India and China have agreed to work to solve differences on commercial and economic problems, said New Delhi, as relations continue to defrost after a 2020 fatal border shock.
After a meeting on Monday in Beijing between the main diplomat of India, Vikram Misri, and China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the Indian Ministry of Foreign Relations also said that both parties would negotiate a framework on the resumption of flights after five years in an “early date.”
China’s Ministry of Foreign Relations confirmed today that flights would resume, and said that Wang had told Misri that China and India should commit to “mutual support and mutual achievement” instead of “suspicion” and ” alienation”.
“Specific concerns were discussed in economic and commercial areas in order to solve these problems and promote the transparency of long -term policy and predictability,” the Indian statement said without going into details.
Analysts say that slow economies and commercial threats of the president of the United States, Donald Trump, are encouraging China and India to work more closely.
Trump warned that it will impose tariffs to China and India is a great market for China, while New Delhi wants Chinese experience, components and machinery to fuel exports and the economy, which is leaving the maximum recent.
“India and both are interested in ensuring that the economic relationship continues to be managed in a [mutually beneficial] Road, ”said Harsh Pant, head of foreign policy in the group of experts from the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.
“If Trump’s threat increases for China’s economy, then China would want a relationship with India that is economically robust and strategically relatively solid compared to 2020”.
China said that a meeting separately between officials at the Vice President officials had agreed to facilitate the exchange of journalists between the two countries.
Bilateral trade between India and China increased four percent to $ 118.4 billion in the last fiscal year that ended in March 2024, a large part of the Indian imports of China.
New irritants
The tensions were grouped between India and China following the 2020 clash between the troops along its border in the Himalayas, which killed at least 20 Indian soldiers and four Chinese.
Subsequently, India made it difficult for Chinese companies to invest in the country, banned hundreds of popular applications and reduced passenger routes, although direct flight flights continued to operate among countries.
Relations have improved from an agreement in October to relieve a military confrontation at the mountainous border, the same month as President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi held conversations in Russia.
There have also been several high -level meetings, but China’s approval in December of a hydroelectric dam in the Tibet, in the lower sections of the Yarlung Zangbo River, raised the eyebrows in India.
The dam, the largest of its kind in the world, with an estimated capacity of 300 billion kilowatts of electricity annually, will be located in the river that flows to India such as Brahmaputra, a key water resource for millions.
Chinese officials said that hydroelectric projects in Tibet would not have a great impact on the environment or water supplies down.
In Monday’s conversations, China said that both parties had agreed to continue cooperation in “cross -border rivers” and work towards a new round of meetings on the matter.
Countries also agreed to promote the resumption of the pilgrimages of the Indians to the Mountains and Sacred Lakes of Tibet in 2025.
Even so, analysts said mutual distrust will remain.
“The thaw between the two parties is very welcome, although I do not believe that in the long term, structurally speaking, the two parties can be peaceful neighbors and collaborate and cooperate with each other,” said Happymon Jacob, who teaches foreign policy at Jawaharla University Nehru New Delhi.
