“Communist China will never leave democratic India alone,” says Maura Moynihan, who as the daughter of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan lived in India when he was ambassador there in the 1970s.

“The Chinese are afraid of the Indians surpassing them and will do just about anything to take them down,” she told me in late May. “They’re obsessed with India.”

Obsessed the Chinese are. Moynihan, who has lived in India off and on since her father’s tour in New Delhi, points out that Chinese leaders think of everything as they go about assaulting the Indian state. “Beijing even has the gall to assign Chinese names to places in Arunachal Pradesh,” she said.[1]

In May, China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs renamed 27 places—mountains, mountain passes, rivers, residential areas, and a lake—in Arunachal Pradesh, an Indian border state. According to Kalpit Mankikar of the India-based Observer Research Foundation, this is the fifth time the Chinese have engaged in renaming places in Arunachal.[2] Beijing, to bolster its expansive territorial claim, calls that Indian state “Zangnan” or South Tibet.

New Delhi has called the renaming campaign “vain and preposterous.”[3]  

In addition to “cartographic aggression” against India, China has engaged in real aggression. Beginning in early May 2020, Chinese forces advanced south of the Line of Actual Control, the temporary border between the two giants, principally in three areas in Ladakh, high in the Himalayas. The boundary is not well-defined, and for years Chinese troops trespassed into Indian-controlled territory, especially after Xi Jinping became the Communist Party’s general secretary in November 2012.

The May incursions took New Delhi by surprise. China also shook India on the following June 15 in the Galwan Valley, the northernmost of the three areas of incursion. In a surprise attack, Chinese troops killed 20 Indian soldiers. It was the first deadly confrontation between the two countries in 45 years.

The 20 deaths galvanized India, which in retaliation immediately cancelled major Chinese contracts and banned Chinese apps, including TikTok, among other actions.

Beijing and New Delhi have tried to settle their disputed border peacefully—there have been more than 50 rounds of talks in various “mechanisms”—but they are no closer to settling disputes that led them to a border war in 1962. Xi Jinping believes his China is on the rise and evidently feels no need to compromise. 

India, which is definitely on an upward trajectory, has tried to maintain cordial ties, often following former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s “Hindi-Chini bhai bhai” slogan promoting the notion that the two Asian nations are brothers. Beijing, for its part, has been under no such delusion and has played a hard game.

The Chinese, among other things, have been trying to tear India into pieces. Zhan Lue, a strategist connected to China’s Ministry of National Defense, said as far back as 2009 that Beijing should try to break up India into as many as 30 states. Zhan’s article was given wide circulation inside China.[4]

China has for decades used Pakistan to assault India. Beijing, for instance, has supported Islamabad’s multi-decade campaign of terror. The militants attacking Mumbai hotels in November 2008 used Chinese equipment—the distinctively blue Type 86 grenades, manufactured by China’s state-owned Norinco, which has continually supplied parties working with militants inside India. China has given Pakistan most of the ordinance that its notorious Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, better known as ISI, provided to terrorist groups. Almost all the sophisticated communications equipment used by terrorists in India, especially Kashmir, is Chinese-made and was routed through the Pakistani army. Training the Chinese give to Pakistani personnel is, with Beijing’s knowledge, leached to terrorists.[5]

The terror campaign continues to today. On April 22, gunmen killed 26, mostly Hindu tourists, at Pahalgam in Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan also claims that territory. New Delhi blames Islamabad for harboring the militants who staged the attack. Pakistan denies involvement.

The Resistance Front initially claimed responsibility for the attack. TRF, as the group is commonly known, is a branch of Lashkar-e-Taiba, LeT for short. Both TRF and LeT are based in Pakistan, and India alleges that Islamabad harbors both.[6]

Pakistan harbors those militants, and China protects them. Beijing uses its permanent perch on the U.N. Security Council to routinely block attempts to sanction Pakistani-based militants. For instance, Chinese diplomats have repeatedly frustrated efforts to designate TRF in the last few years.[7]

New Delhi, as a result of China’s protection of militants, has had to take matters into its own hands. A day after the Pahalgam attack, India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, the first time that the pact had been put on hold.

