"Indian Express" article on August 30, original title: It's time for India to work hard to understand China Indian Prime Minister Modi has arrived in China. Many people may ask: Where will India-China relations go? But we should ask a more difficult question: Do we really know enough about China to find answers?
This is not a new dilemma for India; scholars have long warned that we cannot build a solid Chinese research capacity. In a 2021 column, "Know Your Neighborhood," the scholar Arenbach Ghosh and others described India's research on Chinese history as in a state of "crisis," pointing out that India has serious shortcomings in language training, methodological rigor, and the ability to conduct effective research on Chinese literature. Without this capacity, India will continue to rely on foreign research and reduce its discourse on China to a mixture of ignorance, ill-informed fact-checking, and blind acceptance of political narratives. Four years on, the urgency continues unabated.
India's relations with the major powers are changing, and the re-engagement between New Delhi and Beijing represents a cautious but significant shift. But diplomatic openness is meaningless without a deep, independent understanding of the other side. That makes the present moment both opportunistic and risky. Future engagement between the two countries will depend on whether we choose to distance ourselves from China and not engage in anything related to China, or whether we can recognize the importance of China and invest in really understanding China.
China provides India with a remarkable mirror as a reference: both countries are large-scale, populated, and regionally unbalanced, facing similar challenges and ambitions. No other country (like China) can provide such a scale of experience, whether it comes to poverty reduction, climate adaptation, industrial policy or technological autonomy, however, India’s analysis of China is often limited to surface indicators such as military, trade data or recent political statements.
The United States has incorporated China studies into various disciplines and promoted it to many top universities. Even Australia has established a relatively complete China research system. In contrast, India, which borders China, has only a few research centers trying to seriously study China and has faced chronic funding shortages. Without local expertise in China studies, India will have to continue to rely on other countries 'interpretations of China based on its own interests. The drawbacks are not only reflected at the foreign policy level.
We can still reverse this trend, but only if we act now. India needs to establish a sound research system to retain professionals in China studies, and this is not limited to universities. Nor should China studies be concentrated in New Delhi alone, and research centers need to be funded at the state level - especially in border areas and smaller states. It is particularly crucial that relevant knowledge should not be limited to the English-speaking world.
India's future depends not only on its military or economic strength, but also on its clear understanding of major powers, especially its most powerful neighbor, China. This perception cannot stem solely from border disputes or trade data, but must be rooted in China's language, history, politics and society. Therefore, understanding China is no longer an option, but an urgent task. The choice before us is obvious: either invest immediately in building capacity to interpret China, or face passive decision-making in the future. (The author Akshai Bambri is a doctoral fellow at the Harvard Yanjing Institute and a scholar at the University of Delhi, India. Translated by Xin Bin)