The world's fastest growing major economies and most populous nations face many of the same challenges, including stability in Asia and the struggle against terrorism.
Yet in practice, the Chinese dragon and the Indian elephant are very different creatures. They may have learned to live together, but they may always be more rivals than friends.
On Thursday, Singh called the relationship an 'imperative necessity', and dismissed talk that India was ganging up with the United States, Japan and Australia against China.
"I have made it clear to the Chinese leadership that India is not part of any so-called contain China effort," Singh told reporters, according to the Press Trust of India news agency.
Annual summits between the former foes may be slowly breaking down decades of wariness, but a "strategic partnership" announced three years ago has yet to take off.
"If you compare this visit to previous years, it is a very welcome departure that there is no attempt to project some grand achievement," said Alka Acharya, the head of East Asian studies at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University.
"There is a certain normality coming about in terms of high level interaction but there is considerable depth in the relationship which has yet to be explored."
Singh aims to do exactly that on his visit.
"When you talk about broader global issues, we have a lot in common," said one Indian official, who declined to be named.
COMMON GROUND AND DISPUTED LAND
In their reaction to climate change, India and China sound at their most harmonious. Both resist calls for mandatory curbs on emissions for developing nations and insist that the greater burden for mitigation be borne by the already developed West.
"We have a similar approach, maybe not identical, but there is a fair amount of congruence," the official added.
And yet there remains a lack of cooperation in many areas, and bilateral irritants such as a festering border dispute and trade barriers, said Zhang Li, at China's Sichuan University.
"This visit probably won't bring breakthroughs in those issues, but it could set a more positive tone for dealing with them," he said.
The economic relationship between Asia's engines of growth falls far short of potential. Bilateral trade has crossed $30 billion and is growing fast but non-tariff barriers remain high.
India is unhappy the trade balance is increasingly skewed in China's favour, and would prefer to be exporting more finished goods and less raw materials such as iron ore.
China complains of barriers to direct investment in India and wants a "level playing field", according to its ambassador to India, Zhang Yan.
But there is a more fundamental problem with Sino Indian relations, a border dispute that led to war in 1962. China still claims much of India's vast northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, land it says is rightly part of Tibet.
Decades of glacial negotiations have produced little more than a commitment to solve the problem through dialogue.
Last year, China even seemed to harden its position by restating its claim to the Buddhist monastery at Tawang, and Indian troops complain of frequent border incursions last year. It's an issue that still jangles Indian nationalist nerves.
"There is a strong need for them to develop a relationship of cooperation, but they won't be able to do that until the border issue is out of the way," said Mira Sinha Bhattacharjea, emeritus fellow of the Institute of Chinese Studies in New Delhi. There are other concerns too, including China's longstanding relationship with India's estranged brother Pakistan.
China's old policy of balancing India by supporting Pakistan looks outdated given India's growing clout, analysts say. But the prospect of them working together to promote stability in trouble spots such as Pakistan and Afghanistan still looks remote.
Beijing eyes uneasily India's burgeoning friendship with the United States and its traditional support for Tibetan refugees.
Jian Yang, a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland, says China does not treat India as a threat but India does.
"For China, the biggest concern is to make sure that India doesn't feel threatened by China's rise, and that India won't move too close to countries like the United States and Japan as a kind of balance against China," he said.
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