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BRICS SUMMIT: Xi-Modi meeting falls flat and accomplishes little

No tangible commitments were made during the most anticipated bilateral meeting between BRICS leaders.

In many ways the would-be highlight of this year’s BRICS summit, the inevitable handshake and discussion between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was something of a dog that did not bark.

While India withdrew its troops from Doklam/Donglang just prior to the beginning of the BRICS summit, in a move widely seen as a way to avoid embarrassment for the Indian delegation upon its visit to China, little apparent progress on settling the underlying border tensions between the Asian powers appears to have been made.

While both leaders agreed that closer communications are necessary in order to foster greater cooperation and avoid conflicts, the reality is that India had the opportunity to take China up on its summer-long offers for direct dialogue but this did not happen. Without any further commitments to a dialogue process or any near-future bilateral meetings set-up during the Xi-Modi meeting in Xiamen, it is unlikely that anything more specific other than the polite commitment to dialogue has been offered.

Xinhua reports,

“China is willing to work with India on the basis of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, which were put forward by both countries, to improve political mutual trust, promote mutually beneficial cooperation, and push Sino-Indian ties along a right track, he said.

Xi made the remarks when meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the southeastern city of Xiamen after the ninth BRICS summit”.

While President Xi told Premier Modi that peaceful coexistence was a win-win and the “only correct choice” for the countries, the lack of any specific commitments made during the meeting means that as it was during the Doklam/Donglang stand-off, the person in a position to choose remains PM Modi.

The only major commitment seemingly made during the meeting was a mutual agreement to uphold the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence or Panchsheel Treaty of 1954.

The five principles originally agreed between Chinese leader Mao Zedong and Jawaharlal Nehru remain noble goals, albeit goals whose spirit and letter were widely violated during this summer’s Sino-Indian dispute.

  1. Mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.
  2. Mutual non-aggression.
  3. Mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs.
  4. Equality and cooperation for mutual benefit.
  5. Peaceful co-existence.

While Indian media was whipped up into a kind of frenzy when the official 2017 BRICS Summit named several Pakistan based groups as terrorist organisations. The reality is, this small portion of the Declaration merely restated a known position of the United Nations. The fact that President Xi refused to discuss this matter with Modi during direct talks, underscores the fact that China did not see these rather mundane statements in the way the Indian media did. It was certainly not the “diplomatic victory”, that many in India believed it to be.

In many ways, the fact that the Xi-Modi meeting was a non-starter is not entirely surprising. Prior to the infamous Trump-Putin meeting at the Hamburg G20 summit, both sides openly expressed their willingness to get down to business with the other. No such enthusiasm exists between Xi and Modi.

In spite of this, as countries, China and India have much more to offer one another in terms of economic advantages vis-a-vis Russia and the US and while the disputes between Washington and Moscow will almost certainly not lead to nuclear war, the disputes between India and China came very close to leading to another border war, one which was ultimately prevented by China’s de-facto restraint on the issue.

As I wrote prior to the summit,



The situation between China and India could not be more different.














Because of the pressing necessity of China and India resolving lingering areas of disagreement, particularly on border issues, it is crucial for the matter to be addressed by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

As a body which deals primarily with security and geo-political relations, the SCO is in any case, a more suitable forum for such dialogue than the BRICS ever was as BRICS summits are primarily concerned with economic, monetary and commercial issues.

China has repeatedly stressed it is not only ready but is eager for discussions with India. It is now up to India to at least show a fraction of this readiness in order to help stabilise a situation which in the long term could damage India far more than China.

Narendra Modi is currently in Myanmar where his statements on the developing situation with the Rohingya people may well be more illustrative of his real views on China’s position than his tepid remarks at the BRICS summit.


What do you think?

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Modi’s government represents a very backward chauvinistic religion-bound policy… India has to decide whether it wants to enter the modern world or remain submerged in a sea of crushing poverty, class divides and religious intolerence… It is too soon to know whether India can or wishes to pull itself out of this quagmire… But it is not only China’s problem… The hundreds of millions of poverty-stricken Indians are the problem of the whole world… Except fot the United States and Israel who are manipulating India for their own interests of containing China (and Russia) and creating an anti Muslim alliance….… Read more »


No surprise from the worm that is modi. How he achieved political power in India is all the proof one really needs to know he is a worm.

VeeNarian (Yerevan)
VeeNarian (Yerevan)

A real opportunity has been missed by both sides. China must understand that the destructive potential of India as a pawn of the US/EU/NATO gang is greater then its creative potential to China, and this exactly how the West sees India. Even so, the creative potential of China-India is truly staggering. Can China really afford India being used as a battering ram by the US/EU/NATO gang? As for India, the Hindu FAKE supremacists (they always bow down to their US/UK/EU/NATO/IMF masters), must realize that China is already a world superpower without India, but India will NEVER be a superpower without… Read more »


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