Can Visa Resumption Heal the Deep Fault Lines in India–China Relations?

India’s decision on July 24, 2025 to resume issuing tourist visas to Chinese nationals after a five-year suspension marks a visible olive branch in a bilateral relationship scarred by border clashes, strategic competition, and economic imbalances. In 2019, India had granted nearly 200,000 tourist visas to Chinese visitors; this figure plummeted to 2,000 in 2024 amid pandemic restrictions and the eastern Ladakh stand-off, and cultural and pilgrimage exchanges like the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra were halted for half a decade. The move to reopen visa channels—enabling applications in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou—coincides with renewed diplomatic engagement, including external affairs parleys and plans to restart direct flights. At first glance, this could reinvigorate people-to-people links and address the tourism sector’s steep declines: Chinese arrivals made up over 3 percent of India’s inbound tourists in 2019 and support heritage economies from Bodh Gaya to the Mahabodhi Temple circuit. But beneath the ceremonial welcoming of passport holders lie enduring fissures that a visa sticker alone cannot mend.

Since the June 2020 Galwan Valley clashes, which claimed 20 Indian and an undisclosed number of Chinese military lives, sustained military deployments along the 3,488-kilometre Line of Actual Control have underscored persistent security anxieties. The Doklam standoff in 2017 and recurring face-offs near Pangong Tso further reinforce the reality that peace at the border remains fragile and episodic despite colonel- and general-level talks and confidence-building measures. India’s caution in reopening visa channels was less about tourism logistics and more about calibrating a broader détente without sacrificing deterrence. Simply welcoming travelers cannot dissolve the belief that large-scale infrastructure buildups—like China’s massive Yarlung Tsangpo dam project upstream of the Brahmaputra—pose hydrological and strategic risks to downstream India, where data sharing on river flows remains adversarially conditional.

Economic interdependence, too, cuts at the core of mutual distrust. In the first quarter of fiscal 2025, India imported $92.7 billion worth of goods from China while exporting just $43.3 billion, leaving a yawning trade deficit of $49.4 billion. May 2025 figures reveal China’s exports to India at $11.1 billion—up 12.5 percent year-on-year—contrasted with scant $1.52 billion in Indian exports, highlighting both explosive growth and structural imbalance in commerce. Nearly 19 percent of all Indian imports in 2025 originated from China, making it the country’s largest single import partner despite repeated exhortations to reduce dependency through Atmanirbhar Bharat initiatives and Production-Linked Incentive schemes aimed at bolstering domestic manufacturing. Yet 70 percent of the components in Indian-assembled televisions, and a comparable share in other electronics, still come from Chinese suppliers, perpetuating a cycle of “Assemble in India” rather than genuine “Make in India” production capacity, as Rahul Gandhi pointed out when visiting New Delhi’s Nehru Place market and questioning why manufacturing’s GDP share has stalled at a decades-low 12.6 percent under successive policy drives.

Security imperatives compound commercial misgivings. During Operation Sindoor in May 2025, India’s armed forces targeted nine terror-infrastructure sites in Pakistan in retaliation for the Pahalgam attack; Pakistan’s counter-strikes illustrated a lethal advance in capabilities that Indian officers publicly attributed to Chinese supply of advanced air-defence systems, satellite intelligence, and live targeting data, effectively turning Pakistan into a “live lab” for Chinese weapon exports and real-time battlefield testing. Lieutenant General Rahul R. Singh revealed that China provided live input on Indian vector deployments, underscoring Beijing’s willingness to stoke regional confrontation by proxy rather than risk direct border conflict. Such revelations underscore why trusting China’s goodwill in any sphere—from visas to seated dialogues—requires simultaneous strengthening of India’s strategic autonomy, from indigenizing defence technologies to deepening partnerships beyond traditional trade and military corridors.

Even as tourist visas reopen, the substantive dimensions of bilateral trust remain under construction. Cultural exchange alone cannot erase headlines of blocked diplomatic channels or reverse the domino effect of subsidiary market exits by Chinese firms in hydrocarbons, rare-earth minerals, and technology sectors. The EU-China summit, which juxtaposed Europe’s trade grievances over market-access barriers and rare-earth export controls against China’s portrayal of benign cooperation, reminds us that asymmetries in openness and reciprocity resonate across continents—and find parallels on the India–China axis, where Indian exporters still face non-tariff obstacles even as Chinese goods flood domestic markets at record volumes.

Moreover, geopolitical realignments suggest that unless India diversifies its trade partnerships—by accelerating friend-shoring strategies with ASEAN, the United States, and Europe—and pragmatically decouples critical supply chains in pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and renewable-energy technologies, its economic leverage will remain compromised. The Union Budget 2025’s expanded PLI coverage, combined with targeted R&D incentives in strategic sectors, could chip away at mega-scale dependencies; yet as experts caution, such shifts unfold incrementally and rarely outpace the momentum of entrenched import-trade patterns. Reviving manufacturing at scale demands not only capital outlays but ecosystem reforms: streamlined land, labor, and power regimes; robust logistics corridors; and a tax-regime stable enough to attract long-term investments rather than transient assembly operations.

Ultimately, the decision to reopen tourist visas to Chinese nationals will yield immediate dividends in resuming people-to-people contact, tourism revenue, and soft-power optics. Yet without parallel strides in border de-escalation, economic rebalancing, and strategic defence indigenization, this gesture risks being perceived as veneer atop a rocky bilateral foundation. The resonance of Mahatma Gandhi’s maxim that “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” must be tempered by hardheaded recognition of geopolitical realities: genuine trust is built when mutual vulnerabilities are addressed, not merely glossed over. For India and China, opening visa windows may herald warmer greetings at the frontier gates, but the deeper challenge remains to open minds—and guard sovereign interests—across the broader continuum of national security and economic self-reliance.