Top Singaporean expert warns: 'Asia will be in trouble if India and China don't get along'

Former Singaporean diplomat and public intellectual Kishore Mahbubani has said that Asia's future stability hinges on how India and China manage their complex relationship. Speaking at a public event, Mahbubani noted that while India remains deeply conscious of its 1962 border war with China, most Chinese are unaware of it — a dynamic that he called "asymmetrical." He also urged young people in both countries to look beyond recent tensions and focus on the region's long history of peaceful coexistence.

"The questions on China and India are much more difficult to answer because I don't know how many of you know this but the relationship between China and India is actually quite complicated. Most Chinese are not aware there was a border war fought between China and India in 1962. Most Indians are aware of this. So there is a certain obsession in India about China but you don't have the obsession in China over India. It's an asymmetrical relationship," he said. 

"But at the same time, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said the world is big enough for both China and India to grow. The future of Asia will depend on one big question - can China and India get along? Because these are the two biggest societies. China 1.4 billion, India 1.3 billion. By 2050, India's population will be bigger. So the two most populous countries, China and India, don't get along, then Asia is in trouble,” said Mahbubani, who has authored several books including - 'Has China Won?'

He called on the youth to take a broader view: "So it's very important that the young people of India and China make a huge effort to overcome the recent untroubled history and remember that before the period of western colonial rule when the Asian countries lived side by side, you had 2,000 years of peace between China and India. China and India never fought a war for 2,000 years. So that long history is far more important when you look ahead and we should not be bothered about what happened in the last 50 years."

"There is a certain obsession in India about China," Mahbubani observed, "but we should remember that for 2,000 years, these countries coexisted peacefully. That’s the legacy we must focus on."

Mahbubani's comments come amid renewed efforts to revive diplomatic engagement between the two Asian giants. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently said Moscow was keen to restart the Russia-India-China (RIC) dialogue, which had been frozen since the Galwan clashes in 2020. Lavrov noted that "an understanding has been reached between India and China on how to ease the situation on the border" and said "the time has come for the revival of this RIC troika."

Lavrov also claimed NATO was trying to pull India into anti-China alignments, a view he said Indian leaders were "well aware of," based on confidential conversations. 

Despite the tentative diplomatic thaw — including a bilateral meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping at the 2024 BRICS Summit — strategic trust remains low. One key reason is China's deepening partnership with Pakistan.

Former Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale recently explained that Beijing has long viewed Islamabad as a "strategic asset." He outlined four reasons behind China's enduring support: to counterbalance India, access the Arabian Sea, keep Pakistan outside the US military sphere, and manage extremism near its border regions.