India’s China trade challenge

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Editor's note: For the first time since India lost 20 soldiers in a deadly clash with China’s People’s Liberation Army at Galwan in June 2020, China’s defence minister was in Delhi last week. Li Shangfu was attending the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting of defence ministers and held a bilateral meeting with his Indian counterpart Rajnath Singh.  Later this week, China’s foreign minister Qin Gang is scheduled to be in Goa, to attend the SCO meeting of foreign ministers. He was last in India in March for the G20 foreign ministers meeting where he met foreign minister S. Jaishankar. China’s President Xi Jinping, recently elected for an unprecedented third term, is also expected to be in India twice this year—in June and September—to attend the SCO and G20 summits. This flurry of diplomatic visits by Chinese officials and leaders to India suggests a sign of normalcy in bilateral ties, contrary to Jaishankar’s claim that “today the state of our relations with China is not normal” because of the situation on the Line of Actual Control. Meanwhile, the three-year-old border crisis continues unabated. As …