In mid-October, Guo Guangchang, founder of Fosun, flew to Mumbai in his private plane to attend the dinner celebrating the Chinese conglomerate’s purchase of Indian pharma company Gland. For many weeks, approval for the transaction had been held up — hostage to the border dispute between India and China in Doklam. The situation was finally resolved not because Delhi signed off but because Gland’s founder, PVN Raju, agreed to sell a smaller portion of his holdings, bringing the transfer below the 74 per cent threshold that triggered the need to secure the government’s blessing. Over mao-tai, (which the Fosun people claimed cost $1,000 a bottle), Mr Guo, clad in jeans and a T-shirt, said he hoped to do many more deals in India, according to several attendees. Fosun has already joined the many Chinese companies backing tech start-ups in the country. 

The Fosun deal is a pointer to how complicated India’s relationship with China has become. Swaths of the Indian economy are dependent on Chinese products. If solar energy is now competitive with polluting thermal power plants, owned by corporates such as Reliance and Tata, it is in large part because about 90 per cent of the solar panels come from China. The telecoms industry in India is thriving on cell phones that are made in China, assembled in India; Reliance Jio phones are largely sourced from Chinese maker ZTE. Moreover, some of India’s best-known start-ups, such as Paytm and Flipkart, rely on Chinese capital. 

Business and government do not always look on China in the same way. The tensions over the disputed border area at Doklam have subsided at least temporarily. But China has few friends in Delhi. Most Indian politicians remain convinced that it is a political, economic and financial bully that wishes to impinge on India’s sovereignty and to solve its excess capacity issues at India’s expense.