New Delhi: External affairs minister S. Jaishankar on Wednesday (July 22) pressed China on fair market access, India’s growing trade imbalance and the “predictability” of supply chains during talks with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi in Manila, even as he welcomed the steady normalisation of bilateral ties since the resolution of the eastern Ladakh military standoff.Jaishankar and Wang met on the margins of the East Asia Summit and ASEAN Regional Forum meetings, part of a two-day visit to the Philippines. He also attended a Quad foreign ministers’ meeting with counterparts from Australia, Japan and the United States, and co-chaired the ASEAN Post-Ministerial Conference.In opening remarks that he later posted on X after the meeting, Jaishankar described the discussions as “wide ranging”.While welcoming the resumption of direct flights, the updating of visa arrangements, the restart of the Kailash Manasarovar Yatra and the reopening of border trade, Jaishankar made it clear that significant economic issues remained unresolved.“However, there are also important dimensions of our ties that need to be addressed,” Jaishankar said. “Fair market access and a trade balance ranks high in that regard. There are also concerns about predictability of supply chains.” He added that facilitating “both official and people-to-people exchanges” required attention, along with agreement on the “meetings of various mechanisms and platforms as per our mutual priorities.”Wang, a member of the Communist Party of China’s Politburo, last held bilateral talks with Jaishankar in New Delhi in August 2025, when he also co-chaired the 24th round of Special Representatives talks on the boundary question with National Security Adviser Ajit Doval. More recently, he was in June this year for the BRICS National Security Advisers’ meeting, where he held talks with Doval and both sides said they had “noted progress towards gradual normalisation.” Since the leaders’ meeting in Kazan in October 2024, Jaishankar said, relations between India and China “have been gradually normalizing,” a direction he said was “further affirmed” when Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in Tianjin last August. A stable and cooperative relationship, he said, could best be built on “mutual respect, mutual interest and mutual sensitivity,” and would contribute to “a multi-polar Asia and a multi-polar world.”The concerns over market access and supply chains come against the backdrop of a widening trade gap. India’s imports from China touched a record $79.41 billion in the first half of 2026, while exports to China rose 37.2% to $12.31 billion over the same period, according to commerce ministry data. The overall trade deficit with China had already crossed $116 billion in 2025-26, and in June alone the monthly gap widened to $15.3 billion, a 430% jump over the same month a year earlier.Earlier this year, Beijing rejected shipments of Indian rice and later turned away chilli consignments, citing quality concerns that Indian exporters have disputed. India, in turn, has imposed anti-dumping duties on select categories of Chinese imports, including plastic machinery.Indian industry has also been affected by Chinese export restrictions on several critical industrial inputs, particularly rare earth magnets, which are essential for electric vehicles, automobiles, electronics, renewable energy equipment and defence manufacturing. China’s curbs on seven rare earth elements and their magnets, imposed in April 2025, forced Indian auto manufacturers to severely cut their output for several months. Beijing has since begun issuing import licences to a limited set of Indian companies, including suppliers linked to Maruti Suzuki, Mahindra and Honda, though officials have described the approval process as slow and handled case by case. China still accounted for about 88% of India’s magnet imports in the first half of this financial year.There has been rising alarm over China’s monopoly on critical mineral supply chains, which it has sought to weaponise, just as Washington has also been doing the same in relation to access to the US market through tariffs. In its Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026, released on July 16, the International Energy Agency said the full implementation of China’s expanded export controls could put $6.5 trillion of downstream production outside China at risk across the automotive, high-tech, defence and energy sectors, with the United States and Europe accounting for nearly half of the potential impact. Beijing has already agreed to delay full implementation of the expanded controls by a year, a stand-down due to expire in November 2026, after which a tighter regime is expected to take effect, according to trade policy analysts.Incidentally, supply chains were also a focus of the two ministers’ last bilateral meeting. During Wang’s visit to Delhi in August 2025, Indian government sources said the Chinese foreign minister had assured Jaishankar that Beijing was “addressing India’s needs of fertilisers, rare earths and tunnel boring machines,” after Chinese curbs on these items had disrupted the availability of fertiliser during the Rabi season and squeezed India’s electric vehicle and electronics sectors.