In the spring, I joined a group of fellow Indian journalists in Beijing for an invite-only talk with Chinese think tankers and academics in the city’s glitzy central business district. We were the first delegation of senior Indian journalists to visit China in years; both countries have expelled nearly all of each other’s resident reporters amid soured relations.

The dialogue, organized by the Center for China and Globalization, was part of ongoing efforts to normalize the situation between India and China, which has been sputtering into a reset after the diplomatic freeze that followed the 2020 Galwan Valley clashes along the disputed border. The conversations that transpired at the talk revealed a subterranean current in one of Asia’s most consequential relationships.

India and China do not think about each other with equivalent intensity. To China, the U.S. is the only player on the world stage with any real trump cards; the rest of the world, India included, is a supporting cast. It views India as a significant regional actor, a nuclear-armed neighbor, a potential irritant — but not a strategic equal. In contrast, Beijing exerts gravitational force on strategic thinking in New Delhi. It is present in every military procurement decision, every infrastructure project in the border regions, every calculation about Pakistan. The asymmetry is not, of course, merely psychological. 

As recently as 1990, India and China had similar per capita incomes. By 2025, China’s GDP of $19.4 trillion was nearly five times larger than India’s $4.1 trillion. At the meeting I attended in Beijing, one of the Chinese participants was blunt in pointing this out. India should accept its position of relative weakness without shame, he suggested, and figure out how to leverage China’s economic strengths for its own development. On the Indian side, his remarks triggered gasps and pinched faces as the recommended pragmatism appeared to be interpreted as condescension. 

The brief interaction seemed to reflect a broader issue between the two nations. In my many years reporting on India-China relations, I’ve realized that the greatest barrier between them is not economic disparity or border disputes, but a decades-old communication problem: Each side has learned to interpret the other through a partial historical memory, and mistakes that incomplete view for the whole picture.

‘Ah San’

When I lived in Beijing between 2002 and 2009 as a foreign correspondent, Chinese perceptions of India were generally warm and, crucially, organic — not politically manufactured in the way that attitudes toward Japan, for example, were carefully managed by the state. Older Chinese had affectionate memories of socialist-era Hindi films like Awaara (Liulang Zhi). There was genuine respect for India as a birthplace of Buddhism, a religion that is foundational to Chinese culture. And there was a kind of collegial regard for India as a fellow rising economy — particularly in software outsourcing, an area where India had outpaced China.

Today’s younger generation in China exudes less of this comradely warmth. The view of India seems tohave shifted from a potential peer to, at best, a laggard to be advised, or, at worst, a presumptuous rival to be put in its place.

Social media has played an unhelpful role by amplifying deeply held perceptions about India’s tendency toward boastfulness that is unmoored from reality. For example, reactions on Chinese platforms to Vision 2047 — India’s goal to become a fully developed nation by the 100th anniversary of its independence — are often derisive: Commenters pointedly note that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2019 pledge to build a $5 trillion economy within five years has not been met, so why, they ask, should anyone trust the aspirations for 2047?

This kind of trolling on Chinese social media can take on ugly overtones. The pejorative term Ah San is bandied about. Understanding this, and the underlying issue of Chinese skepticism toward India as a strategic partner, requires historical context. We are all handcuffed to our histories — nations like India and China, who have spent much of the last century recovering from the wounds of colonialization, even more than others. 

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Sikhs were among the most recognizable symbols of the British imperial presence in China. Sikh policemen comprised about 12% of the Shanghai Municipal Police force alongside Europeans and Chinese. From 1885 until the early 1940s, hundreds were recruited directly from Punjab to police the treaty port concessions of Shanghai and Hong Kong. They were cheaper than Europeans and considered more reliable than the local population, and thus inserted into a triangular hierarchy in which they occupied the role of the colonial enforcer’s enforcer.

“Each side has learned to interpret the other through a partial historical memory, and mistakes that incomplete view for the whole picture.”

The Shanghainese called the Sikhs hong tou Ah San — literally “red-headed number three.” An often-cited explanation is that this referred to the policemen’s red turbans and to their status in the Shanghai hierarchy, with the British as No. 1 and the Chinese as No. 2. The term Ah San — No. 3, the subordinate, the lackey — embedded itself in the Chinese imagination as a descriptor for Indians generally, carrying a charge of willingness to do the white man’s bidding against one’s fellow Asians.

