China and India should boost communication, manage differences, Xi tells Modi

NEW DELHI: Chinese President Xi Jinping told Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday (Oct 23) that their two countries should enhance communication and cooperation and effectively manage differences, in their first formal talks in five years.
The two leaders met on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan, signalling that ties between the Asian giants damaged by a deadly military clash in 2020 had begun to recover.
The meeting came two days after New Delhi announced that it had reached a deal with Beijing to resolve the four-year military stand-off on their disputed Himalayan frontier.
The two sides should strengthen communication and cooperation, resolve conflicts and differences, and realize each other’s development dreams, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported Xi as telling Modi.
Relations between the world’s two most populous nations – both nuclear powers – have been strained since a clash between their troops on the largely un-demarcated frontier in the western Himalayas of Ladakh left 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers dead in 2020.
The neighbours increased their military presence along the icy frontier since, adding tens of thousands of troops and weapons over the last four years.
Modi and Xi had not held formal bilateral talks since although they both participated in multilateral events.
Their last summit talks were held in October 2019 in the southern Indian town of Mamallapuram.
The two spoke briefly on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali in November 2022 and exchanged courtesies.
They spoke again on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg in August 2023 but ended up releasing different versions of the conversation, indicating the two sides didn’t see eye to eye.
Xi skipped the G20 summit hosted by New Delhi the following month, a decision seen as another setback to their relations.
Diplomatic efforts gained momentum in recent months after foreign ministers of the two countries met in July and agreed to step up talks to ease the border tensions.
As India had made improving the wider political and damaged business ties contingent upon finding a solution to the border stand-off, Wednesday’s talks between the two leaders are expected to result in potentially more Chinese investment into India.
New Delhi had increased the scrutiny of investments coming from China, blocked direct flights between the two countries and had practically barred issuing any visas to Chinese nationals since the Ladakh clashes.
The military stand-off deal is likely “a bit of a probing move” by China to take India’s eyes off maritime issues in the Indian Ocean, said analyst Richard Rossow.
“I think that from Beijing’s interest, the land, the territory has some nominal strategic value, but the bigger (aim) is trying to take India’s eye off the real prize, which is the maritime domain,” said the senior advisor and chair on India and emerging economies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan think tank based in the United States. 
India understands the bigger picture, but needs to acknowledge the conciliatory effort, he said. 
When asked about the timing of the disengagement process between both countries, Rossow told CNA’s Asia First that he believes they “want to prove that BRICS still has some relevance”.
He noted that India and China, which are among the four founding members of BRICS, experienced tensions in the past which led to some in China calling for India’s expulsion from the bloc.
“I suspect that as much as India wants to be able to work within the systems that are created for international order, (they also want to) try to find a larger voice in maybe some of the systems that are being created more recently, to challenge that world order,” Rossow added.
“I think India wants to have its cake and eat it too, in terms of those functions and having a summit like this, where they can show that two big countries can come together and resolve their differences.
“But again, there’s still a lot of areas that they have to unravel before we’re going to say the two are walking hand in hand towards peace.”