The treaty, “a rare beacon of cooperation between India and Pakistan,”[8] allocates waters in the Indus basin. India got control of the eastern rivers of Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej. Pakistan controls western rivers, the Chenab, the Indus, and Jhelum. The treaty is generous to Pakistan, allocating about 70% of the total water carried by the Indus River System to it.

Water stoppages pose a dire threat to Pakistan: Rivers covered by the treaty provide almost 80% of the country’s drinking and irrigation water. “Water is a vital national interest of Pakistan, a lifeline for its 240 million people and its availability will be safeguarded at all costs,” a Pakistani foreign ministry spokesperson said on April 25.[9]

“Pakistan has violated the spirit of the treaty by inflicting three wars and thousands of terror attacks on India,” declared Parvathaneni Harish, India’s Permanent Representative to the U.N., on May 23 at a Security Council Arria-formula meeting titled “Protecting Water in Armed Conflict—Protecting Civilian Lives.”

“It is against this backdrop that India has finally announced that the treaty will be in abeyance until Pakistan, which is a global epicenter of terror, credibly and irrevocably ends its support for cross-border terrorism,” Harish announced. “It is clear that it is Pakistan which remains in violation.”[10]

By India’s count, Pakistani terror attacks have taken more than 20,000 Indian lives in the past four decades.[11]

Harish’s remarks reveal India’s new hardline stance. “New Delhi has made it clear: Dialogue with Islamabad will now be limited to one agenda—ending terrorism and ensuring the return of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir,” Indian media outlet NDTV reported.[12]

“Water and blood cannot flow together,” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, referring to the suspension of the Indus treaty. “Terror and talks cannot happen at the same time. Terror and trade cannot happen simultaneously.”[13]

And India now sees war as an option. The India military launched Operation Sindoor on May 7 against known terrorist sites in Pakistan, and for four days the two neighbors hit each other with air, drone, and missile strikes.

India’s targeting decisions were especially bold. Its strikes, reports Georgetown University’s Aqil Shah writing in Foreign Affairs in May, “ranged far beyond Pakistani-administered Kashmir into Punjab, Pakistan’s heartland, eventually hitting not just the facilities of militant groups but also military targets, including airbases.” Previously, Shah notes, “fighting has been mostly confined to the border region around the disputed territory of Kashmir.”[14]

Of particular concern, Indian strikes targeted two installations linked to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal: the Nur Khan airbase, close to the country’s nuclear-command headquarters, and the Mushaf airbase, near a nuclear storage site.

After these airstrikes, Pakistan’s Shehbaz Sharif, the prime minister, called an emergency meeting of the National Command Authority, which has the authority to approve the use of nuclear weapons. This, Shah wrote, sent a “calculated message to India—and everybody else.”[15]

“These Indian attacks on the airbases could have been ones for the history books,” Blaine Holt, a retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general, told me. “This particular inferno could have gone nuclear.”[16]

As could the next one. “This could well overshadow any previous, containable conflict between India and Pakistan,” writes Gregory Copley, the president of the International Strategic Studies Association and editor-in-chief of Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, on the next war. “It could be ‘the big one.’”[17]

Georgetown’s Shah is thinking along the same lines. His piece, after all, is titled “The Next War Between India and Pakistan.”[18]

The Trump administration, which had expressed little interest in the fighting before India struck the Pakistani airbases, rushed to broker a ceasefire, which has held so far. Yet the situation remains volatile. For one thing, Modi has said Operation Sindoor is not yet over.[19]

For its part, Pakistan is also in a warlike mood. Ishaq Dar, Pakistan’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister, told CNN on May 12 that the ceasefire could fall apart “if the water issue is not resolved.”[20]  

Nobody thinks India and Pakistan are going to resolve either the water or more fundamental issues anytime soon. Most analysts believe that Pakistan’s forces got the better of India in the four days of fighting. Whether true or not—it’s still too early to make definitive assessments—Pakistan’s army came out ahead at home. “Rather than deterring its rival, India precipitated a retaliation that ended up burnishing the Pakistani military’s reputation and boosting its domestic popularity,” writes Georgetown’s Shah.[21]

The India-Pakistan conflict could envelop China as well. Beijing, for instance, could intervene by blocking water flows into India. The headwaters of the Indus are in China, and so are those of the Brahmaputra.

