The Modi government has built its foreign policy around the claim that India has graduated from hedging to civilizational confidence. Its deepening rapprochement with Beijing since Donald Trump’s return to the White House suggests the opposite. New Delhi has hedged more toward China without articulating any condition under which it would hedge back. Beijing noticed, as is clear from a recent revelation.
On May 8, China’s state broadcaster CCTV aired interviews with two engineers from the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), confirming for the first time that Chinese technical personnel were physically present at Pakistani operational bases during the four-day conflict between India and Pakistan in May 2025. Zhang Heng described the experience of working in 50-degree heat as fighter jets took off and air-raid sirens wailed. Xu Da spoke of the J-10CE as “a child we had nurtured, cared for, and finally handed over to the user,” adding that its combat performance (including the reported downing of at least one Indian Rafale) “didn’t feel sudden at all.”
The confession lands at an awkward moment for New Delhi. For 18 months, India’s foreign policy establishment has presented a rapprochement with China as the centerpiece of strategic recalibration in a Trump-era world. The choreography is by now familiar: the meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping in Kazan, the Line of Actual Control (LAC) patrolling agreements at Depsang and Demchok, Modi’s August 2025 visit to Tianjin for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s reciprocal trip to Delhi, the resumed Kolkata-Guangzhou direct flight in October. Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar called the trajectory positive. Xi Jinping invoked the vision of a “dragon-election tango,” while Modi said Sino-Indian differences were “as natural as in a family.”
What no one in this process has been willing to say out loud is what India actually wants from China – or what New Delhi will do if it does not get it.
The pivot to Beijing was not driven by any structural shift in the bilateral relationship. Chinese troops remain forward-deployed along the LAC, and infrastructure construction near the disputed border continues apace – for example, the Hotan-Shigatse railway is being extended toward the eastern sector. Instead, India’s change in China policy was a reaction to Trump’s tariffs and the quiet cancellation of the Quad summit Delhi was to host last November. When the American option narrowed, the Chinese option had to widen. The question of whether that widening was reciprocated, or simply accepted, by China was deferred.
May 8 revealed the weakness of this pivot. Beijing has now publicly confirmed what Indian Lieutenant General Rahul R. Singh suggested last July when he called Pakistan a “live lab” for Chinese systems: the China-Pakistan relationship involves operational integration. AVIC engineers were on the ground. J-10 fighters and PL-15E missiles, also Chinese, were the weapons used against India. Roughly 80 percent of Pakistan’s arms imports between 2021 and 2025 came from China, according to SIPRI. The next reported inductions (J-35 stealth fighters) will deepen the integration further.
The “dragon-elephant tango” has no vocabulary for this. India cannot publicly condemn Beijing for the May 8 admission without abandoning the Tianjin script and conceding, retroactively, that the rapprochement was misjudged. AVIC’s admission lays bare the asymmetry: Beijing was willing to extract rhetorical normalization from New Delhi while continuing to integrate operationally with Islamabad. Rather than acknowledge this, the Ministry of External Affairs has, so far, chosen silence. The pattern is becoming the policy.
A coherent China policy would look different. It would begin by identifying what New Delhi expects of Beijing – on the LAC, on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, on arms transfers, on Chinese support to Pakistan during future contingencies – and tie those expectations to specific Indian responses if they are not met. It would treat normalization as conditional, not declarative. It would distinguish between the gestures Beijing has made (patrolling agreements at two contested points) and the behavior it has continued (forward deployments, infrastructure expansion, the Pakistan partnership). And it would acknowledge that the May 8 admission was, in all likelihood, a deliberate signal: state media broadcasts of this scale are not aired by accident, particularly not in the week U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is reportedly expected in New Delhi.
What “managing China” should mean for India now is not retreat from rapprochement but the imposition of substance on a relationship that has so far traded only in symbols. Until New Delhi can name what it wants and what it will do if denied, the choreography continues – but the dance is no longer between equals.
