Bilateral trade between India and China in the first three months of 2022 stood at $31.96 billion, a 15.3 per cent increase compared to the corresponding period in the previous year. While India’s trade deficit with China went up to $22.23 billion touching $27.1 billion, analysts said that imports of finished goods have significantly dropped.
“However, imports of raw materials for several sectors have increased as with the rise in activities in India’s exports and manufacturing sectors,” one of them said.
Notwithstanding the border tension with China, bilateral trade between the two countries crossed a record $125.6 billion in 2021.
In 2001, it was just $1.83 billion.
“We are driven by our own priorities and interests to ensure that our manufacturers and other businesses continue seamlessly. There has never been any intention to disrupt trade but at the same time, we will boost our manufacturing and capacity purely for our benefit, it has nothing to do with what other countries are doing,” an analyst told India Narrative.
"The continuous rise in bilateral trade showed the complementarity of two major developing economies despite tension from global geopolitical changes,” Beijing based newspaper Global Times quoted Liu Zongyi, secretary-general of the Research Center for China-South Asia Cooperation at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, as saying.
