New Delhi: As the India-China relationship shows concrete signs of thawing—the renewal of direct flights between the two nations—Karishma Mehrotra and Lyric Li report on the restoration of ties for The Washington Post.
In 2020, after the Galwan clashes, cross-border exchanges did not completely halt—570,000 passengers found “indirect” India-China routes in 2024 to continue exchanges.
“Experts say rebuilding the relationship would require time—and real political will—after such a protracted lull,” says the report. “As a consequence of the pandemic and subsequent tensions, the population of Indian students in China dropped from 2,00,000 in 2019 to just 5,000 in 2024, according to India’s Ministry of External Affairs. Chinese capital investment in India—once as high as $8 billion, according to a Brookings Institution report—has stagnated.”
But concerns linger. “Some in India worry that even a relative thaw in relations could make the country more reliant on China and less focused on building national capacity,” the report also says.
“We have to understand the culture … to stop the friction,” Gurpreet Singh, who moved to China in 2008 as a student and now works for the tech giant, Xiaomi, in Beijing, is quoted as saying. “It’s not easy, but like the Chinese saying, there are always more solutions than the problem itself.”
Travis McMaster, the general manager of an “outdoor and travel brand”, was shifting production from China to India. However, after the US’s “tariff truce” with the former, he’s had to circle back, report Ana Swanson and Alexandra Stevenson in The New York Times.
“Cocoon had begun shifting some production to India this spring to avoid high tariffs on China. But in the past few months, Mr Trump has raised tariffs on India by 50 percent, while dropping tariffs on Cocoon’s Chinese goods to 30 percent, scrambling the company’s plans,” says the report. “Mr McMaster lamented the time he had spent on building up production in India. At least for the time being, he said, ‘I’m not going to spend any more energy trying to get out of China’.”
“I don’t think you’ll see companies moving out of Vietnam, India, and elsewhere to go back to China. It’s the big number that actually matters,” Adam Sitkoff, the executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hanoi, has been quoted as saying.
The report also says that China’s “ability to retaliate” is behind the US’s decision to curb its tariffs.
India could become a “juggernaut” of women’s cricket, Alex Hartley, England’s former spinner, tells Ffion Wynne on the BBC.
“India could become a juggernaut of women’s cricket, it’s scary where they could get to,” says Hartley. “The money that’s going to be pumped into the game, the domestic system, more and more people are going to want to be like Jemimah Rodrigues, Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana, and Deepti Sharma.”
The women of the team, following their historic win, also have high hopes.
“This means a lot, we have created history,” 25-year-old all-rounder Amanjot Kaur tells the BBC. “But this is just the start. We are going to dominate all over the world in every format, and I’m glad we could do it when it mattered most.”
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)