Xi may meet Modi. But can China-India trust return?

(Edited and refined by Josephine Hong, with the assistance of AI translation.)

The BRICS summit will be held in New Delhi, India, next month, with Chinese President Xi Jinping reportedly expected to attend with a delegation of about 400 people. If the visit goes ahead, it would be Xi’s first trip to India in seven years.

Reuters reported on 24 August, citing three Indian sources, that Xi is likely to attend the summit. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, however, has yet to confirm his participation.

Pragmatically driven diplomatic thaw

China-India relations plunged to a low after the 2020 border clashes. Following about four years of military confrontation and diplomatic deadlock, ties began to recover in the second half of 2024. 

Over the past two years, the two sides have gradually resumed high-level exchanges and communication on border issues. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi travelled to Tianjin last year for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, where he met Xi. On 25 August, Indian national security adviser Ajit Doval separately met Chinese Vice-President Han Zheng and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing. His meeting with Wang was a special representatives’ meeting on the China-India boundary question.

The thaw in China-India relations has been driven partly by the US factor and partly by practical considerations. US President Donald Trump’s tariffs and transactional diplomacy have increased India’s external pressures, reinforcing New Delhi’s need to maintain strategic autonomy. BRICS and the Global South also offer room for China-India cooperation. India holds the BRICS rotating chairmanship this year, with China set to take over next year.

Economically, although India hopes to reduce its reliance on China through its “Make in India” initiative, it remains highly dependent on China in areas such as electronic components. At a public event on 22 August, Indian Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar said that while India is building up its own industrial and manufacturing capabilities, it has to “do business with China”. For Beijing, easing tensions would help reduce border risks, sustain economic and trade ties, and manage long-term competition.

Air routes reconnect, but public perception lags

But a thaw in relations does not mean that trust has been restored. Disputes left by the 2020 border clashes remain unresolved, while the Dalai Lama, who lives in exile in India, remains a sensitive issue. Wang Yi has repeatedly spoken in recent years of “restoring” and “enhancing” mutual trust, reflecting the continuing strategic suspicions between China and India.

More importantly, the repair of official ties has not fully restored people-to-people exchanges.

Over the past year, travel between China and India has gradually resumed, although progress has not been entirely in step. India resumed issuing tourist visas to Chinese citizens in July 2025, while direct flights between China and India resumed on 26 October 2025. Pilgrimages by Indian citizens to Tibet have also restarted.

Chinese ambassador to India Xu Feihong said on 24 September last year that, as of 22 September, the Chinese embassy and consulates in India had issued more than 265,000 visas to Indian citizens. Data from India’s Ministry of Tourism showed that about 359,000 Indian citizens travelled to China in 2019, before the pandemic. The recovery in Chinese tourist arrivals in India has been slower. India did not resume issuing tourist visas to Chinese citizens until 24 July 2025, so there are still no complete figures for the number of Chinese visitors to India in 2025.

On 2 July, The Paper published an article stressing that the uncivilised behaviour of a few should not be used to condemn an entire country, let alone as a pretext for xenophobia. It said that repeatedly highlighting Indians’ alleged “poor conduct” could easily foster labelling and stereotypes. Such content is intended to attract traffic and incite confrontation, and is inconsistent with the mindset of an open and confident major power. The Chinese Embassy in India reposted the article on its website.

From cultural affinity to algorithm-driven hostility

Indian public attitudes towards China are also complex. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that only 21% of Indian respondents held a favourable view of China. Another Pew survey showed that about one-third of Indian respondents regarded China as the second-largest threat facing their country, behind only Pakistan, indicating that security concerns continue to shape Indian perceptions of China.

Have relations between the Chinese and Indian society always been like this? No.

China and India are both ancient civilisations with a long history of cultural exchange. Indian films once enjoyed considerable popularity among young Chinese audiences. After 3 Idiots was officially released in China in 2011, its lead actor Aamir Khan became a household name. Dangal became a cultural phenomenon after its release in 2017.

In 2005, Indian economist Jairam Ramesh proposed the concept of “Chindia”, envisioning a complementary relationship between Chinese manufacturing and India’s software and services industries, allowing the two Asian powers to find room for cooperation beyond competition.

The 2020 China-India border clashes marked an important turning point in public perceptions in both countries. Since then, Chinese netizens increasingly associated India as a “border rival” and a “potential US partner”, while security concerns in India have also heightened vigilance towards China. Chinese online discussions of India frequently focused on poverty, sanitation and development gaps as negative themes. Meanwhile, Indian public discourse tended to scrutinise China through the lens of border tensions, national security and strategic competition.

Online we-media has further widened this distance. A video of an Indian tourist behaving badly, or an exaggerated headline, can spread without context and be packaged as a trait representative of an entire group. Similar phenomena may also occur online in India.

Chinese people may have once come to know India through films and travel. Today, they may instead come to know this country of about 1.47 billion people through short-video algorithms. Governments can restore flights, visas and high-level visits, but they cannot flip impressions already formed among their people with a single agreement.

The “dragon-elephant rivalry” is unlikely to disappear, but competition can be managed. Only by preventing border disputes from fuelling nationalist sentiment, increasing people-to-people and cultural exchanges, and curbing we-media from turning isolated incidents into group labels, can improved official ties truly extend to the public.

Whether China-India relations can genuinely warm up will depend not only on whether the two countries’ leaders can shake hands, but also on whether their people can break through their stereotypes of one another.

This article was first published in Lianhe Zaobao as “中印关系回暖，民间跟上了吗？”.

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