The relationship between India and China has been described by strategists as "neither friends nor enemies" — a formulation accurate enough to be almost meaningless, since the same phrase could describe the relationship between most neighboring great powers at most points in history. What makes the India-China relationship specifically interesting is the combination of its scale, its complexity, and the persistent gap between the economic logic that pushes the two countries toward engagement and the territorial and strategic logic that pushes them toward competition.

The 1962 war remains the defining event in the relationship's emotional history — India's unexpected defeat, the territory lost in what the Indian understanding describes as a betrayal, the national humiliation that shaped decades of Indian strategic thinking. China's understanding of the same events is different in important ways; the divergence in historical narratives is itself a source of ongoing friction.

The boundary disputes that triggered the 1962 war remain formally unresolved in 2010. India and China have signed agreements on maintaining peace and tranquility along the border, on military confidence-building measures, on the procedures for handling incidents when they occur. These agreements have worked in the sense that there has been no armed conflict since 1962. They have not worked in the sense that the boundary has not been settled.

The economic relationship has grown dramatically since the 1980s, driven by China's manufacturing capacity and India's appetite for cheap consumer goods and industrial inputs. The trade balance is heavily in China's favor, a source of ongoing friction in India's trade policy debates. Both countries recognize that their economic relationship constrains the strategic competition; neither has figured out how to translate this mutual recognition into a stable political framework.

The relationship lives in the productive tension between these two logics — economic interdependence on one axis, strategic competition on another — with no resolution in sight and no obvious mechanism for producing one.