NEW DELHI -- Managed competition is likely to define the relationship between the two demographic titans, India and China, in the years ahead, even as they seek to expand bilateral cooperation.
Chinese President Hu Jintao will be received warmly when he arrives in New Delhi on Nov. 20 after attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum meeting in Hanoi. The visit will seek to showcase growing ties, but the underlying wariness and even suspicion of each other's intentions will hardly be absent.
Hu's tour will be high in banal expressions of friendly intent but low on enduring substance. Any accord signed will be no different than the ornamental agreement that marked the April 2005 visit of Premier Wen Jiabao. That vaunted agreement identifying six abstract "guiding principles" for a settlement of the Sino-Indian frontier disputes has actually taken the border talks backward. Despite 25 years of continuous border negotiations, India and China remain the only neighbors in the world not separated even by a mutually defined line of control.