China has developed an expanding network of minilateral and multilateral mechanisms across South Asia that institutionalize its regional influence while remaining separate from, but strategically linked to, its approach toward India. The architecture underscores how Beijing uses parallel diplomatic tracks to strengthen its long-term regional position, with implications for India, the United States, and other partners.
Since 2020, China has convened several minilateral and multilateral mechanisms with South Asian countries, spanning public health logistics, maritime governance, transport-corridor extension, dispute mediation, and academic diplomacy. While India, the largest of the South Asian states, is absent from these, Beijing’s two-track foreign policy with South Asia and India can be read as institutionally separate but strategically interdependent.
A Pandemic Habit Becomes a Standing Reserve
The first of these mechanisms met in July 2020, when China convened foreign ministers from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nepal. The meeting produced priority customs clearance – “green lanes” – to keep the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) supply chains moving, highlighted China’s support in providing pandemic assistance, and positioned the Belt and Road Initiative as central to the post-pandemic economic recovery of these countries.
Four months later, Beijing widened the format. The November 2020 Five-Country Vice Foreign Ministers’ Video Conference dropped Afghanistan and added Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, shifting the agenda from emergency logistics to post-pandemic recovery encompassing medical supply commitments, cross-border trade regularisation, and supply-chain risk-sharing. Beijing treated the participant list as adjustable to the problem at hand rather than fixed by a standing charter, a pattern that recurs across the architecture surveyed below and is a key aspect of minilateral gatherings.
The April 2021 Six-Country Foreign Ministers’ Conference, which included China, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka formalised the China-South Asian Countries Emergency Supplies Reserve, a collaborative medical stockpile system designed to bypass traditional international distribution channels. The July 2021 launch of a Poverty Alleviation Center in Chongqing pursued permanence by generalising China’s domestic rural development model into a shared template for partner states’ agricultural policy.
Repurposed for New Conditions: Two Trilaterals Adjust to Changed Facts on the Ground
The clearest evidence that China treats these mechanisms as adaptable instruments rather than fixed diplomatic architecture comes from two cases in which an existing trilateral format was repurposed once conditions in a third country changed materially: the China-Afghanistan-Pakistan dialogue, and the China-Bangladesh-Myanmar track.
The Afghanistan Trilateral
The June 2021 Fourth Trilateral Foreign Ministers’ Dialogue, convened just ahead of the US withdrawal from Kabul, secured explicit Afghan commitments against harbouring anti-China militant groups. At that stage, the dialogue’s function was reassurance under conditions of acute uncertainty about who would control Afghan territory. Two years later, with the Taliban consolidated in power, the same trilateral format was repurposed for a different function. The May 2023 fifth session formally agreed to extend CPEC’s physical infrastructure across the border into Afghanistan, linking Kabul to global trade routes.
From Mediation to Corridor: The China-Bangladesh-Myanmar Track
In January 2021, the Trilateral Director-General Level Meeting with Bangladesh and Myanmar positioned Beijing as mediator in the stalled Rohingya repatriation process, producing a roadmap for a phased, verified pilot programme backed by Chinese border infrastructure incentives. At that stage, China’s role in this trilateral relationship was diplomatic mediation between two other states.
Five years later, the same three-country relationship acquired a materially different function. During the Bangladeshi Prime Minister’s visit to Beijing in June 2026, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed to advance the China-Myanmar-Bangladesh Economic Corridor for greater regional connectivity, in what appears to be reviving the failed Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM) Economic Corridor without New Delhi.
Read together, the two episodes trace a shift from ad hoc, dispute-specific mediation toward a standing economic development mechanism, echoing the trajectory observed in the Afghanistan-Pakistan case.
China’s Expanding Maritime Engagement in the Indian Ocean
China’s most developed instrument for institutionalising its Indian Ocean presence is the China-Indian Ocean Region Forum (CIORF), launched in Kunming in November 2022 with nineteen rim countries and paired with a concurrent Think Tank Forum providing academic justification for expanded maritime investment. The forum’s substance evolved across three iterations, tracing a broader shift in how Beijing pursues Indian Ocean influence. The inaugural session centred on blue-economy cooperation and marine disaster prevention. The December 2023 second session pivoted away from mega-infrastructure toward more than two hundred smaller livelihood projects, including solar installation, clean water technology, and fisheries modernisation. The December 2024 third session, co-chaired with the Maldives, produced the launch of a Maritime Cooperation and Training Center, giving China a standing role in training regional coast guards and maritime officials.
