In October 2019, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Chinese leader Xi Jinping at Mamallapuram, a coastal town in southern India. Modi highlighted the port¡¯s role in ancient maritime exchanges with China. Xi described the talks as ¡°heart-to-heart.¡±
Just eight months later, in June 2020, on a frozen ridgeline in the Galwan Valley along the disputed Himalayan frontier, Indian and Chinese soldiers beat each other to death with rocks and iron rods wrapped in barbed wire.
It was the first fatal clash on the Line of Actual Control, the de facto border, since 1975. The violence punctured the mood of informal summitry and exposed it as diplomatic theater over a relationship whose underlying structure had not changed.
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