NEW DELHI, 8 November 2003 — First-of-a-kind military exercises between China and India due next week show the Asian giants’ desire to move past decades of mistrust and could herald a more active role in South Asia for Beijing, a traditional ally of Pakistan.

The Indian and Chinese navies will hold a day of search and rescue drills Nov. 14 off the Shanghai coast — maneuvers that are militarily insignificant but deeply symbolic for countries still mending ties after a 1962 border war, analysts said.

The joint operations come after President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, India’s rival and neighbor, finished a visit to China Wednesday in which Beijing pledged to support Islamabad on territorial disputes and strengthen defense cooperation.

An Indian diplomat here said the maneuvers were another “confidence-building measure” after Atal Behari Vajpayee made the first visit by an Indian prime minister to Beijing in a decade.

Since Vajpayee’s trip in June, China and India have redoubled efforts to finally demarcate their borders including between the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and Tibet, the scene of their war.

“These issues are very complicated,” the diplomat told AFP. “But various steps are being taken and the exercises are one of them.” David Zweig, a political scientist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said rapid economic developments in China and India had prompted Beijing and Delhi to take symbolic steps at improving transparency. “Both countries recognize they are becoming very big players in the world economy. If they can settle border disputes, they know it’s a win-win situation,” he said.

Jyoti Malhotra, the diplomatic correspondent of The Indian Express newspaper, said the joint maneuvers showed Indian leaders wanted “to get over the negativity of the past”. “Forty years after this little border war we had, India had in a sense been frozen in the past with China. These moves help to break out of the box,” she said.

India soured relations with China in 1998 when it said its surprise nuclear tests — which were quickly followed by Pakistan — were due to a threat from China.

Indian leaders, who barely hide their envy at the economic successes of the only other country with over a billion people, were infuriated when then US President Bill Clinton said China could play a role defusing a nuclear arms race in South Asia.

Riffat Hussain, head of the defense and strategic studies department at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, said a China with warmer ties to India could “play the role of a truly honest broker between India and Pakistan.” “The diplomatic symbolism is more important than the maneuver itself,” he said of the naval exercises.

“They send a very clear signal that China is now fully engaged in South Asian affairs,” Hussain added.