India-China Ties Improving As Border Moves Towards Normalcy: Jaishankar

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said India-China ties are better today than they were a couple of years ago, tying the improvement to easing border tensions. He made the remarks at Asia Society in New York on Monday.

He compared 2025 and 2024 while answering a question on China and said the relationship has improved in recent times. The gains also come after Xi Jinping's trip to India for the BRICS Leaders' Summit in New Delhi.

“If you asked me, compared to where you were in 2025, is the relationship better today? I would say yes. Compared to 2024, even more so,” Jaishankar said. He said the shift was not really a “structural change” but reflected the fact that ties had gone badly “off-track” after the 2020 border standoff.

Border Standoff Impact

The 2020 face-off strained routine engagement. Jaishankar said the long border standoff with China badly affected bilateral contacts. After 2020, normal exchanges between the two sides largely stopped, even though trade continued.

After the standoff, routine contacts were effectively frozen, while official exchanges, visa issuance and flights were hit. “So once the border standoff was resolved, it was natural that this would start to improve,” he said.

Statecraft Logic

Delhi kept making one point. Jaishankar said India had long told Beijing that a prolonged standoff helped neither country and could be used by third parties. “standoff between us, a dip in our relationship, actually doesn't help either of us. In fact, it is third parties who will take advantage of that.”

He then set out the principle that guided India’s approach. “We also maintained consistently a very elementary principle of statecraft - don't get locked into a problem which benefits others,” Jaishankar said.

He added that Beijing took time to come around to that thinking. “It took a little while for the Chinese side to agree with that, for whatever reason, but I don't think that long standoff served our interests. It certainly didn't serve theirs. And to the extent there is an improvement in our relations, I think it certainly helps our position,” not only vis-a-vis China but vis-a-vis the rest of the world, he said.

Jaishankar said India should not be trapped by one difficult relationship at its own expense. “Because I don't want to get totally focused to my disadvantage on one particular relationship and issue. If I can find a solution which works for me, I would rather do that,” he said.

Border Determines Ties

For Jaishankar, the border is central. He summed up India’s position in direct terms. “We came down to a very fundamental principle, which is that the state of the border determines the state of the relationship.”

He then made the link between military calm and diplomatic normalisation explicit. “You can't have tension...on the border and say the relationship should be normal. So what we've had is, as the border comes back more towards normalcy, the relationship comes back more towards normalcy, and if the relationship comes back more towards normalcy, it helps both of us,” Jaishankar said.

That is why he said the ties are better now than in 2024 and 2025. In his view, stabilising the border has been the main reason the relationship has moved back towards normal.

Multipolar Worldview

Jaishankar widened the lens. He was speaking to prominent members of the Indian-American community and said the world is moving “quite visibly” towards greater multipolarity. He argued that the shift is being driven partly by changes in the behaviour of the world’s strongest power.

Listing reasons for that view, he said that “in terms of the most powerful country in the world, which has been in many ways the ballast or really the shaper of the system as we know it currently, what we are seeing is really an erosion in alliances, a tendency to do it alone, and that has a huge impact on the thinking of the rest of the world.”

He also referred to the ‘G2’ summit meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping last week in Washington. Jaishankar said that when the second most consequential or weightiest economy engages with the first, “while they may have their points of convergence, overall they are in a competitive mode.”

That competition, he argued, limits how much Washington and Beijing can settle for everyone else. “There are limits to what the two of them can agree upon vis-a-vis the rest of the world. And that then leaves the rest of us and the rest of us are coming to terms today with a very different America, with the fact that there is also today a certain conversation taking place between America and China,” he said, adding that the rest of the world is busy making its arrangements.

He described those adjustments in practical terms. “Each one of us is looking for our optimal solutions. How do we de-risk? How do we diversify? Which are the new partners? Where do we get more value out of an existing partnership? We are really looking today at a difficult global situation. But as always, countries respond, they calculate, they adjust, they find new accommodations, they find new solutions, and that is how the international order develops, and it is that development today that I think the UN is a witness to,” he said.

Jaishankar added that this trend was visible in the exchanges that took place during the just-concluded high-level UNGA week. He said the conversations and meetings he attended, along with those of other global leaders, reflected that broader global recalibration.