China is not particularly in need of making friends to influence the world, notwithstanding the sheen it has lost following the bursting of the Shnaghai-Shenzen stock exchange bubble. (Mr Xi has tried to control the markets with the same ferocity that his predecessors displayed 25 years ago in quelling the Tiananmen square uprising.) It certainly does not need to curry favours with India, given the fact we are great believers in the beggar-thy-neighbour school of thought. We blow our trumpet when we discover that our growth has exceeded that of China this year and likely to do so again the next year. It does not matter that our fractionally higher growth rate may be the result of the national accounts statistics legerdemain, or that despite that "achievement", the gap between the Indian economy and that of China (five times larger in dollars) will actually widen in absolute terms. And well before Mr Modi's peregrinations in the energy-rich Central Asian "stans", Mr Xi had showered billions on them, sewing up agreements to build pipelines for their oil and gas to be shipped to meet China's insatiable thirst.
Mr Xi makes agreeable gestures such as agreeing to K V Kamath being the first head of the BRICS Bank (itself little more than an extension of China's financial sinews, along with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank) or bearing gifts when he visited India last year. No matter if concrete announcements added up to investment of a modest $20 billion in the next five years as against the earlier expectation of $100 billion. Mr Xi made all the right noises, sang praises of India - but yielded not a square millimetre of the territory China claims. On the contrary, there were reports of fresh Chinese incursions into disputed areas even as Mr Xi was welcomed in Ahmedabad and Delhi. Whether similar notes emanating during Mr Modi's return visit this year mean much remains to be seen.
The Chinese president is first and foremost the latest among a long line of Sinocentric leaders. The one article of faith that has driven all Chinese rulers including the Manchu dynasty (or even the Ming), Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang, Mao, Deng or the generation of faceless party officials that followed them is in the very name of the country: Chung-guo. Loosely and commonly translated as the Middle Kingdom, it really means the Centre of the Universe, which all Chinese believe to be the country's rightful address. They have been disdainful of all foreigners throughout their history. The Japanese were derisively called the Eastern Dwarfs.
It riled China no end that it was among the poor for most of the 20th century. So when its upward march began in the 1980s, every Chinese regarded it as his holy mission to propel it further. The Chinese belief in its place of honour at the world high table as its manifest destiny is absolute.
This motive governs all Chinese actions, especially economic ones. If China shores up the American economy through its vast holding of US Treasury bills, it is because a consuming American middle class sustains the Chinese manufacturing economy. The aid to Africa, running into hundreds of billions of dollars, secures for China the vast mineral wealth of the continent, even as the rest of the world profligately squanders its resources.
India figures only on the periphery of Chinese concerns. It is no competition in export trade. China will perhaps happily offload the manufacturing of cheap staplers and disposable cigarette lighters on India as "investments." India can then sell these products to Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Myanmar, showing off its "arrival" as an economic manufacturing superpower, even as the Chinese corner the world market for smartphones and aircraft components and high-speed trains. China will applaud India's ushering in the Second Green Revolution in West Bengal, adding a few million tons of paddy and depleting its water by 6,000 times as much - while it quietly executes iron-clad contracts for produce from vast swathes of land in South America and Africa, where it owns everything from railways, roads and storage silos to ports and shipping lines.
One can second guess the Chinese all one wants, but one will be almost always wrong. Their logic is revealed only after the fact. So if China today has issues with SmithKlineGlaxo or Microsoft or Google or Boeing, all of these are meant to serve the overarching Chinese goal of control. When that is in sight, all disputes will be instantly resolved and the new Chinese dynasty will graciously receive tributes from ambassadors of the suzerain states or corporations.
The writer taught at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and helped set up Institute of Rural Management, Anand