The talks this week in Beijing between Indian and Chinese officials, which went in round 25, were as they always were – rhetorical flourishes, new mechanisms, studious silence on the hot topic that really got them into trouble in the first place the disputed line. National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi faced each other for a candid talk and came up with a list of eight points on paper that show what they consider progress. The two Special Representatives had a candid and in-depth exchange of views on the boundary question and reached consensus on eight points. Two of these do not involve diplomacy, but rather hardware two new senior military commander meeting spots, two new hotlines between army posts in the Eastern and Middle sections of the country.Try to visualize this: a string of telephone wires passing through one of the most militarized and least lived on places on earth to prevent a shouting match at 14,000 feet from escalating to something more.

This is important as the previous failure occurred in 2020 at Galwan, where 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese were killed in 2020 due to the absence of a working hotline to defuse the situation. The Eastern Sector, which passes through Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim, and the Middle Sector, which traverses Himachal and Uttarakhand, are the areas that were not covered by the communication net that was established after 2020 when the government had already had six commander-level hotlines in eastern Ladakh. This is not new architecture, it's a patch job on the issues that both military teams have known for years but now agree to address and that involves the 220km Sikkim stretch and the 545km frontier in Himachal-Uttarakhand and the issues that could be resolved in an ‘early harvest'. It's a jargon term meaning the easiest to address first and the most contentious largely in Arunachal Pradesh and in Aksai Chin for another decade.

All of this is not occurring on its own. The optics behind Doval and Wang shaking hands in Beijing are entirely unconnected with Bhutan and Tawang, and have much more to do with Washington. A fragile truce has been struck, but India is still in shock from the high American tariffs imposed as it continues to buy Russian oil. Both capitals have surreptitiously decided that to hedge against an erratic U.S. trade stance is to keep the other door open, even if the border is cold. It is the truthful interpretation behind the return of direct flights into the sky after five years pandemic shutdown, why India resumed tourist visas to the Chinese nationals over the summer and why three border trading zones have been opened after five years of a freeze.

The economics of this thaw are skewed to the point of explaining why it is that India's diplomats are diligently inking these communiqués, while their enthusiasm is dampened. India's trade deficit with China has been steadily rising from around forty-four billion dollars in the pandemic year to approximately one hundred billion dollars in the latest complete financial year, as estimates by think-tanks have predicted that the deficit could be even bigger this calendar year. Almost 80% of the imports that India makes from China are in four product categories electronics, machinery, organic chemicals and plastics, exactly what Indian manufacturing doesn't have for immediate replacement at volume, whether it is active pharmaceutical ingredients or rare earth magnets for electric motors and defence equipment. India continues to restrict its re-exports to raw materials such as castor oil and iron ore to China. That imbalance is the unsaid underlying message each time the two governments declare yet another round of trade facilitation: normalisation on the Beijing side tends to further aggravate the dependency that New Delhi is trying to diminish.In four years, the gap has more than doubled and it has been continuing to widen despite the chilly diplomatic climate.

The pressure lurk beneath all those positive headlines from Beijing this week. This hotline announcement will be advertised correctly as a real risk reduction strategy more channels means more opportunities to prevent a patrol-level fight from getting out of hand. However, it would be wrong to see it as an indication that the fundamental issue is closer to being resolved. The framework talks remain bound to a political parameters agreement of 2005 that has over 20 years of discussions but little substantive actual delimitation on the ground. The small task of the expert groups, which will undertake the boundary and border-management tasks, is to agree on their own terms of reference, a testimony to the fact that even the process of discussion of a process is still being developed. The next full-fledged Special Representative talks won't occur until 2027 in India, providing both governments with about a year and a half to determine if hotlines and reopened trade posts mean more than a temporary truce.