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China-India relations
OpinionAsia Opinion
David Dodwell
Outside In
David Dodwell

India and China are cautiously getting closer, thanks to Trump

The US trade war has prompted India to rethink China. While relations might be short of a breakthrough, deeper engagement is here to stay

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Chinese Ambassador to India Xu Feihong, centre, attends the Brics foreign ministers’ meeting in New Delhi on May 14. Photo: AFP
David Dodwell
David Dodwell is CEO of the trade policy and international relations consultancy Strategic Access.
Perhaps the most fascinating and important aspects of US President Donald Trump’s jolt to the global economy have been its unintended consequences, especially the impact on relations between China and India.

Two consistent aspects of Trump’s meandering narrative are to “make America great again” by bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US, and to hobble China as an economic and strategic threat.

A decade later, there has been negligible progress on either objective. Instead, the unintended consequences have been colossal, and comprehensively harmful to US interests. The impact on Washington’s reputation as an anchor for global economic stability has been nothing short of catastrophic. The reshoring of manufacturing – and evidence of any resultant economic stimulus or job creation – remains negligible, if not invisible.
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China’s rise is also unimpaired, not least due to its strategic consistency, unwavering advocacy and preference for multilateral problem-solving, and its role in enabling the parallel rise of the Global South, which brings us to its relations with India..

One consistent conundrum of the past eight decades has been the suspicion and rivalry between New Delhi and Beijing. Rivalry has some rational foundations: both countries have colossal populations, civilisations that go back thousands of years and strong rival claims to stand as champions of the developing world.
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By 1950, shortly after India broke free from British colonialism and China’s Communists pushed the US-backed Kuomintang government into exile on the island of Taiwan, both countries had espoused highly contrasted models of socialism. As China under Mao Zedong focused on tackling the deep internal wounds of a decades-long civil war, India rose as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement.

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