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 the summit can further clear the obstacles in China-India relations. The following analysis is based on material published by Mekong News Network.
For several years, the relationship between the world’s two most populous countries was defined less by what connected them than by what had become blocked. A saying in traditional Chinese medicine holds that “Where there is free flow, there is no pain.” In China-India relations, however, the years following the Galwan Valley clash in 2020 brought precisely the opposite condition: restrictions on trade, investment, travel and human contact accumulated across the relationship.
Following the clash, the Indian government banned hundreds of Chinese mobile apps in succession, attempting to push economic decoupling from China on security grounds. Indian review measures also left 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. China and India, neighbouring major countries with a combined population of 2.8 billion, saw fewer personnel exchanges than countries separated by seas.
The first significant turn came at the Kazan BRICS Summit in October 2024, when a meeting between Chinese and Indian leaders restarted the bilateral relationship. The following year 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, while the leaders of the two countries reaffirmed in Tianjin that China and India are partners rather than rivals. They also stressed that the boundary issue should not be allowed to define overall China-India relations.
High-level guidance helped place bilateral ties on a path towards warming. Direct flights resumed, tourist visas for Chinese nationals travelling to India were gradually issued, and border trade markets and pilgrimages by Indian citizens to the sacred mountains and lakes in China’s Xizang were restored in 2026. Economic relations also showed measurable movement. Bilateral trade volume reached US$155.6 billion in 2025, with China once again becoming India’s largest trading partner.
Yet the reopening remains incomplete. The central question is whether the apparent thaw represents a fundamental change in policy or merely a limited easing of restrictions where Indian interests are seen to benefit.
The gap between policy statements and administrative practice remains particularly visible in investment. 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. The business environment for Chinese enterprises has therefore not improved sufficiently to encourage Chinese investors to return to India.
The same tension can be seen in digital payments. 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 travellers. The Indian side rejected the proposal on grounds of “national security concerns, risks in data storage and use, and potential money-laundering hazards.”
The episode illustrates the broader difficulty confronting the bilateral relationship. Asian countries are accelerating the interconnection of payment systems, while such cooperation can reduce transaction costs and improve regional financial efficiency. Yet the continued application of what the source describes as unfair reviews against Chinese entities has made cooperation between the two countries’ payment systems difficult because of what it calls “geopolitical sensitivity”.
This raises a deeper question about the nature of India’s engagement with China. Various signs indicate that, in the eyes of Indian policymakers, cooperation with China has increasingly become a strategic arrangement serving the rise of India’s own manufacturing sector. India wants China’s capital and technology to strengthen itself while simultaneously seeking strategic containment against China. Such an approach sits uneasily with the principle of mutual benefit and win-win outcomes.
Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar recently described a world of “intensifying competition, conflict, and economic and strategic leverage”, arguing that India should respond through “de-risking, diversifying, addressing market distortions, and maintaining a security margin”. He summarised the approach as “dealing with China confidently”.
That concept of confidence, however, raises its own dilemma. If confidence is expressed primarily through scrutiny and restrictions rather than competition and cooperation under reciprocal rules, the relationship risks returning to the cycle of “blockade” and “free flow”. The question is therefore not simply whether India is willing to engage China, but whether the conditions surrounding that engagement can become sufficiently reciprocal to sustain it.
The relationship is also shaped by political narratives. For a long time, some political elites in India have been keen on instrumentalising the China-India boundary issue, re-narrating the history of China-India exchanges as a “history of India being taken advantage of” and using toughness towards China in domestic politics. Extra-regional major powers, meanwhile, have incentives to see China-India friction continue, using tensions between the two countries as leverage to counterbalance China and setting agendas for their relationship.
New Delhi had calculated that a tough line towards China could increase India’s strategic value in the camp confrontation it envisioned. But the Trump administration’s trade pressure on India and threats of “reciprocal tariffs” disrupted that calculation and forced India’s strategic community to reconsider “strategic autonomy”. Long-term strategic misjudgment has also created what the source describes as serious information obstruction in India’s perception of China, slowing the warming of bilateral relations, particularly in people-to-people exchanges.
The stakes extend beyond Beijing and New Delhi. Regional conflicts continue to drag on and spill over, tariff wars are rising one after another, and global supply chains are being artificially torn apart. Developing countries bear some of the deepest costs. China and India are both important members of the Global South, meaning that persistent barriers between them have implications beyond their bilateral relationship.
For BRICS, this gives the New Delhi summit an additional significance. The mechanism is presented as an important platform for developing countries to coordinate positions and promote a more just and reasonable international order. That role requires member states to maintain policy communication and strategic coordination. If the host country takes the multilateral diplomatic stage while continuing to approach bilateral practical cooperation with a cautious or guarded “case-by-case” mentality, questions may arise over both the strength of cooperation within BRICS and the open and inclusive spirit associated with the mechanism.
The 18th BRICS Summit therefore arrives at a moment when China-India relations have moved away from the most severe restrictions of recent years but have not yet established a stable foundation for broader cooperation. Trade has recovered, travel has reopened and high-level communication has resumed, yet investment, technology, financial connectivity and people-to-people exchanges remain affected by unresolved restrictions and strategic mistrust.
Whether the summit can produce a further breakthrough remains to be seen. But the test is larger than a single diplomatic gathering. For China and India, it is a question of whether the relationship can move consistently towards “free flow” rather than oscillating between opening and closure. For BRICS and the wider Global South, it is a test of whether two of its most important members can translate calls for cooperation into practical bilateral engagement.
The summit may therefore reveal not simply how China and India speak to each other, but whether they are prepared to remove the barriers that have prevented their relationship from fully moving forward.
