Modi in China: New détente or a progressive trajectory?

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be in China’s Tianjin on Sunday for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit and a likely bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

This is his first visit to China in seven years and the first since the deadly military face-off between the two countries along the Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh in 2020.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation has 10 members: India, China, Pakistan, Russia, Iran and five other nations from the Eurasian region.

Modi’s visit comes on the back of the Indian and Chinese foreign ministers agreeing earlier in August to facilitate trade and investment flows. India has also resumed issuing tourist visas to Chinese citizens after a gap of five years and there has been some movement on the “boundary question”.

The trip by the Indian prime minister and the recent high-level interactions between the two nations is significant because it comes amid diplomatic turbulence between India and the United States.

The US has in recent decades viewed India as a counterweight to China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific. New Delhi has also been enthusiastic about its improving defence partnership with Washington.

So despite the frosty relations India and the US shared during the Cold War, the impulse to develop their strategic partnership has found bipartisan support in both...

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