India and Nepal share an open border, a cultural affinity that predates both countries’ current forms, and a bilateral relationship with more complications than either government tends to acknowledge publicly. China and Nepal share a high-altitude frontier, a history of limited direct contact, and a relationship that has grown considerably more active since 2015.
Two events that year accelerated the shift. The first was the earthquake. When the 7.8 magnitude Gorkha earthquake struck Nepal in April 2015, killing nearly 9,000 people, both India and China mounted relief operations. India responded in less than 12 hours and was the first international team to arrive. India’s Operation Maitri was launched within hours of the quake, and India has since been Nepal’s largest aid donor, providing over a billion dollars in support.
China’s response, while slower and smaller in scale, was accompanied by sustained media engagement in subsequent months — an effort that observers of Nepal’s media landscape have noted, though it varied significantly by outlet. The competitive optics of disaster response in a neighbouring country tells you something about how seriously both powers take Nepal’s strategic alignment.
The second event was the 2015 blockade. The supply disruption along Nepal’s southern border, which Nepal attributed to Indian pressure over its new constitution and India officially denied orchestrating, pushed Kathmandu to seek alternatives to its near-total dependence on India for fuel and imports. China’s corridors northward, however incomplete, suddenly had political value that transcended their economic logic.
China’s formal courtship of Nepal’s political establishment has accelerated significantly since then. High-level visits between Beijing and Kathmandu have become more frequent. Chinese investment in Nepal’s party infrastructure—including exchanges, training programmes and media partnerships—has been documented by researchers at institutions including RUSI, the Observer Research Foundation, and CESIF Nepal, as well as by journalists covering the region, though the full scope of this engagement is difficult to verify independently. In 2019 alone, about 50 CCP leaders provided training to more than 200 Nepal Communist Party leaders on “Xi Jinping Thought.”
The Annapurna Express The CCP’s International Liaison Department now maintains active relationships across Nepal’s entire political spectrum—including parties across the left-right divide—an approach designed to ensure continuity of influence regardless of electoral outcomes.
India’s traditionally dominant influence in Nepal has rested on history, geography, economic integration and cultural connection. None of those factors has disappeared. What has changed is that China is now investing in Nepal’s political future at a level that means Indian assumptions about Nepali alignment can no longer be taken as given.
Nepal’s government, a coalition with changing compositions, has tried to maintain a visible balance—attending summits in both Beijing and New Delhi, keeping the BRI relationship active while also progressing the MCC compact.
The optics of balance are easier to manage than the substance. When the IMF attaches conditions to a loan, Nepal must negotiate with a multilateral institution whose governance is dominated by major Western economies. When a BRI project’s financing terms are onerous, Nepal must negotiate bilaterally with Beijing. The power asymmetry in each of those negotiations is not equivalent, but it is not equivalent in the same direction: IMF conditionality is at least publicly documented and subject to international scrutiny; BRI terms are frequently not.
New Delhi’s concern is specific—not that Nepal will become Chinese in any cultural or political sense, but that it will become a country in which China’s strategic preferences have institutional weight in Kathmandu’s decision-making. That concern is no longer purely hypothetical.