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Pallavi Aiyar is a territorially polygamous correspondent, columnist, and author. She has reported from — and raised a family in — China, Belgium, Japan, Indonesia and Spain. She writes about the world with indiscriminate delight and a weakness for the surprising connections between people and places.
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https://www.inkl.com/a/EkBPRGfWlBl
By Pallavi Aiyar
August 6, 2026
Beijing: Every communication encounter has an encoder, the speaker trying to convey something, and a decoder, the listener receiving it. Miscommunication happens when the message decoded isn't the one that was sent. India and China have this problem.
There is an undeniable structural asymmetry at the heart of the bilateral relationship. India and China do not think about each other with equivalent intensity. For China, India is a significant regional actor, a nuclear-armed neighbour, a potential irritant - but not a strategic equal. In contrast, China exerts gravitational force on strategic thinking in New Delhi. It is present in every military procurement decision, infrastructure project in the border regions, and calculation about Pakistan.
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The asymmetry is not merely psychological. In 1990, India and China had broadly comparable per-capita incomes. By 2025, China's $19.4 tn GDP was nearly 5x India's $4.1 tn. As a participant in a recent conversation between Indian journalists and Chinese think-tankers in Beijing put it: India should accept its position of relative weakness without shame, and figure out how to leverage Chinese economic strength pragmatically. It was a reasonable argument. Indians in the closed-door gathering bristled. Pragmatism, encoded by the speaker, was decoded by his audience as condescension.
In the 2000s, Chinese perceptions of India were warm, and - unlike attitudes to Japan - organically so, not state-managed. Older Chinese remembered Raj Kapoor's socialist-era Awaara fondly. There was real respect for India as Buddhism's birthplace, and a kind of collegial regard for India's software outsourcing success, an area where India had outpaced China.
Today's younger Chinese carry less of that warmth and more of a coolly comparative gaze. The developmental gap has widened, and the register has shifted from potential peer to laggard-to-be-advised, or worse, presumptuous rival. Social media does the rest. Narendra Modi's unmet 2019 pledge of a $5 tn economy by 2024 is a recurring, mocking reference point whenever India's Vision 2047 comes up.
Some of this trolling curdles into something uglier, carrying a term most Indians have never heard: Ah San. Understanding it means going back to the treaty ports of late-19th and early-20th c. Shanghai, where Sikh policemen - recruited by the hundreds from Punjab from 1885 onward - made up a third of Shanghai Municipal Police.
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They were cheaper than European officers and considered more reliable than local recruits, which slotted them into a colonial hierarchy as the enforcer's enforcer. Shanghainese called them 'hong tou Ah San' - red-headed number three: red for the turban, 3 for their rank beneath the British (No. 1) and Chinese (No. 2). The term hardened into shorthand for Indians generally, the willing instrument of the White man against fellow Asians.
Indian merchants had their own, less remembered role in this history. Parsi and Marwari traders were commercial intermediaries in the opium trade Britain forced on the Qing empire. By 1831, 41 Parsi merchants operated in Guangzhou's foreign enclave, outnumbering the English and Americans combined.
Marwari firms like Tarachand Ghanshyamdas traded opium futures across the Malwa belt. The fortune of Shiv Narain Birla, grandfather of Gandhi confidant G D Birla, has roots in that trade. Some of that same capital later helped fund India's independence movement. These merchants, junior partners in a system they didn't design, were neither innocent nor sovereign. But in China, the specifics faded while the residue stayed: the Sikh's red turban, the Parsi's opium chest, hardened into an instinct that India is the West's willing instrument.
That instinct still colours how Beijing reads Indian foreign policy today. The 2008 Nuclear Suppliers Group waiver, secured for India by George W Bush, wasn't read in Beijing as recognition of India's weight. It confirmed India had settled into the role of favoured American client. The Quad gets the same treatment. Where India encodes these as sovereign strategic choices, China decodes them, instinctively, as a reprise of the comprador reflex.
The misreading runs both ways. If China sees India through colonial subordination, India sees China through the lens of 1962 - the war that shattered Nehru's Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai idealism and left India, in its own telling, betrayed by a fellow postcolonial power it had trusted.
That wound still shapes how India reads Chinese moves today: Beijing's arming of Pakistan - visibly on display when Chinese-built J-10C fighters faced Indian jets in aerial engagements in May 2025 - reads in Delhi not as ordinary alliance politics but as deliberate encirclement, timed, it often feels, with pointed precision.
Neither side fully sees its blind spot. China looks at India and sees Ah San, repositioned for this century. India looks at China and sees 1962's smiling betrayer, advancing pawns beneath the table. In communication theory, the fix for a persistent encoding failure isn't to speak louder. It's to learn the other side's implicit assumptions, not just their words. India and China talk past each other fluently, and with total conviction.
It is never easy for a person to sit with a story that contradicts the one they grew up on. For nations carrying a century's accumulated weight, it is harder still.
(This is an edited version of an article that was first published in Noema Magazine)
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Pallavi Aiyar is a territorially polygamous correspondent, columnist, and author. She has reported from — and raised a family in — China, Belgium, Japan, Indonesia and Spain. She writes about the world with indiscriminate delight and a weakness for the surprising connections between people and places.
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