What Tarique Rahman’s China Visit Really Tells Us About Bangladesh’s New Foreign Policy

By the time Prime Minister Tarique Rahman boarded his flight home from Beijing on June 26, he had met every tier of the Chinese leadership a foreign head of government can realistically expect to meet — Premier Li Qiang, NPC Standing Committee Chairman Zhao Leji, and President Xi Jinping — signed roughly fifteen agreements, secured a rare joint communiqué, and walked away with Chinese commitments on a river project that has outlived four decades of failed India-Bangladesh diplomacy.

By any normal measure, this was a consequential trip. Yet much of the commentary surrounding it, particularly across the border, has fixated on a single question: why didn’t he go to India first?

That question is worth answering honestly, but it should not be allowed to crowd out the more important one — what did Bangladesh actually achieve, and what does it tell us about how this government intends to conduct itself in the world?

The “snub” narrative misreads the moment
Indian outlets were quick to frame the Malaysia-China sequencing as a deliberate snub. The Hindustan Times reported that Rahman had chosen “Malaysia and China for his first foreign visit… signaling his foreign policy priorities by bypassing India, which has traditionally been the destination for such trips.”

The Hindu ran with nearly identical framing, describing the trip as “bypassing neighboring India as his inaugural destination.”

Both outlets also noted, accurately, that Rahman had written to Prime Minister Modi in March accepting an invitation to visit. All of this is true.

What they leave out is that Dhaka’s own internal deliberations, reported well before the trip was finalized, show a government actively trying to avoid exactly this binary — reportedly shelving an original China-first itinerary in favor of routing through Malaysia precisely so the visit wouldn’t read as a contest between Delhi and Beijing.

A foreign ministry official put it plainly to the local press: a third country appealed more than staging a competition between India and China.

That nuance was largely lost in translation. And it matters, because it tells us something about this government’s instinct that the “bypass” framing obscures: this is not a foreign policy built on snubbing anyone.

It is one trying, however imperfectly, to assert that Bangladesh does not have to choose. A parallel conversation has also taken hold at home, where some intellectuals now argue at the tea table that, as the prime minister of a Muslim-majority country, Tarique Rahman’s first overseas visit should have gone to Makkah and Madinah rather than to Malaysia or China — a critique that, whatever one makes of it, underscores just how contested the symbolism of a “first visit” has become across very different audiences.

The substance deserves more attention than the sequencing
Strip away the diplomatic choreography and the deliverables are genuinely significant. Bangladeshi diplomatic sources described the decision to issue only the third joint communiqué in the history of the relationship as a deliberate signal that this visit was about political depth, not just project financing — a point reinforced by a researcher who argued that friendship between nations cannot progress on financial cooperation alone, but requires sustained political engagement.

Bangladesh’s expected alignment with China’s Global Development Initiative — its first inclusion in a major Chinese global initiative since the 2016 Belt and Road MoU — extends that logic from rhetoric into institutional commitment.

Then there is Teesta. For more than forty years, the Teesta water-sharing question has been a case study in how a small state’s development needs can be held hostage to the domestic politics of a larger neighbor — most visibly when a promising 2011 interim deal collapsed under opposition from West Bengal’s chief minister.

Successive Bangladeshi governments have absorbed that lesson and waited anyway.

This government, through its water resources minister’s direct request to China’s Li Guoying and Beijing’s positive response on technical cooperation, signaled it is no longer willing to let Dhaka’s irrigation needs in Nilphamari, Kurigram, Rangpur and beyond remain hostage to a bilateral negotiation that has gone nowhere since 1983.

What this should mean for how Bangladesh is read abroad
There is a tendency, understandable but limiting, to read every Bangladeshi diplomatic move through the lens of which larger power it pleases or displeases.

That framework will keep producing the same headlines — “bypass,” “snub,” “tilt” — without capturing what is actually happening on the ground: a country trying to extract concrete commitments on its own development priorities, from whichever partner is willing to deliver them, while keeping its options with everyone else genuinely open.

Whether this government can sustain that balance — particularly as India watches the Teesta cooperation unfold so close to the strategically sensitive Siliguri Corridor — remains to be tested. Here, it is worth listening to voices on the Chinese side itself, who have pushed back against the binary framing more directly than most.

Qian Feng, director of the Research Department at Tsinghua University’s National Strategy Institute, told the Global Times that some voices in India’s media and strategic circles continue to view regional affairs through the lens of India’s traditional leadership role in South Asia — a habit, he argued, that breeds unnecessary anxiety about closer China-Bangladesh ties diminishing New Delhi’s influence.

His conclusion was unambiguous: China-Bangladesh cooperation is not directed at any third party and should not be viewed simply through the prism of geopolitical competition.

That is a convenient thing for a Chinese scholar to say, and it should not be taken uncritically — Beijing has every interest in normalizing its expanding footprint in South Asia as routine, depoliticized development cooperation.

But the underlying point still stands on its own merits: a regional order in which every Bangladeshi diplomatic choice must be read as a verdict on Delhi or Beijing, treating Bangladesh as a chessboard rather than a player.

Dhaka would do well to hold all of its partners — Chinese and Indian alike — to the same standard Qian invokes, and to keep insisting, through its actions rather than its press statements, that an independent foreign policy is not a euphemism for picking a new patron. It is the more difficult, more valuable project of not needing one at all.

(The writer: Assistant Professor of State University of New York-Dutchess and Executive Director of Bangladesh Institute of Development and Security Studies)