Talking Past Each Other: Pallavi Aiyar on India, China, and the Case for Cognitive Empathy

This week on Sinica, I sit down with the writer Pallavi Aiyar — at her own dining table in Beijing, where in recent months I’ve been the lucky beneficiary of her and her husband Julio’s legendary hospitality. Pallavi first arrived in Beijing in 2002 to teach at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute and went on to spend the better part of a decade as The Hindu’s China correspondent — for much of that time, the only Chinese-speaking Indian foreign correspondent in the country. That period produced Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, still one of the very few sustained attempts to look at China through Indian eyes. After 16 years away — years spent in Brussels, Jakarta, Tokyo, and Madrid — she’s back in Beijing, and turning her gaze inward with her latest book, Travels in the Other Place: Pursuing the Self in Eight Acts. She writes the wonderful Substack The Global Jigsaw, which I recommend without reservation.

Our conversation is built around her recent essay for Noema Magazine, “The Real Problem Underlying India-China Tensions,” which argues that the deepest problem in the relationship isn’t the border or the trade imbalance but the distorting lenses through which each side reads the other: China reads India through the lens of colonial subordination, while India reads China through the lens of betrayal. We talk about the ugly etymology of an ethnic slur, the partial historical memories each country mistakes for the whole picture, her serialized interviews with the Chinese India-watcher Mao Keji, the aporia-inducing impossibility of explaining either country to outsiders — and how her answer to the question she first posed in 2008, “Would I rather be born Indian or Chinese?”, has changed, painfully, in the years since.

• 4:35 – Beijing, 2002: an ad in That’s Beijing, gandhi@hotmail.com, and becoming The Hindu’s correspondent
• 10:03 – “Beijing and I grew up together”: the aughts as a shared coming-of-age
• 12:16 – The asymmetry of obsession: why India watches China, but not the reverse
• 16:39 – The unacknowledged third vertex: Western discursive power in the India-China relationship
• 18:08 – Back after 16 years: the Liangma River, blue skies, and the panopticon
• 21:35 – Walks in the park and the “buddy system”: what access looks like now
• 25:43 – Where did all the foreigners go?
• 29:59 – The scene at CCG: candor, offense, and the register of truth
• 33:10 – “Asan”: the etymology of a slur, Sikh policemen, opium fortunes, and China’s colonial lens
• 40:10 – 1962 and India’s betrayal lens
• 42:15 – Aporia: the foolhardy task of explaining India or China
• 47:22 – Shame and indignation: explaining a place you love versus a place you merely know
• 52:29 – The big question, 2008: born Indian or Chinese?
• 55:44 – The 2026 answer: “It hurts”
• 1:00:08 – Kaiser pushes back: cherry-picked comparisons, and can this essay’s very existence complicate its conclusions?
• 1:04:43 – Twin nations of the exam
• 1:06:57 – Cognitive empathy: what it would take for ordinary Indians and Chinese to actually see each other

Paying It Forward

• Yaqi Li, a young Chinese international relations scholar recently returned to China after a year in Singapore — Pallavi admires the rare self-reflectiveness of his memoir-inflected IR writing on his Substack, New China Literacy, and notes that he makes an interesting case for AI-assisted writing as a way for second- and third-language English speakers to find their voice.

Recommendations

• Pallavi: Flashlight by Susan Choi — a novel spanning Japan, the U.S., and North Korea, built around the North Korean abductions of Japanese citizens in the 1970s. Also This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin — the first novel from her favorite Pakistani writer, a sprawling, Chekhovian portrait of feudalism and politics in modern Pakistan.
• Kaiser: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner — beautiful at the sentence level, painted on a small canvas: two couples who meet as young academics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and their friendship across the decades. Emotionally rich despite the absence of grand drama.

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