Indian traders, too, had their role in the colonial economy of China’s humiliation. Parsi and Marwari merchants were among the commercial intermediaries of the opium trade that Britain forced onto the Qing Empire at gunpoint — a trade that, by the mid-19th century, had created millions of addicts and gutted Chinese silver reserves. By 1831, there were 41 Parsis in Canton’s foreign enclave, outnumbering the 32 English merchants — a gap that widened further by 1835, when there were 52 Parsis to just 35 English traders. They were a significant part of the non-Western commercial presence in the city through which the drug entered China.

Marwaris supplied a different part of the chain. Tarachand Ghanshyamdas, one of the great Marwari trading firms, had offices across the Malwa opium belt and traded extensively in opium futures. It was in opium speculation that several of the first great Marwari fortunes were made, including that of Shivnarain Birla, grandfather of G.D. Birla, who became a close associate of Gandhi. A little-known fact in India is that some of the same commercial capital accumulated through the drug trade that devastated China went on to fund the Indian independence movement. The complexity is that these merchants, Parsis and Marwaris, were operating within a system they did not design and could not easily refuse.  

In China, the specific details have become obscured with the passing of decades. But the residue remains: the Sikh policeman’s red turban, the Parsi merchant’s opium chest, the figure of Ah San. It has all hardened into a lingering perception of the Indian as the Westerner’s willing instrument. A significant strand of Chinese opinion still seems to view India’s international positioning — its partnerships with the United States, its role in the Quad (a diplomatic partnership between India, Australia, Japan and the United States), its balancing act against China — as a continuation of that old subordinate role: Ah San, still doing the white man’s bidding.

When President George W. Bush secured India a waiver at the Nuclear Suppliers Group in 2008 — allowing civilian nuclear trade despite India’s refusal to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty — Beijing seemed to read the move not as recognition of India’s strategic weight, but as confirmation that India had settled comfortably into the role of favored American client. The same template is applied to India’s membership in the Quad and its pursuit of closer trade ties with the European Union. 

Where India makes sovereign strategic choices, expressions of a proudly independent foreign policy, China perceives them, instinctively, through the prism of historical memory: a reprise of the apparent willingness to align with Western power against China’s interests. This misalignment runs in both directions. If China reads India through the lens of colonial subordination, India reads China through the lens of betrayal.

The ‘Betrayal’ Of 1962

In the early years after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 and Indian independence in 1947, the Hindi slogan Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai — “Indians and Chinese are brothers” — carried real conviction in India. In 1954, the two countries signed the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, a rulebook requiring mutual respect for sovereignty, non-aggression and non-interference in a world no longer organized by empire. Then-Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru invested considerable political capital in the vision of two great Asian civilizations charting a post-colonial future together — co-architects of a non-aligned world order that refused the binary logic of the Cold War.

But in October 1962, China launched simultaneous attacks against India along their shared border, in Aksai Chin in the west and the North-East Frontier Agency (what is now Arunachal Pradesh) in the east. India was caught catastrophically unprepared. Hugely outnumbered, its forces collapsed. The war ended in late November when China declared a unilateral ceasefire, its objectives met.

The Chinese have their own account of 1962: not unprovoked aggression but a “self-defense counterattack” in response to Indian military encroachment into disputed territory and by the suspicion, sharpened after the Dalai Lama’s 1959 flight to India, that New Delhi was attempting to peel Tibet away from Chinese control.

“In China, the view of India seems to have shifted from a potential peer to, at best, a laggard to be advised, or, at worst, a presumptuous rival to be put in its place.”

That China’s attack came after months of Indian troops establishing forward posts along the contested border is not taught in Indian schools. What is reiterated instead is Nehru’s misguided conviction, rooted in Panchsheel-era idealism, that war between the two countries was essentially unthinkable — and the sense that China betrayed a fellow post-colonial, non-aligned actor. For India, 1962 was proof that post-colonial solidarity could not bear the weight Nehru had placed upon it.

More than 60 years on, the wound continues to shape perception. China’s arming of Pakistan — visibly demonstrated when Chinese-built J-10C fighters were deployed against Indian aircraft during aerial battles in May 2025 — is read in India not as a normal exercise of alliance politics, but as the continuation of a deliberate strategy of encirclement. The pattern of Chinese military pressure along contested borders, timed with what feels to India like pointed precision to coincide with sensitive diplomatic moments or periods of Indian domestic vulnerability, has hardened into a settled conviction: that China is a bad-faith actor, one that deploys dialogue as a screen for tactical advantage.

