China’s meeting with India and Russia was about more than Trump

The optics of engagement between China, India and Russia at the recently-concluded Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit have done little to alleviate the fault lines that exist between the three countries, says Manoj Kewalramani.

A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. Sometimes, it also masks a hundred cracks. Scenes of handshakes and smiles shared between the leaders of India, Russia and China during the recently-concluded Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin have made headlines across the Western press, mostly couching the gathering in terms of the message it sent to the United States and its allies.

There is, of course, a significance to this moment. And indeed, the whiplash from the sharp turn in American foreign and economic policies under President Donald Trump has reshaped the incentives of the three leaders, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin and host Xi Jinping. However, a closer reading reveals that the optics of engagement have done little to alleviate the fault lines that exist between the three countries — and that there was far more to the meeting than simply a response to Trump’s diplomatic and economic provocations.

Take Russia and India. The two countries remain important partners. There is a deep historical logic to this relationship, and no fundamental conflict of interests exists between the pair. That said, the relationship has experienced friction in recent years. Moscow has often publicly bristled at New Delhi’s growing proximity with Washington. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has echoed Chinese criticism of the Indo-Pacific as a strategic construct, and India’s engagement in the Quad — the security grouping of the U.S., India, Japan and Australia.

India, meanwhile, has sought to strike a balance in its policy towards the war in Ukraine. Unlike Xi, the Indian Prime Minister Modi has visited Ukraine and engaged with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. New Delhi has grown increasingly anxious about Moscow’s proximity to and dependence on Beijing too. A Russia that finds itself deep within the Chinese orbit is detrimental to India’s strategic interests across the Eurasian landmass: In fact, it is even detrimental to Washington’s interests. Of particular concern for New Delhi are the green shoots of engagement between Moscow and Islamabad. For instance, Russia said last year that it would support Pakistan’s entry into the BRICS grouping. Engagement with Russia, therefore, is a strategic imperative for India.

Russia views India as an important partner in Asia and a balancer vis-a-vis China

That said, there's a ceiling to the India-Russia economic relationship, and the West remains crucial to India’s developmental aspirations and security objectives. Therefore, India must and will seek to pursue a balanced approach to its external relations, particularly since its ties with China remain difficult. On the other hand, Russia views India as an important partner in Asia and a balancer vis-a-vis China in the region.

China’s position relative to both India and Russia is far from straightforward as well. If the views of Chinese analysts are right, Beijing has never been particularly thrilled about India being a member of the SCO; Russian diplomacy was key to India gaining membership of the grouping. The bargain from the Chinese side was that it could balance this move by admitting Pakistan to the group. This is just one example of Sino-Russian competition playing out at a regional level. Similar examples of contestation between Moscow and Beijing are evident. Crucially, while Beijing does not want Moscow to lose the war in Ukraine, it has had concerns about the nature and impact of Russian conduct on China’s ties with the West.

Differences between the two sides are even sharper in terms of their engagement in each other’s periphery. Russia’s deepening security relationship with North Korea is a case in point. The 2024 Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership committed the two sides to provide “military and other assistance with all means in its possession without delay” if “any one of the two sides is put in a state of war by an armed invasion from an individual state or several states.” This marked a qualitative shift in the Moscow-Pyongyang relationship, to the detriment of Beijing’s influence. It also created certain conditions that China doesn’t particularly desire. Beijing is evidently not keen on appearing to be building some sort of a Cold War-style bloc with like-minded countries. On the other hand, it is clear that while China has gained a deeper foothold in Central Asia, Russian economic diplomacy in what was once its sphere of influence has been flailing.

A shared strategic understanding around the need for a stable border and the imperative to push back against the U.S.-led world order have, as a consequence, driven deeper Sino-Russian collaboration. That, however, does not mean there aren’t real frictions between the two, and concerns around the impact of the policies of the other on one’s interests. For Moscow, in particular, the asymmetry of economic and military strength with China is likely to remain a prickly issue over the long term.

An asymmetry of power is fundamentally shaping the India-China relationship

An asymmetry of power is also fundamentally shaping the dynamics of the India-China relationship, the third side of the triangle. After decades of friction following the war in 1962, India and China arrived at a new modus vivendi in 1988 during the visit of then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to Beijing. Both sides agreed to work on easing tensions and resolving the border dispute, while moving ahead with other areas of their bilateral relationship. That arrangement came at a particularly turbulent moment in the world order, with American unipolarity in the 1990s shaping the incentives of both sides. It was also a time when both India and China were at a parity in terms of their economic strength.

That, however, is not the case today. There now exists a deep power asymmetry between the two countries. This is obvious in their respective GDP numbers and the resources that the two countries can bring to bear to achieve developmental goals, and in times of strife. In addition, external actors like the U.S. and Russia have a bearing on the bilateral balance of power. This context provides an important backdrop to the meeting between Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping in Tianjin.

It’s also important to remember that the current Sino-Indian engagement is beginning from an incredibly low base. The clashes between the two countries at different points across the disputed boundary in Eastern Ladakh in 2020 led to a breakdown in the relationship, after which it took years of difficult negotiations to achieve troop disengagement from eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation. This process was completed late last year, allowing for Modi and Xi to meet at the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan in October. That meeting was followed by a gradual process of cautious re-engagement.

Even today, however, there are no direct flights connecting India and China and the movement of people between the two countries is severely constrained. Both sides still have tens of thousands of soldiers forward deployed, and discussions around pulling them back to the barracks have yet to take place. The most substantive outcome of the dialogue process since Kazan came during the August 2025 visit of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Those meetings in Delhi resulted in the announcement of new mechanisms to discuss issues related to the boundary dispute and to expand people-to-people and economic ties. There is still a long way to go for India and China to achieve some sort of normalcy, far be it a new equilibrium.

From an Indian perspective, therefore, the meeting in Tianjin during the past week was not about signalling a new bonhomie with China amid frictions with the U.S. owing to tariffs and over America's renewed engagement with Pakistan. Rather, it was about putting a floor under what is a contentious relationship with a testy and powerful neighbour.

New Delhi is cognizant that there are significant differences between the two sides on issues ranging from the boundary talks to trade and terrorism. These are reflective of a deeper, more structural difference in each’s strategic goals: China desires multipolarity in the world; New Delhi concurs but with the caveat that a multipolar Asia must persist. Resolving this broader misalignment in world views will take years of patient engagement, a process liable to stall or rupture at any time if there are further border or trade clashes. Given that, it would be a major mistake to view the Modi-Xi meeting this week as simply a response to Trump and his tariffs.

This article was first published by The Wire China on September 2, 2025.

About the author

Manoj Kewalramani is the Chairperson of the Indo-Pacific Studies Programme at the Takshashila Institution and a Senior Associate (Non-resident), Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS. He is also a Senior Associate Fellow at MERICS.