P. S. Suryanarayana
Two rare dramatic episodes have complicated India’s engagement with China in the context of “Operation Sindoori.” Although Delhi launched the operation as a counter-terror military strike on select Pakistani targets on the night of May 6/7, 2025, Islamabad responded by attacking military and civilian targets in India. With that, Islamabad projected a narrative of a renewed India-Pakistan military conflict—the first major bilateral clash in over two decades.
In the process, there were two rare episodes of relevance to India-China ties. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in Beijing on June 23 that “some positive developments” were evident in India’s engagement with China since their leaders met in October 2024. In India, though, China’s support for Pakistan during “Operation Sindoori,” paused at this writing, is an issue that Beijing ignores or glosses over.
Arguably, Chinese Ambassador Jiang Zaidong’s presence at the Pakistani Foreign Ministry on the night of May 6/7, 2025, signified Beijing’s strategic opposition to India’s counter-terror operations against Pakistan. In that rare episode of Sino-Indian interest, Jiang and Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar “agreed to maintain close coordination and communication across all relevant areas.”
Reinforcing this Sino-Pakistani closeness is Wang Yi’s silence on India’s counter-terror attack when he held talks with National Security Advisor Ajit Doval in Beijing on June 23. Wang Yi’s silence was evident from the Chinese readout on his meeting with Doval. In contrast, the Indian press release on the same meeting said Doval “emphasised the need to counter terrorism in all its forms and manifestations to maintain overall peace and stability in the region.” In Delhi’s sense of descriptive propriety in this crisis, “the region” is a code for India’s neighbourhood consisting of Pakistan and China in particular.
Amazingly, in the second rare episode of Sino-Indian interest, Pakistan’s Army Chief, Field Marshal (FM) Asim Munir, was hosted by United States President Donald Trump at the White House on June 18. Metaphorically, FM Munir’s pro-US (or pro-Trump) ‘diplomacy’ may turn out to be just a storm in Beijing’s teacup—if (and only if) Pakistan could prove its loyalty to China again after having sought America’s help to end India’s “Operation Sindoori.”
With an eye on Pakistan’s internal affairs, FM Munir may have made a beeline for the White House to consign conventional civilian diplomacy to the scrapheap of statecraft. However, the Trump-Munir meeting marked almost a tectonic shift in geopolitical optics, which was (and still is, at this writing) bad news for both India and China.
At first glance, the Pakistani military exercised strategic autonomy by deploying Chinese arms against India (not effectively) and thereafter seeking US intervention to gain a truce with Delhi—Washington’s partner (not ally) in the China-focused Quad. (The Quad comprises the US, Japan, India, and Australia.) After the Trump-Munir talks, Islamabad sought to make amends for the potential anti-China implications of that meeting in the White House. As the Iran nuclear issue had figured in that meeting, Pakistan began supporting China in opposing Trump’s extraordinary military raids over three nuclear sites in Islamic Iran on June 22.
Sino-Pakistani Camaraderie for a While
Before FM Munir played his US card against India and China, Pakistan’s civilian leadership played a China card against Delhi. Beijing, too, willingly displayed conflict-time camaraderie with Pakistan on May 6/7.
Despite the long-standing Sino-Pakistani “all-weather” strategic partnership (not alliance), it was a travesty of diplomacy that a Chinese ambassador should have been, in person, privy to Islamabad’s response to Delhi’s “Operation Sindoori” during the night of May 6/7. Beijing was well aware that India had, only a few hours earlier, launched its military action in retaliation for the gruesome terrorist attack at Pahalgam on April 22.
A Pakistani group had claimed credit for that act of terrorism. Delhi conceptualised, in later terminologies, a “new normal” of regarding anti-India terrorism emanating from Pakistan as “war itself” (“not proxy war”) against India’s ethos and interests. Significantly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi conveyed this new Indian position to Trump when he called Modi a few hours before hosting FM Munir at the White House.
During the night of May 6/7, India acted in terms of its then-evolving new strategic framework in dealing with Pakistan. In a stealth operation, the Indian military launched its “new age warfare” on the terrorists and their infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (POK: Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Jammu and Kashmir in Pakistani terminology). This time, the Indian warplanes did not cross the India-Pakistan Line of Control, unlike in 2019 when Delhi carried out an airstrike, undetected, on a terrorist structure at Balakot inside Pakistan. The Balakot episode had woken up China to the acute vulnerabilities of Pakistani airspace to India’s growing prowess.
