China’s New Trilaterals

China has for a decade plus, run its grand strategic project of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and more recently, its extensions in the form of the Global Security Initiative and Global Civilization Initiative. It has also put in several decades driving regional multilateral organizations such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Over this period, Beijing has run up against natural inertia in some of these projects and so has decided to innovate yet again by creating new and smaller groupings with the potential for sharper political and security agendas.

Two trilaterals in India’s neighbourhood stand out. In May, barely days after India and Pakistan had reached an uneasy pause in hostilities, the Chinese organized a trilateral meeting with the foreign ministers of Pakistan and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in Beijing.[1] Less than a month later, Beijing was again at it organizing the inaugural meeting of the Bangladesh-China-Pakistan trilateral mechanism in Kunming China.[2]

How do we understand China’s motivations? And what must India do?

Context Matters

The context is important. After the initial euphoria of the takeover of Kabul by the Taliban – backed by the Pakistani security establishment for decades – Islamabad and Rawalpindi soon ran up against the Pashtun nationalism that also undergirds the Taliban’s Islamist beliefs. As a result, tensions have been frequent along the Pak-Afghan border and the regime in Kabul has also been accused of supporting insurgents in Pakistani territory.[3] China has had its own concerns with the presence of Uyghur insurgents in Taliban-controlled territory[4] while the latter for their part have been unhappy at the slow progress of China’s investments and development projects.[5]

The Pakistan-China relationship, meanwhile, is a longstanding one but it is one in which a fairly stable politico-military relationship has been complicated over the past decade by issues with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and the safety of Chinese workers in the country. Sino-Pak military collusion as seen during Operation Sindoor was perhaps only a matter of time but tensions in their relationship probably gave a fillip to such cooperation as a way of getting back to the fundamentals of the relationship between the two countries, namely, their anti-India plank.

Given, its increasing concerns over New Delhi’s leaning towards the West, it is important, therefore, for Beijing to bolster Pakistan as a proxy against India. And peace, or at least stable relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan, is part of this process. Given their

[1] https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjbzhd/202505/t20250521_11629994.html

[2] https://x.com/ForeignOfficePk/status/1936001680518021212

[3] https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-global/pakistans-taliban-problem-on-either-side-of-afghan-border-9229980/

[4] https://www.orfonline.org/research/china-and-afghanistan-s-jousting-over-the-wakhan-corridor

[5] https://www.stimson.org/2025/chinas-unenthusiastic-economic-engagement-with-taliban-led-afghanistan/

difficult international status and straitened economic circumstances, neither Pakistan nor Afghanistan are in a position to turn down Chinese suggestions in this regard.

Bangladesh, meanwhile, is at a particularly sensitive time with its present caretaker government under both internal and external pressure to ensure the conduct of parliamentary elections in a timely manner. One of the objectives of this government appears to be to walk back from the perceived close alignment with India of the previous Sheikh Hasina regime. To this end, it has undertaken a series of domestic policy measures that have created an opening for Pakistan and for China to expand not just their individual bilateral ties but to think of a trilateral formulation.

Such a format potentially eases the normalization of Pakistan-Bangladesh ties given its history, offers Dhaka cover for a more expansive foreign policy independent of India and allows Beijing smoother ingress into India’s immediate neighbourhood.

China’s Motivations

Clearly, these trilaterals with China as the organizing power are meant to resolve differences between countries that have a history of antagonism not just with India but also with each other in the expectation that Beijing can strengthen its balancing against Indian influence in South Asia. At the same time, the trilateral format also offers scope to be seen as more than about targeting another country with potential for discussions on economic and people-to-people engagements. 

Indeed, one could argue that these new trilaterals are an extension of China’s BRI and other global initiatives and part of attempts China is making to play a still greater economic role and to build alternatives to the moribund SAARC and the India-driven BIMSTEC.

Besides the political and economic potential, there is also the ideological aspect. As Chinese competition with the liberal global order becomes entrenched, it needs partners and allies across the world, not least in its own neighbourhood, that represent in their political systems alternatives to Western models of governance or object to Western or Indian intervention. While China has so far claimed each country has the right to develop its own model of politics and economic development, in practice it does promote its domestic thinking abroad in the form of Xi Jinping Thought and ‘Chinese wisdom’.

How should India respond?

Note that China has not yet created a quadrilateral involving Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. This is not the result of limits in China’s capacities or in its vision but of an understanding of the limits of the capacity of its partners and of a keen sense of timing and pace. The idea is first and foremost generate a degree of familiarity and comfort that can build up to habits of engagement and eventually cooperation.

For India then, the opportunity lies in these natural contradictions between the countries that China is trying to bring together just as China is trying to take advantage of differences these countries have with India. This, however, will require mindset changes in the political and foreign policy establishment in New Delhi. As difficult as it may be, India has no choice – if it considers China the bigger strategic challenge than any of its smaller neighbours – but to move beyond its current preoccupation with Pakistani terrorism or Bangladesh’s targeting of minorities. Big nations are not diverted from their larger goals by occasional events, however, tragic. India’s inability to keep an eye on the bigger picture creates conditions for China to further exploit in India’s neighbourhood.

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Originally Published as Jabin T. Jacob. 2025. ‘China’s new trilaterals reshaping regional balance in South Asia’. Deccan Herald, 20 July.