This trajectory of a mega-infrastructure pledge, followed by small-scale livelihood projects, followed by a permanent training institution with a physical footprint, traces China’s Indian Ocean engagement moving from episodic investment pledges toward a standing institutional presence with a training and personnel function. The Maldives co-chairmanship remains the only instance across the mechanisms surveyed here in which a South Asian state shares formal convening authority with China.
Academic Diplomacy
China has also convened long-running think tank and cooperation forums for the region. The Tenth China-South and Southeast Asian Think Tank Forum was held in Kunming on October 11, 2025, under the theme “Joining Hands for a Shared Path to Modernization.” The forum was jointly organised by the Global South Think Tanks Alliance and the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences’ Kunming Academy of South and Southeast Asian Studies, and drew more than 200 political leaders, experts, and scholars from seventeen countries.
Eight months later, the Seventh China-South Asia Cooperation Forum (CSACF) opened in Kunming on June 11, 2026, themed “Deepen Development Partnership, Build a Community with a Shared Future for Neighboring Countries.” The forum ran two designated sub-forums alongside its main proceedings — one on people-to-people and cultural exchange, one for think tanks — organised around three thematic tracks: artificial intelligence and green development, international health cooperation, and integrated agriculture-culture-tourism development for poverty reduction. Official coverage described the CSACF as “an important institutional platform for intergovernmental dialogue and exchange between China and South Asian as well as Indian Ocean Rim countries.”
Institutional Separation, Strategic Interdependence
None of these engagements has included India. The consistency of the omission across such functionally different mechanisms encompassing health logistics, maritime engagement, trade standardisation, and academic diplomacy suggests the absence is a structural feature of how China organises regional multilateralism, not a by-product of any single mechanism’s design.
This pattern coincides with a period in which China-India relations reached their lowest point in decades, following the deadly June 2020 Galwan Valley clash in the Himalayas. One reading of China’s engagement surveyed here would treat India’s absence as simply downstream of that rupture, in which the omission reflects the state of the bilateral relationship rather than a considered choice about regional strategy.
However, India’s continued absence indicates that the omission is not merely a function of bilateral temperature at any given moment. It is more plausibly read as emblematic of a Chinese South Asia strategy that treats relations with India and relations with the smaller South Asian states as two separate, non-fungible tracks rather than a single regional policy calibrated to New Delhi. Under this reading, Beijing’s convening of health, maritime, corridor, and academic mechanisms with Colombo, Dhaka, Kathmandu, Islamabad, and Malé would be expected to continue to follow its own institutional logic largely irrespective of the state of Sino-Indian relations.
However, Chinese strategic-studies scholarship suggests this is not evidence of two unrelated tracks. For example, Zeng frames smaller-state engagement as leverage against India; Feng frames it as compatible with stable India management. Both treat engagement with the region’s smaller states as bound up with managing India, not autonomous from it.
The two tracks followed by China are therefore best read as institutionally separate but strategically interdependent; convened on distinct bureaucratic calendars, insulated from the short-term temperature of the Sino-Indian relationship, yet operating as complementary instruments of a single underlying strategic position toward New Delhi. This carries an implication beyond the China-South Asia case. Institutional separation between a rival-facing track and a smaller-state engagement track is not, on its own, evidence that a major power treats the two as strategically independent. A power may deliberately run parallel architectures on separate calendars precisely so that neither is hostage to the other’s short-term fluctuations, while both continue to serve one strategic objective.
For India and like-minded partners, taking cognisance of this strategy is only the beginning. Given the narrative- and standard-setting effects these engagements can generate, the practical task is to ensure that regional consensus is not quietly built around Beijing’s terms by default. For New Delhi, Washington, and other partners seeking to compete for influence with China, the response this architecture calls for is strengthening their institutional presence with the same consistency Beijing has successfully sustained.