China is unlikely to block Indus waters as that would harm Pakistan as well, but the Brahmaputra is a different story. That river, known in China as the Yarlung Zangbo, flows across the Chinese border into Arunachal Pradesh and then into Bangladesh before emptying into the Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean. China has just started constructing the world’s largest hydropower dam, sited on that river, near the Indian border. The new Chinese dam will be gigantic, with almost three times more installed capacity than what is now the world’s largest hydroelectric project, China’s Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.[22]

The dam on the Yarlung Zangbo will give Beijing the ability to practice “hydro-diplomacy.”[23] New Delhi has already expressed deep concern. Cleo Paskal of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told me in January that China is going ahead with this project, despite criticisms and objections, because it “is a weapon as much as it is a hydro project.”[24]

New Delhi, despite suspending the Indus treaty, currently does not have much of a weapon against Pakistan because India’s upstream dams have only limited storage capacity. The most Indian officials can do with the current infrastructure is affect the timing of water flows to Pakistan.

New Delhi’s longer-term goal is to prevent any water from leaving India, however, and the country is planning to improve its system of dams so that they do not have to release water into Pakistan. There is now a region-wide race to build and weaponize dams.

China’s water weapon against India is a powerful one, and at the moment China is a far more mighty state than the Indian one. Beijing’s advantages are decisive.

Ultimately, however, trend lines favor India. China’s economy is trapped in a deflationary spiral; India’s is surging. The Chinese people are, as a whole, despondent and either are leaving the country or opting out of society; Indians by and large are optimistic. Most fundamentally, the “relentless maker and breaker of civilizations” is working against the People’s Republic, which this decade lost its crown as the world’s most populous state to India. China by the end of this century will lose at least half its population and, according to one demographer, three-quarters of its people, ending up at 330 million from a reported 1.41 billion now.[25] India, on the other hand, has one of the most favorable demographic profiles anywhere and will continue to gain population through most of this century.

These long-term favorable trend lines may, however, prove ominous for India. Xi Jinping must be seeing a closing window of opportunity. That means the ambitious Chinese leader might be tempted to derail India’s rise with dangerous attacks, perhaps through proxy Pakistan.

New Delhi’s grand move is to turn away from former Nehru’s “non-aligned” orientation and find powerful new friends, such as the United States. The growing partnership between the world’s largest democracy and its most powerful one suggests an enormous setback for Chinese plans to destabilize New Delhi. India, in addition, is a member of the Quad, which also includes Japan, Australia, and the U.S.  

The democracies in Asia may not yet be ready to formally create an “arc of freedom” to defend themselves, but nations in the region are increasingly concerned about Beijing’s hostility and aggressiveness. Therefore, the states to China’s south and east will continue to grow closer together. Indian politicians do not want to become anyone’s pawns in an effort to contain an increasingly belligerent China, but they are beginning to find common cause with Beijing’s neighbors nonetheless. 

Ultimately, India should be able to stitch together friendships, but the issue is time. Today, Pakistan’s generals are emboldened, China’s Communists have reasons to act soon, and India’s politicians seem unprepared.

As Moynihan says, “India needs to get ready fast.”[26]

Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America and The Coming Collapse of China. Follow him on X @GordonGChang. 

[1]          Maura Moynihan, telephone interview by author, May 27, 2025.

[2]          Tenzin Pema, “India Slams China’s Renaming of Places in Its Territory as ‘Vain and Preposterous,’” Radio Free Asia, May 14, 2025, https://www.rfa.org/english/tibet/2025/05/14/china-tibet-india-arunachal-pradesh-renaming/.

[3]          Pema, “India Slams China’s Renaming of Places in Its Territory as ‘Vain and Preposterous.’”

[4]        “China Should Break Up India Into 20-30 States: Chinese Strategist,” TwoCircles.net, August 10, 2009, https://twocircles.net/2009aug10/china_should_break_india_20_30_states_chinese_strategist.html.

[5]          Gordon G. Chang, “India’s China Problem,” Forbes, August 14, 2009, https://www.forbes.com/2009/08/13/india-china-relations-population-opinions-columnists-gordon-chang.html.

