Chinese Foreign Minister’s Nepal visit puts Himalayan nation in headlights of big power rivalry in South Asia

Wang Yi is expected to kick-start at least two Belt and Road Initiative projects after Nepal accepted a US$500 million infrastructure grant from Washington

A 25-member bipartisan US Congressional delegation will visit in mid-April, aiming to show China and India just how serious Washington is about the region

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Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi will visit Nepal this weekend. It will be the first high level meeting between the nations since Nepal accepted a US grant. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 9:00am, 26 Mar 2022

Nepal remains in the headlights of big power rivalry in South Asia with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Kathmandu for talks and a heavyweight US Congressional delegation expected to arrive three weeks later.

Wang’s weekend visit, the last stop on a swing through South Asia, will mark the first high-level engagement between the two countries since the impoverished Himalayan nation last month approved a US$500-million grant from Washington, defying China’s calls to reject the package.

The lawmakers’ consent to the US deal to modernise roads and build desperately needed high-voltage power lines was seen by foreign-policy watchers as a major rebuff to China, whose influence in the politically volatile democracy has grown considerably in recent years.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is in Kathmandu this weekend. Nepal just approved a US development grant that China opposed. Photo: Xinhua

Even if the Chinese failed to stop the pact’s ratification, they have one consolation. “They’ve been successful at gaslighting anti-American sentiment here, and that sentiment won’t go away quickly,” said Santosh Sharma Poudel, co-founder of the Nepal Institute for Policy Research.

The decision to accept the money offered by the Millennium Corporation Challenge (MCC), a US foreign aid agency set up by Congress in 2004, came a day before America’s take-it-or-leave-it end of February deadline.

Debate over taking the grant, provisionally agreed five years earlier, polarised the country and sparked violent street protests.

02:19

Nepal police fire tear gas to disperse pro-Beijing protest over US$500m aid grant from the US

Pro-China advocates, including Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal, better known by his guerilla name Prachanda, said the deal jeopardised Nepal’s sovereignty.