Can the BRICS summit further reset China-India relations?

The 18th BRICS Summit will be held in New Delhi, India, on September 12-13. This is already India's fourth time assuming the BRICS rotating chairmanship, and the international community is closely watching whether this summit can further clear the obstacles in China-India relations.

A logo of the coming BRICS Summit

From Blockage to Restart

A saying in traditional Chinese medicine goes like this: "Where there is free flow, there is no pain." Over the past few years, most of the ailments in China-India relations have been tied to "blockage." Following the Galwan Valley clash in 2020, the Indian government banned hundreds of Chinese mobile apps in succession, attempting to push economic decoupling from China on security grounds.

The Indian review measures made Chinese enterprises vulnerable to blames in India, with hundreds of millions in corporate assets seized and frozen. Direct flights between the two countries were suspended, visas were obstructed, and people-to-people and cultural exchanges came to an almost complete halt. The two neighboring major countries with a combined population of 2.8 billion saw fewer personnel exchanges than those countries separated by seas.

The turning point began with the Kazan BRICS Summit in October 2024, when the meeting between Chinese and Indian leaders restarted the bilateral relations. 2025 coincided with the 75th anniversary of the establishment of China-India diplomatic relations. Indian Prime Minister Modi made his first visit to China in seven years, and the leaders of the two countries reaffirmed in Tianjin that China and India are partners rather than rivals, and stressed that the boundary issue should not be allowed to define overall China-India relations. Thanks to high-level guidance, the bilateral relations gradually got onto a track of warming.

Since then, direct flights have resumed, tourist visas for Chinese nationals traveling to India have been gradually issued, and border trade markets as well as pilgrimages by Indian citizens to the sacred mountains and lakes in China's Xizang were also restored in 2026. On the economic and trade front, there have been more tangible results: bilateral trade volume reached US$155.6 billion in 2025, and China once again became India's largest trading partner.

The China-India national flags

Strains under Seeming Thaw

However, the clearing of blockages is far from meeting expectations, and the pains still persist in China-India relations. Although reports continue to say that the Modi government is encouraging China-India economic and trade exchanges, only 800,000-yuan direct investment from the Chinese mainland was approved by the Indian government in the 2025-2026 fiscal year. There is still a gap between policy text and administrative implementation. The Indian business environment for Chinese enterprises has not improved, forcing Chinese investors to shy away from India.

According to Reuters, Ant International's Alipay+ proposed in January 2026 a plan to connect with India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI), aiming to facilitate cross-border payments for Indian travelers, but the Indian side rejected it on grounds of "national security concerns, risks in data storage and use, and potential money-laundering hazards." Asian countries are accelerating the interconnection of payment systems, and such cooperation helps reduce transaction costs and improve regional financial efficiency. Yet India has maintained unfair reviews against Chinese entities, making it difficult to connect the two countries' payment systems due to so-called "geopolitical sensitivity."

Various signs indicated that, in the eyes of Indian policymakers, cooperation with China has become more of a strategic arrangement serving the rise of India's own manufacturing sector. India wants China's capital and technology to strengthen itself, while seeking strategic containment against China—such a mindset is clearly far away from the principle of mutual benefit and win-win outcomes. India has not changed its inertial thinking of politicizing and securitizing economic and trade issues. India wants to obtain China's development and technological dividends, yet it is unwilling to show reciprocal sincerity on issues such as equity and market access.

A poster of the coming BRICS Summit

Self-Confidence or Self-Binding?

Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar recently said that, under a landscape of "intensifying competition, conflict, and economic and strategic leverage," India should respond by "de-risking, diversifying, addressing market distortions, and maintaining a security margin," and he summarized the policy as "dealing with China confidently." This argument is in line with the "realism" and "strategic confidence" S. Jaishankar has consistently upheld. But if "confidence" is manifested only as one-way scrutiny and restrictions rather than benign competition and cooperation under reciprocal rules, it will inevitably fall into the trap of binding one's own hands and feet. If the Indian policy orientation does not change, the China-India relations will only go back and forth between "blockade" and "free flow."

For a long time, some political elites in India have been keen on instrumentalizing the China-India boundary issue, re-narrating the history of China-India exchanges as a "history of India being taken advantage of," and feeding domestic politics by showing toughness toward China. Extra-regional major powers are also happy to see this, using China-India friction as leverage to counterbalance China and constantly setting agenda for the relations between the two countries.

New Delhi thought that taking a tough line toward China could raise its own value in the camp confrontation it envisioned. However, the Trump administration's trade pressure on India and threats of "reciprocal tariffs" dashed this calculation, forcing India's strategic community to once again reflect on "strategic autonomy." Rome was not built in a day. Long-term strategic misjudgment has created serious information obstruction in India's perception of China, slowing down the warm-up in bilateral relations, especially people-to-people exchanges.

The Weight of BRICS

At present, regional conflicts continue to drag on and spill over, tariff wars rise one after another, and global supply chains are being artificially torn apart. Those who bear the deepest costs are always the developing countries. China and India are both important members of the Global South. If the China-India barriers continue to exist, what is blocked is not only the bilateral relationship, but also the cooperation expectations of the entire Global South.

As an important platform for developing countries to coordinate positions and promote a more just and reasonable international order, the BRICS mechanism requires member states to maintain policy communication and strategic coordination. If the host, while taking on the multilateral diplomatic stage, still treats bilateral practical cooperation with a cautious or even guarded "case-by-case" mentality, it will not only weaken the cooperation within BRICS, but also run counter to the open and inclusive spirit advocated by the mechanism.

China-India relations should move forward, not stagnating, not retreating, and not deviating from course. Whether the upcoming BRICS summit can bring a "free flow" to China-India relations remains to be seen. After all, this tests not only India's diplomatic wisdom, but also whether it has the sincerity to break away from the pains in bilateral ties

Writing by Zhang Shujian (Associate Researcher at the Institute of South Asian Studies, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations); Trans-editing by Wang Shixue and Han Chengyuan