New Delhi: A day after participating in the first Quad ministerial meeting under the second Trump administration, India announced the resumption of yet another high-level bilateral mechanism with its northern neighbour, with foreign secretary Vikram Misri scheduled to visit China next week.
In a press release, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said that Misri will visit Beijing on January 26 and 27 for a meeting of the foreign secretary-vice minister mechanism between India and China.
Framing the reason for the meeting, the MEA noted that the “resumption of this bilateral mechanism flows from the agreement at the leadership level to discuss the next steps for India-China relations, including in the political, economic, and people-to-people domains”.
The press release underscored India’s ongoing rapprochement with China, marked by a series of high-level engagements since the signing of the “patrolling agreement” that ended the four-and-a-half-year military standoff in eastern Ladakh.
Since October, India and China have held meetings between their top leadership, foreign ministers, defence ministers and Special Representatives.
At the same time, the foreign secretary-level talks also take place against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s second presidency whose first major foreign policy engagement was the joint meeting of all four Quad foreign ministers, which was seen as a signal to Beijing.
China responded critically that “group politics and bloc confrontation” were not conducive to peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific or globally.
While the new US administration is packed with China hawks and Trump has promised to impose trade tariffs against Beijing, he was also quick to invite Chinese President Xi Jinping to his inauguration and also paused the ban on the popular Chinese social media app TikTok.
When asked about his views on the Trump administration’s China policy during a media interaction in Washington, Indian external affairs minister S. Jaishankar, who participated in the Quad meeting, sidestepped the question.
“During the Quad, the sentiment was very clear that the Indo-Pacific is a crucial region. It’s important for there to be stability, security and respect for law. But beyond that, commenting publicly on another bilateral relationship would not be appropriate,” he said on Wednesday.
While border disengagement appears to be progressing as planned, India continues to grapple with other friction points in its relationship with China, including Beijing’s proposed massive hydropower project in Tibet on the river that flows into the Brahmaputra in Assam.
Trade concerns are also mounting, with multiple reports pointing to unofficial restrictions on the import of critical technologies like tunnel boring machines, alongside official policies curbing Chinese exports of lithium-ion batteries essential for electric vehicle manufacturing.