Apparently due to the lingering implications of the Balakot episode, the Chinese Foreign Ministry made a categorical statement on May 7, 2025, expressing “regret” over Delhi’s counter-terror military action during the previous night. Subsequently, glossing over this anomalous Chinese reaction to the counter-terror trend of the present times, Dar tried to portray Beijing as playing a balancing role in India-Pakistan affairs. However, Beijing did not play any mediatory role to defuse the Pakistan-India conflict in May.
With India vividly succeeding in its initial counter-terror military methods in May 2025, Pakistan retaliated and downed at least one, perhaps a couple more, of Indian warplanes that had just then targeted the terrorist networks in Pakistan and POK. Pakistan’s military and civilian publicity czars were soon rapturous in song and dance, even claiming to have inflicted “defeat” on India.
This turned out to be unreal, as evident in FM Munir’s subsequent praising of Trump for his purported diplomacy of ending this conflict on May 10 (when India was very much on top). However, Delhi was categorical that it had only paused—not ended—this conflict by agreeing to Rawalpindi’s “request” for a ceasefire. Trump really played no role in stopping, as in his claim, a potential India-Pakistan nuclear war, Delhi underscored. (Rawalpindi is Pakistan’s military ‘bastion.’)
Chinese Cheers and a Paradox
Regardless of many complexities in the current India-Pakistan-China triangular equations, Islamabad’s publicity czars hit the fast track. They projected, in global strategic terms, the Chinese Ambassador’s “happiness” while being present in Islamabad’s ‘war room’ in the pre-dawn hours of May 7, 2025. Although Pakistan’s real ‘war room’ was in Rawalpindi, the foreign ministry’s office in Islamabad was the metaphoric version.
On the same day, Dar conveyed the news about Jiang to his country’s parliament. Dar’s version was along these lines: Jiang and his delegation were informed that their country’s fighter jets — J-10C “Vigorous Dragons,” equipped with the state-of-the-art Chinese PL-15E missiles — had enabled Pakistan to pull a trick of destroying a few of India’s foreign-origin warplanes.
This version, true or otherwise, was the gloss that Islamabad put on the Chinese envoy’s in-person association with Pakistan in its war against India at a time when Beijing was actually seeking to improve its own ties with Delhi (“Is China Pivoting Towards India?” Border Affairs, April-June 2025).
Unsurprising, therefore, was the Chinese Government’s refusal to confirm or contradict Dar’s version of Jiang’s nocturnal presence in the Pakistani ‘war room’ for a show of solidarity with Pakistan in its dark hour. Unspoken but evident, therefore, was Beijing’s discomfort over Pakistan’s indiscretion of projecting China as a comrade-in-arms against India’s arguably legitimate war on terror.
Beijing and Islamabad missed a supreme irony. Clear as daylight, India was pursuing its policy of “zero tolerance of terrorism” on that fateful night in May. However, it could be further argued, China and Pakistan messaged their anomalous but collective zero-tolerance of counter-terror strategies insofar as India pursued them.
A policy of “zero tolerance of terrorism” had already become an internationally recognised pursuit for any terror-hit country since the United States launched its “war on terror” in 2001. So, Islamabad tried to camouflage the Sino-Pakistani opposition to India’s counter-terror military action that lasted four days in May 2025.
Islamabad did so by shifting the international focus away from India’s counter-terrorism and towards claims that the Chinese warplanes and missiles (deployed by Pakistan) had stood the test of an actual combat situation. This was said to have been the first in-combat test for the advanced Chinese military hardware. Consequently, in today’s interconnected world, the Chinese social media activists hit an overdrive of nationalist fervour and celebration.
For those Chinese nationalists, the issue was not the one-sided narrative of Pakistani success in using Chinese hardware and downing a couple of Indian warplanes. What mattered to those enthusiasts was the perception of Chinese hardware striking at least one French-made warplane that India was flying — the presumed superiority of Chinese mil-tech capabilities over the hitherto unassailable Western mil-tech power.
