D
oval landed in Beijing Monday. Tuesday afternoon, he's across the table from Wang Yi, round 25 of a mechanism that's been running since 2003, survived the Galwan clash in 2020, survived the four-year freeze after it, and is now supposedly on a warmer footing. He also stopped in to see Vice President Han Zheng while he was there, which is the kind of add-on visit both sides use to signal this trip mattered beyond the usual talking points.
The official language hasn't budged much in a year. Peace and tranquillity along the LAC. The 2005 political parameters, again. Steady progress, again. Go talk to people at CICIR in Beijing, though, and the tone gets less careful. Hu Shisheng basically said the quiet part out loud before this round even started: the talks have sprinted ahead of anything that's genuinely changed between the two countries.
Sit with that for a second. Twenty-five rounds, twenty-two years, and nobody's agreed on where the border actually is. What this process has delivered: disengagement pacts, a flood-season data-sharing arrangement, and, most recently, a plan to reopen three old trading posts along the frontier: Renqinggang-Changgu, Pulan-Gunji, Jiuba-Namgya. What it hasn't delivered, after all that, is delimitation. Not close.
That's the gap Hu keeps returning to, and it's worth knowing who he is before taking the point at face value. He's also CICIR's deputy secretary-general, so this isn't some outside academic lobbing opinions, it's someone whose read on India carries weight inside Chinese policy circles. His writing over the past couple of years treats the relationship less as a problem to be fixed and more as a structural condition you manage, indefinitely, because it isn't going away. He's called the trajectory "cold hostility" in one piece that got passed around widely once it hit English translation. Not war. Not friendship. Something flatter than either.
It doesn't break cleanly into bullet points, even though Chinese state outlets like to present it that way. Two rising powers, both with interests that keep expanding, and that expansion itself creates friction. No single dispute needed. Hu frames a lot of India's recent moves, on the South China Sea, on Taiwan, as testing limits Beijing considers non-negotiable. He also figures Washington will keep leaning on New Delhi to get more dependent on Western tech and defense ties, though he doesn't actually think India folds and becomes anyone's pawn. He's said as much.
The argument that seems to bother Indian officials the most, though, is the one about supply chains. India trying to cut reliance on Chinese manufacturing, what gets called "de-Sinicization" in Chinese commentary, has hurt India more than it's hurt China, in his telling. He said something close to this after the 2024 disengagement deal too. Not a new take. What's worth noting is the timing, saying it again right when both capitals are trying to sell everyone on the relationship being fixed.
Still, more meetings isn't the same as more agreement, and that's basically the entirety of Hu's case boiled down. Border management: genuinely better. The bigger question, a settlement both sides can actually live with, using the same "fair, reasonable, mutually acceptable" language from 2005 that shows up in every readout, hasn't moved noticeably in the last five rounds versus the five before. And India's balancing act between Washington, Moscow and Beijing hasn't shifted either, which is arguably the thing Chinese analysts actually care about more than the border itself.
None of the timing here is an accident. New Delhi hosts BRICS on September 12 and 13, and Xi's attendance is still unconfirmed as of this week. Talks going well makes a presidential trip an easier sell back home. Talks going badly gives Beijing cover to send somebody more junior instead. Both sides have reasons to want this round to look good on paper no matter what actually got resolved behind closed doors.
India's own line, repeated by Jaishankar as much as Doval, is that closer ties with China don't have to come at the cost of an independent foreign policy. The two, in Delhi's telling, can sit alongside each other. Hu reads it more or less the opposite way: he thinks that balancing act eventually has to break one direction or the other. Neither side is going to concede anything on that this week, and nobody's expecting them to say so publicly. What actually gets settled in Beijing, and whether it still holds once the BRICS delegations land in New Delhi next month, is the part worth watching from here
India and China held the 25th round of Special Representatives' talks on the boundary question in Beijing on August 25, Doval meeting Wang Yi for a mechanism that's now over two decades old. It's part of a normalisation push that kicked off after Modi and Xi met in Kazan back in 2024. Hu Shisheng, who directs the Institute for South Asian Studies at CICIR, keeps making the same point in different forms: the photo-ops have gotten better a lot faster than the actual relationship has. The talks land right before India hosts the BRICS Summit next month, and whether Xi shows up in person is still anyone's guess.
