China and India

Tony Blair flies to Afghanistan, Gordon Brown to Iraq; David Cameron is in Darfur, George Bush has just left Indonesia. Some of the recent flurry of international jettings matter a lot. Others much less so. One that indisputably belongs in the first category is the visit by China's president Hu Jintao to India this week. The summit with India's prime minister Manmohan Singh - only the second of its kind - brings together the leaders of more than a third of humanity and of the two countries whose growth is the starting-point for all serious discussion of the global economy in the 21st century. Few bilateral relationships are more important than this. This one matters to us all.

The current tendency of European leaders to speak of the two nations in one globalising breath can be misleading. China and India are neither economic equals nor political allies. On most indicators, India lags considerably behind, while the visit reminds the world that China's military defeat of India in 1962 still shapes relations and attitudes. Attempts to solve their border disputes have continued for long years without breakthrough; last week, on the eve of Mr Hu's trip, China provocatively reiterated its territorial claims. Indian fears that China may try to divert the Brahmaputra river and ongoing Chinese anger about the presence in India of the Dalai Lama and 120,000 Tibetan refugees also ensured that the summit had to skirt around some intractable differences. Agreements were limited further by China's long relationship with Pakistan, where Mr Hu goes tomorrow. There he will sign nuclear-power and naval arms deals worth billions of pounds more than anything to which he put his name in Delhi. Though there have been plenty of mutual compliments during the visit, India and China remain wary of each other, acting out a cold-war style rivalry in which an advantage for one is perceived by the other as a threat. None of that has changed this week.

The differences matter but, in both political and economic terms, they are only part of the picture. From Europe's perspective, the rivalry between China and India in places like Burma or Sudan matters less than the fact that both are investing heavily there, frustrating western efforts to isolate the regimes in Rangoon and Khartoum. And with yesterday's confirmation that bilateral trade, worth only £1bn as recently as 1998, will reach £30bn by 2010, the two Asian giants are increasingly shaping the global economy too. The rise of China and India is no longer some far-distant prospect. It is the here and now of the 21st-century world.