The Reality as It Emerged
The Chinese defence officials, however, did not endorse their compatriots’ chorus in the social media about the invincibility of China vis-à-vis the West in the dynamic mil-tech domain. There was a reason why Beijing’s officialdom remained circumspect while answering queries about this aspect on May 29.
Urging Pakistan as well as India to “avoid complicating the situation” for Chinese interests, a defence official said, “China will continue to play a constructive role [sic] in maintaining regional peace and stability.”
Sino-sceptics have long regarded the claims of China’s “constructive role” with reference to India as Beijing’s constant efforts to beef up Pakistan’s military capabilities. The sceptics now expect China to further prepare its proxy, Pakistan, for more fights—or stable deterrence—with India. The reason for such informed speculation follows.
Delhi had said categorically on May 14 that the Indian Air Force actually “bypassed and jammed Pakistan’s Chinese-supplied air defence systems.” As a result, Modi later informed Trump, on June 17, that Pakistan’s key “military airbases were rendered inoperable” due to India’s “strong and decisive response” to the escalatory moves by Islamabad. Modi further emphasised that India agreed to Islamabad’s “request” for a ceasefire. It was not officially reported whether Modi told Trump about India’s calculations in stopping while on a winning track.
It is also unclear if FM Munir took Beijing into confidence before meeting Trump at a time when the Sino-American engagement itself was unsettled. Unexplained, too, in Pakistani circles is whether the Chinese envoy was privy to the Munir-Trump mutual overtures before the two met for whatever ultimate objectives.
The evident reality, though, was summed up by different observers in various ways. Frédéric Grare, a long-time expert on Asian strategic affairs, wrote on June 16, a day before Trump’s call to Modi, as follows:
“The strategic outcome of the conflict appears to favour India.”
Viewing the conflict, in recess while this is written, as “a war with no clear winner,” he noted:
“Although it experienced some losses in the early phase of the conflict, India subsequently neutralised Pakistan’s air defence and radar systems and was able to strike deep into Pakistani territory. More importantly, India demonstrated that it would no longer be intimidated by [Pakistan’s] nuclear threats.”
Trump and the China-India-Pakistan Triangle
The real or fanciful fear of an India-Pakistan nuclear war, with global implications, animated Trump as he hosted FM Munir on June 18. This was the raison d’être Trump cited, despite Indian assertions that there was no credible signalling of a likely nuclear strike from the Pakistani military during the May conflict (as different from nuclear sabre-rattling in Pakistan’s political circles).
Furthermore, India’s declared policy of “no-first-use of nuclear weapons” did not figure in Trump’s playbook. In the process, he equated India with Pakistan; the latter makes much of its policy option of a first-use of nuclear weapons against India. In all this Pakistani strategic showbiz, Beijing does not encourage its “all-weather partner” to copy the Chinese mantra of “no-first-use of nuclear weapons,” including towards India.
It is widely known that China had tutored and shepherded Pakistan to become a nuclear-weapon state outside the framework of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a discriminatory piece of “international law” which India would not accede to. Interestingly, Chinese diplomats have told this author that Beijing’s perceived nuclear-arms assistance to Pakistan had really taken place before 1992 when China actually signed the NPT. While this might be substantially true of the basic Sino-Pakistani nuclear networking, Beijing may still be aiding Rawalpindi in the missiles domain. For now, China is outside the framework of the Missile Technology Control Regime, and this may suit Rawalpindi’s interests.
Another key aspect in the wake of the Trump-Munir meeting is whether Pakistan’s military establishment would once again seek to ride two horses—China and the US. During the now-bygone US-Soviet Cold War, Pakistan first sided with the US, as its military ally, against China before gravitating towards Beijing as well and playing a facilitatory role for the Sino-American rapprochement in the early 1970s.
Around mid-2025, as both China and the US appeared to value their respective perceptions of Pakistan’s strategic relevance, Delhi’s ties with Beijing might get caught in this potential web. (Courtesy: Border Affairs)
*The writer is Senior Fellow of the Society for Indian Ocean Studies (SIOS), New Delhi, and Adjunct Senior Fellow with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RS1S), Singapore. His books include `Smart Diplomacy: Exploring China-India Synergy’ (USA: World Century, 2016),
