Pakistan getting a drubbing from India is a constant fear in the minds of the Chinese.
NEW DELHI: The Pahalgam terrorist attack of April 22, 2025, which brutally targeted civilians in one of India’s most serene and picturesque tourist destinations, marked yet another grim episode in the protracted history of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. In response, India launched “Operation Sindoor”—a calibrated, precise, and strategically restrained military campaign.
The operation comprised coordinated missile strikes on nine high-value terrorist installations—four deep inside Pakistan (notably in Bahawalpur and Muridke) and five in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (including Muzzafarabad and Kotli). These locations served as operational hubs for Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the very outfits responsible for heinous attacks such as Pulwama (2019) and Mumbai (2008). The operation sent a clear and unequivocal message: India will consider a terrorist attack as an act of war and respond to terrorism with precision, resolve, and without crossing the threshold into full-scale war.
In retaliation, Pakistan launched swarms of Turkish and Chinese-built drones and Haft-series ballistic missiles targeting Indian military installations and urban centres on May 7, 8, and 9, 2025. India responded with a powerful counter-offensive, striking 11 key Pakistani military bases including Noor Khan, Rafiqui, Murid, Sukkur, Sialkot, Pasrur, Chunian, Sargodha, Skardu, Bholari, and Jacobabad. High-resolution satellite imagery captured before and after the strikes revealed the extensive scale of damage inflicted on these installations. Pakistan’s Director General of Military Operations (DGMO) was forced to call his Indian counterpart and a ceasefire was agreed.
Operation Sindoor established a decisive deterrent against Pakistan’s nuclear brinkmanship and exposed the vulnerabilities of its Chinese-supplied air defences, including the HQ-9. In response, Pakistan launched a high-decibel disinformation campaign to salvage both its own face and that of its close ally China. It claimed that Chinese-made J-10 and JF-17 jets had downed five Indian aircraft, including a Rafale, captured a female Indian pilot, destroyed India’s S-400 systems at Adampur, and paralysed 70% of India’s power grid. These fabricated narratives, amplified by state-controlled Pakistani, Chinese, and some Western media, aimed to portray Pakistan as the victor—despite ground realities suggesting otherwise. A few takeaways could be summarised as following.
One, as I have argued in my last column that since Chinese weaponry constitutes 81% of Pakistan’s total defence imports, in the event of a conflict, the battlefield would effectively pit Chinese military systems against a combination of Indian and Western platforms.
An analyst in a video claimed, “The J-10 didn’t just take down the Rafale—it erased 26 years of humiliation,” referencing the 1999 US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia. That incident spurred the PLA into launching “Project 995,” a high-tech weapons development initiative.
Yao Yuanmei, Associate professor at the Centre for South Asian Studies, East China Normal University questions “why India’s advanced ‘multi-national’ weapons failed to defeat Pakistan’s ‘Made in China’ weapons?” India has not publicly acknowledged the losses but the Indian Air Force stated in a briefing on May 11 that “losses are a part of combat,” albeit the Hindu did file a story but later retracted. While the narrative briefly boosted Chinese defence stocks by 20%, they quickly fell to 9% as the actual destruction of terror infrastructure and air bases began to emerge.
Two, Pakistan getting a drubbing from India is a constant fear in the minds of the Chinese, argues another analyst called Zhang Shizhao. Zhang asserts that “if India emerges victorious, the strategic and geopolitical gains for it would be substantial. Securing full control over the Kashmir region would not only consolidate its territorial position but also pave the way for enhanced cooperation and benefits from the United States. Such an outcome would deal a significant blow to China—disrupting its Belt and Road Initiative and diminishing its regional influence—while simultaneously elevating India’s global stature.” Yao Yuanmei links Pakistan’s and hence Chinese fear to Modi government’s “Akhand Bharat” mind-set, and argues that this “imperial thinking is the root cause of this outbreak of the war.”
However, Zhang’s argument borders on the absurd when he claims that India attacked Pakistan at the encouragement of the United States, based on supposed guarantees involving advanced weapons exports, relocation of supply chains to India, and increased imports of Indian products to reduce dependence on China. He further attempts to persuade his readers of the lethality of Chinese-supplied weapon systems to Pakistan—particularly the PL-15E missile, which he asserts is “a generation ahead” of the missiles equipped on the Rafale. “It is possible that India is not clear about the strength of these equipment systems in Pakistan.” Such a discourse is not just aimed at China and Pakistan’s domestic audience but also at potential arms buyers, especially the Middle East against Israel.
Three, the Chinese argue that India’s restraint in scaling the conflict stems from a fear that China might step in to replenish Pakistan’s military supplies and offer broader support. Another assert, “India knows China will not sit idly by and watch Pakistan being bullied,” citing the Sino-Vietnamese war as an example of China seizing a narrow window to act before the Soviet Union could intervene. However, the analyst might benefit from consulting non-Chinese historical accounts, many of which suggest that it was China, not Vietnam that walked away with a hard lesson from that war.
Four, the record “six to zero” in “systematic combat” is also a message that “now no country in the world will misjudge China’s military strength.” The blogs as well as mainstream media boast that China has more sophisticated aircraft like J-20 and J-36, including the test flights featuring two sixth-generation fighters in recent times. In naval terms, the Type 055 destroyer ranks among the world’s most advanced warships, and China continues to hold significant advantages in various missile systems. The point he is driving home is that those countries that rashly go to war with China will only be beaten to a pulp, so they can only seek peace and cooperation.
The Sino-US tariff negotiations, the concessions made by the United States, the analyst says “should be largely related to the victory of Chinese equipment in this air combat. Only by winning on the battlefield can we be invincible at the negotiation table.” Conversely, “India’s strategic value to the U.S. would decline—from a key counterweight to China to merely a secondary player, unable to even defeat Pakistan” argues Ning Nanshan.
Fifth, another analyst on Guancha argues that India’s acquisition of advanced weaponry from Europe, the US, and Russia over the past three decades, coupled with sustained economic growth, has led its elites to view Pakistan—hampered by slower development and internal instability—as a reduced threat, redirecting their focus toward China. However, the recent air combat served as a sobering wake-up call. Echoing earlier assessments, the analyst contends that if Indian fighter jets can suffer such losses against Pakistan, a real confrontation with the PLA would be far more devastating.
Finally, I believe beyond the battlefield, Operation Sindoor sent a clear message to Pakistan that its terror infrastructure is more liability than leverage. The myth that sponsoring cross-border terrorism would bleed India without consequence has been decisively shattered. It is now evident that such support has boomeranged into Pakistan’s own strategic collapse, as demonstrated by the resurgence of Baloch nationalism, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militants, and radical Islamist groups demanding either independence or wanting to topple the Pakistani state. This internal fragmentation is a consequence of the very ideological extremism that Pakistan continue to support and export.
It is time for the Pakistani people to understand that China has a containment of India policy, and the pivot for that is Pakistan. In other words, China is achieving its ends through India-Pakistan conflict, essentially it is the containment of both. The sooner Pakistan realises this the better it would be for the regional and internal peace, which is prerequisite for development. China too must introspect that by enabling a proxy that thrives on terrorism, it risks not only regional instability but also its own credibility as a responsible global power.
B.R. Deepak is Professor, Center of Chinese and Southeast Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.