What if China and India became friends?

CHINA’S rulers like to look down on India. They scorn its turbulent politics, its creaky infrastructure and its poverty. India has looked across with a combination of fear and envy, hoping in vain to be treated as an equal. Now the tectonics of the trans-Himalayan relationship are shifting. Recent border bloodshed suggests mounting hostility. But blossoming economic ties tell a different story that could trouble America and its allies.

When India’s most revered poet toured China in April 1924, Chinese intellectuals were unimpressed. Rabindranath Tagore had been feted globally as the first non-European Nobel literature laureate. A fierce critic of British rule in India, he hoped to rebuild an ancient cultural bond between Asia’s oldest civilisations.

For leading Chinese thinkers, however, his call for a revival of Eastern values and spirituality rang hollow. The Chinese, they argued, could only resist the West by learning from it – and rejecting their own traditional culture. China’s youth should not become “Indianised”, wrote Chen Duxiu, a co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party. “Unless, that is, they want their coffins to lie one day in a land under the heel of a colonial power.”