Description: Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, while conducting an official two – day state visit to India, signaled the strengthening of bilateral ties between the two countries after resolving their 2020 border dispute in the Galwan valley. Yi met with India’s Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and India’s National Security Advisor, Ajit Doval, as they jointly announced official diplomatic reconciliation and the resolution of their border dispute. The foreign ministers also announced they discussed the expansion of economic cooperation in areas such as trade, rare earth minerals exploration and bilateral sharing of river data. Yi is also expected to meet Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and officially introduce the country as one of the participants in the upcoming Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit later this month.
Impact: China is rapidly exploiting the deterioration of bilateral ties between India and the US to grasp one of Asia’s largest economies under its orbit of geopolitical influence. The move also favors India’s historical strategic ambiguousness and positions the country closer to the Chinese and Russian strategic sphere of global influence. China and India could explore various venues of cooperation prioritizing India’s demand for rare earth mineral products while exploiting the country’s vast untapped potential providing an entrance to Chinese business interests in crucial geoeconomic areas. Military cooperation hasn’t been extensively discussed, however, India is expected to refrain from establishing direct dependency on Chinese military technology due its longstanding ties with other countries such as the US and Russia. The reconciliation of bilateral ties through resolving the border dispute and devising means for economic cooperation significantly impacts the power dynamics in the Global South and expands the Chinese sphere of regional and global influence.