[6]          “Who Are the Armed Groups India Accuses Pakistan of Backing?” Al Jazeera, May 9, 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/9/who-are-the-armed-groups-india-accuses-pakistan-of-backing.

[7]          “China Blocked India’s Request for UN Sanctions On 5 Pakistan-Based Terrorists: Report,” NDTV, May 26, 2025, https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/china-blocked-indias-request-for-un-sanctions-on-5-pakistan-based-terrorist-report-8511220.

[8]           Akshat Dwivedi, “Breaking the Dam: How India Can Abrogate the Indus Waters Treaty,” Geopoliticalmonitor.com, May 1, 2025, https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/breaking-the-dam-how-india-can-abrogate-the-indus-waters-treaty/.

[9]           Siyar Sirat, “Pakistan Calls India’s Suspension of Water Treaty ‘Act of War’ as Tensions Surge,” Amu TV, April 25, 2025, https://amu.tv/170650/.

[10]          “Pakistan Violated Spirit of Indus Waters Treaty by Inflicting Three Wars, Thousands of Terror Attacks: India Tells U.N.,” Hindu (Chennai), May 24, 2025, https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/pakistan-violated-spirit-of-indus-waters-treaty-by-inflicting-three-wars-thousands-of-terror-attacks-india-tells-un/article69613260.ece.

[11]          “Pakistan Violated Spirit of Indus Waters Treaty by Inflicting Three Wars, Thousands of Terror Attacks: India Tells U.N.”

[12]          “Pakistan ‘Pleads’ With India to Reconsider Indus Waters Treaty Suspension,” NDTV, May 15, 2025, https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/pakistan-pleads-with-india-to-reconsider-indus-waters-treaty-suspension-8417890.

[13]          “Pakistan ‘Pleads’ With India to Reconsider Indus Waters Treaty Suspension.”

[14]          Aqil Shah, “The Next War Between India and Pakistan,” Foreign Affairs, May 23, 2025, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/india/next-war-between-india-and-pakistan.

[15]          Shah, “The Next War Between India and Pakistan.”

[16]          Blaine Holt, telephone interview by author, May 26, 2025.

[17]          Gregory R. Copley, “The Big One: India Versus Pakistan, 2025 Edition,” Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, April 29, 2025.

[18]          Shah, “The Next War Between India and Pakistan.”

[19]          Aman Sharma, “Indus Treaty in the Crosshairs: Is a Water War Brewing Between India and Pakistan?” News 18 India, May 26, 2025, https://www.news18.com/india/indus-treaty-in-the-crosshairs-is-a-water-war-brewing-between-india-and-pakistan-ws-kl-9350733.html.

[20]          Nic Robertson and Sophia Saifi, “‘We Hope Sense Will Prevail,’ Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Says as Delicate India-Pakistan Ceasefire Holds,” CNN, May 13, 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/12/asia/pakistan-foreign-minister-on-ceasefire-intl-latam. For more on the possible breakdown of the ceasefire, see Stuti Mishra, “Pakistan Warns Ceasefire With India Could Collapse Over Indus Water Treaty,” Independent, May 14, 2025, https://www.the-independent.com/asia/south-asia/india-pakistan-ceasefire-indus-water-treaty-b2750789.html.

[21]          Shah, “The Next War Between India and Pakistan.”

[22]          For more about the new Chinese dam, see Gordon G. Chang, “China’s Latest Massive Dam Project Could Be a Weapon in Disguise,” Hill, January 15, 2025, https://thehill.com/opinion/international/5084161-china-dam-controversy/.

[23]         Sara Sheikh, “China’s Plan for World’s Biggest Dam a Mega-Disaster for India,” Asia Times, April 5, 2025, https://asiatimes.com/2025/04/chinas-plan-for-worlds-biggest-dam-a-mega-disaster-for-india/#.

[24]          Cleo Paskal, e-mail message to author, January 3, 2025.

[25]          Gordon G. Chang, “The End of China As a Great Power: Population Collapse,” Newsweek, December 23, 2024, https://www.newsweek.com/end-china-great-power-population-collapse-opinion-2005236.

[26]          Maura Moynihan, telephone interview by author, May 27, 2025.