India stands toe-to-toe with China as a civilizational peer. If anything, from India’s perspective, China owes it a civilizational debt. Buddhism — which transformed Chinese culture, philosophy, art and governance over two millennia — originated in India. “Journey to the West,” one of China’s most beloved literary works, is premised on a Chinese monk’s pilgrimage to India to retrieve Buddhist scriptures. The Monkey King himself, Sun Wukong, makes his journey to what the text calls the “Western Paradise,” which is India. 

There are blind spots in India-China relations that neither side fully sees. China looks at India and sees, refracted through the lens of colonial memory, a country with a habit of subordinating itself to Western power — Ah San, repositioned for the 21st century. India looks at China and sees, refracted through the lens of 1962, a neighbor that smiles across the table while advancing its pawns. 

At the Beijing meeting, when the Chinese participant’s comment caused the temperature on the Indian side to rise, the reaction was seemingly triggered not by the substance of the argument, but by its register — the absence, as the Indians experienced it, of respect. In communication theory, the solution to persistent miscommunication is not to speak louder. It is to learn the other’s language — to understand not just the words being used, but the implicit assumptions that give those words their particular charge. 

India and China have become used to talking past each other with conviction and fluency. They are often not even having the same conversation. It is never easy for individuals to sit with the discomfort of a story that contradicts the one they grew up with. Nations, carrying the accumulated weight of their histories, find it harder still.

Bring Back The Journalists

To help address India and China’s miscommunication problem, it is critical to consider the source of each population’s information about the other. Between 2016 and 2023, a series of tit-for-tat exchanges culminated in both countries removing nearly all of each other’s foreign correspondents. By 2024, when the ongoing bilateral thaw got underway, there was only a single Indian journalist for the Press Trust of India based in China, and no Chinese journalists in India at all. In the intervening months, one more Indian correspondent has been added to the Beijing-based foreign corps. A single Xinhua correspondent is expected to take up a position in New Delhi shortly.

These are nuclear-armed neighbors that together comprise a third of the world’s population and share a 4,000-kilometer boundary. The fact that they still get the majority of their information about each other from third-party, usually Western, sources, is an indictment of the mutual failure of investment in understanding each other directly.

Before I moved from New Delhi to Beijing in the early 2000s, I had believed China was inscrutable — its architecture outlandish in scale, its language impossibly alien. Once I was living there, regularly walking the crisscrossing core of hutong alleyways, what struck me was how familiar it all felt: the cadence of itinerant knife-sharpeners and cardboard recyclers announcing their services as they cycled slowly past low-rise homes with doors that were always open; the way strangers addressed each other as ayi (auntie) and shushu (uncle); the comfort with loud conversation; the lack of privacy, with neighbors’ noses perpetually stretching into each other’s business; the pushing in queues; the sharing of food with strangers on long train journeys.

“We are all handcuffed to our histories — nations like India and China, who have spent much of the last century recovering from the wounds of colonialization, even more than others.”

The sense of familiarity was surprising because, until I moved there, China had seemed wholly foreign, probably because all I knew about it came from Western journalists reporting for wire news agencies whose copy Indian newspapers carried.

We cannot help but filter observations through our own implicit lenses, our barely conscious ideas about what is “normal,” the benchmark against which we observe deviance. But my “normal” was far closer to China’s than the West’s. To be an Indian foreign correspondent in China had felt like having double vision. I always seemed to see differently from my Western colleagues. Where they saw chaos, say while looking at the traffic on a typical afternoon on Beijing’s third ring road, I saw discipline: little honking, no stray cows and enviable infrastructure. We would both be seeing the same thing — Beijing traffic on a weekday afternoon — but seeingit in totally different ways.

On-the-ground reporting matters because a country should not be defined by propaganda from its generals and strategists, but by its people and their cumulative hopes and quotidian preoccupations. This is what is lost when foreign correspondents disappear. In their place, we get online trolls and professors from WhatsApp University who often generate reality-warping hyper-nationalism and xenophobia rather than reliable information.

The Beijing meeting I attended in the spring was a welcome development, but far from enough. Long-term, resident reporters matter because understanding accumulates over time. It lies at the intersection of deep study and the epiphanies born of sustained interactions with everyday people, not in a single meeting with think tankers.

Bringing back journalists will not erase India and China’s protracted history of mutual suspicion. Both countries are in the throes of an overheated nationalism that has been weaponized to distract from domestic troubles. But it is a necessary first step. Only direct contact, sustained over years, can begin to fill in the historical and communication gaps that plague and distort bilateral dialogue.