Is ‘Trump Effect’ Realigning Old Foes? India-China Ties May Be On The Mend

India might be realising that it will have to fend for itself without US support in case it faces a hostile China.

As Trump 2.0 unravels geopolitical alignments across the world, should India look to mend halted ties with China?

(Illustration: Shruti Mathur/The Quint)

Barely a few days after Minister of External Affairs of India S Jaishankar’s bilateral meeting with the new US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and later the Quad meeting, perceived as an anti-China grouping of the US, Japan, Australia, and India, Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri left for Beijing for a rather hastily put-together visit.

The trip was unusual as it was not just sudden and not pre-announced, but it commenced unusually, on the nation’s Republic Day, 26 January, and carried on a day before the Chinese New Year holidays began on 28 January.

Rubio, observers in Washington claim, was less than warm towards India and raised the unpleasant issue of 18,000 Indian illegal migrants, many of them from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat, that the Indian government agreed to take back home, credible sources said.

Strain in India-US Ties?

Rubio is considered to be a China hawk, but going by the readout of the meeting between the nations, the session between the two ministers did not go down well.

Seemingly, Jaishankar has inferred that India may have to fend for itself, and that the US will not do anything to help, in case it faces a hostile China. 

This could be the reason why Misri rushed to Beijing, perhaps to placate a belligerent China after they had imposed soft sanctions on critical goods in India. 

Not only has China prevented Chinese workers from being sent to work in Apple factories in India, but also stopped all the equipment supply for the factory, hence cramping the Taiwanese contractor, Foxconn, and its Indian iPhone assembly plants. If the slide in Indo-Chinese ties remains unmended, the latter could even stop the supply of bulk drugs to India, causing domestic havoc.

Though the readout between Misri and his Chinese counterpart is limited to restoration of flights between the two countries and issue of visa — both halted since the military standoff at Galwan in June 2020 — sources claim that the looming crisis has been averted.

What is yet to be seen, however, is whether India will host the Quad summit later this year, an issue that remains sensitive for China.

Quad Faces 'Trump Effect'

Informed sources claim that the Chinese government is suddenly getting unusual attention from countries that were considered hostile towards Beijing.

Besides India, Japan, another member of Quad, has sent its foreign minister to China. In the last seven-odd years, no foreign minister had made a trip to Beijing. Visibly, the Japanese are quickly making amends, and are keen meet and make up to revive a relationship that had gone sour over the last decade.

A military delegation of Japan has also travelled to China. Quad as a concept emanated from late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, but it is looking ambivalent about continuing in it.

Call it the “Trump effect”, but Quad members do not seem to want to be burdened any longer by what is seen as the Joe Biden administration’s "legacy". Expectedly, Australia, another member of the Quad, is rapidly building bridges with China.

The same mood is prevailing in Europe. Chinese President Xi Jinping recently spoke with European Council President, Antonia Costa, seeking “stability and certainty” in relationship.

This mood resonated with Germany and England as well. England has started financial and business talks with China after eight years, following the halt during the term of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Nearly all the US allies are slowly coming around to be friendly with China for a reason.

New 'Friend' On The Block

Firstly, under President Donald Trump, US foreign policy is very unstable. No one is sure where it will go. This view is exacerbated by remarks in the gushing speeches of Trump where he calls the Chinese leader “a good friend”.

Trump also invited Jinping for his inauguration, while not sending an invite to Prime Minister Modi. This public snub must surely have left the Modi government red-faced, which immediately moved to fast-track normalising its ties with China.

How will this tit-for-tat play out when Prime Minister Modi visits Washington later in February this year, on the invite of Trump?

Even in the first term of Trump, there were high expectations in China that the relationship between the two countries will get better. Trump, however, proved to be one of the harshest incumbents in White House history when it came to China.

The pessimists' view is that this time the transactional nature of the POTUS will not be any different. He will only respond to raw economic and technological power. If he thinks China can hurt the prospects of the US, he might impose sanctions and other restrictions on critical technology.

AI Wars

It is interesting that within a week of Trump's return to the Oval Office, China spooked the US’ Artificial Intelligence (AI) supremacy by unveiling Deepseek, an AI offering like the American ChatGPT. China has built it at very low prices compared to the billions that had been spent by AI companies like Nvidia, OpenAI, or software companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft.

DeepSeek shaved off a trillion dollars from the US stock market and made Nvidia poorer by $539 billion.

This is a body blow not just to the power of the US, but also its tech oligarchs that are driving Trump’s immense power. People like Elon Musk and his opponent, Sam Altman of OpenAI, seem to be realising that they do not have the free run of things as they had expected. China is here to challenge them.

A Chinese Technocracy?

With China's inexpensive innovations with an AI product, American allies are waking up to a world of potential contained in the massive range of products that China has built.

Despite facing bans in many countries due to a multiplicity of reasons, products like TikTok, Huawei’s phones, or BYD’s electronic vehicles (EVs) are considered to be a class of their own.

Transactional as he is, Trump has been trying to rescue TikTok, which was recently banned in the US by its Supreme Court. On the face of it, Trump would like a deal, but no one knows the contours of it.

Beijing has been trying to have a G2 (America-China) summit, much to the chagrin of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) powers, and also India.

China is a $18.5 trillion power and the belief is that once it pips the US, then there will be no looking back. Europeans and other powers are cognisant of this bitter reality.

An inexpensive AI product, DeepSeek, has proved to companies around the world, including India, that it is possible to build a high-tech product at phenomenally low costs. One must, however, factor in the Chinese ecosystem that allows such inexpensive technological innovation. India relies a lot on the US for any innovation and that has to change if it wants to take on China.

(Sanjay Kapoor is a veteran journalist and founder of Hardnews Magazine. He is a foreign policy specialist focused on India and its neighbours, and West Asia. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)