Geopolitics is interesting. Just a few months ago, India and China were getting ready to go to war with each other. Now, they are co-operating like good neighbors. I guess, peace comes when you are ready for war.
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The “informal meeting” between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping at Wuhan has raised hopes for a reset between China and India in the mold of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s groundbreaking visit to Beijing in 1988. During that visit, Gandhi and his host, Deng Xiaoping, relaunched the China-India relationship after a rocky period and pushed to decouple it from their troublesome territorial dispute. The summit proved a turning point which paved the way for a massive improvement in Sino-Indian relations in the 1990s and the early 2000s.
With this background, many commentators have seen 2018 as a potential repeat of 1988. Regrettably, such a comparison is deeply misguided as the international circumstances and the very relationship between China and India make such a prospect unlikely. While the Wuhan summit signifies a thaw and opens the door for improvement in relations, it is not a 1988-style reset.
Of course, seeing 2018 as a repeat of 1988 is not completely fanciful; there are undeniable parallels between the two summits. Both were preceded by military standoffs between Chinese and Indian troops, the Sumdorong Chu incident (or Sangduoluo He) in 1987 and the 73-day long Doklam standoff in 2017 which forced Beijing and Delhi to awake to the dangers of possible military conflict. In 1988 and again in 2018, a strong Indian prime minister who had stood his ground in the preceding standoff took the political risk of going to China about a year before a general election and was received by a powerful but conciliatory Chinese leader. Moreover, both summits concluded with a promise that the two sides will take into account their respective concerns and work to reach a solution to their territorial disputes. Much more important, in both 1988 and 2018 China and India realized that relations were drifting toward confrontation and halted this process before it was too late.
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Is a China-India ‘Reset’ in the Cards?
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The “informal meeting” between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping at Wuhan has raised hopes for a reset between China and India in the mold of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s groundbreaking visit to Beijing in 1988. During that visit, Gandhi and his host, Deng Xiaoping, relaunched the China-India relationship after a rocky period and pushed to decouple it from their troublesome territorial dispute. The summit proved a turning point which paved the way for a massive improvement in Sino-Indian relations in the 1990s and the early 2000s.
With this background, many commentators have seen 2018 as a potential repeat of 1988. Regrettably, such a comparison is deeply misguided as the international circumstances and the very relationship between China and India make such a prospect unlikely. While the Wuhan summit signifies a thaw and opens the door for improvement in relations, it is not a 1988-style reset.
Of course, seeing 2018 as a repeat of 1988 is not completely fanciful; there are undeniable parallels between the two summits. Both were preceded by military standoffs between Chinese and Indian troops, the Sumdorong Chu incident (or Sangduoluo He) in 1987 and the 73-day long Doklam standoff in 2017 which forced Beijing and Delhi to awake to the dangers of possible military conflict. In 1988 and again in 2018, a strong Indian prime minister who had stood his ground in the preceding standoff took the political risk of going to China about a year before a general election and was received by a powerful but conciliatory Chinese leader. Moreover, both summits concluded with a promise that the two sides will take into account their respective concerns and work to reach a solution to their territorial disputes. Much more important, in both 1988 and 2018 China and India realized that relations were drifting toward confrontation and halted this process before it was too late.
...
Is a China-India ‘Reset’ in the Cards?
