Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal spent the opening day of a four-day visit to China shuttling between science and statecraft, beginning at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, where he urged closer research collaboration, before sitting down with senior official Liu Haixing. The centrepiece, formal talks at the invitation of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, was set for the evening in Beijing. Khanal, whose trip began Sunday, is due back in Kathmandu on June 17.
Its importance lies less in any document signed than in its choreography. The visit lands just days after Khanal’s headline-grabbing stop in New Delhi, which switched on cross-border digital payments, wrapped up a years-long post-quake reconstruction effort and opened conversations on energy and connectivity. Stacking a Beijing trip immediately atop an India trip is a calculated gesture, the new government advertising its intent to extract development benefits from both neighbours at once while resisting capture by either, a manoeuvre that has shaped, and repeatedly unsettled, Nepali diplomacy for generations.
The difficulty of that posture is easy to underestimate. Wedged between the planet’s two largest economies and lacking a coastline, Nepal leans on its neighbours for the roads, capital, trade corridors and power deals that fuel its growth. Beijing has shown an appetite for investment in connectivity and hydropower, while New Delhi anchors Nepal’s trade, remittances and supply lines. Every government in Kathmandu has had to defuse the suspicion, felt acutely in both capitals, that affection shown to one side amounts to a snub of the other.
The outreach also plays out against a tricky scene at home. Prime Minister Balendra Shah’s recent comments brushing against the border question stirred friction inside Nepal and beyond, and the country’s enduring boundary disputes remain unsettled. For an administration swept in on pledges of capable, clean governance, foreign affairs is shaping up as an early proving ground, a test of whether goodwill in Delhi and Beijing can be converted into hard deliverables, transmission lines, trade routes and investment, without setting off the nationalist tripwires that ensnared earlier governments.