Amrita (top) and Harpreet Singh Puri: Showing the way

Recently in Beijing: Driving to Beijing on a cold morning early this week, Amrita Singh wondered aloud to husband Harpreet Singh Puri what was in it for them in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Beijing. They were going, they decided, to network.

The Indian entrepreneur couple run two businesses from the north China city of Tianjin. They are pressed for time. Harpreet chucked his job as the general manager with a Sino-American-Singaporean joint venture six years ago to go independent.

He started Business Links, a consultancy connecting Indian and Chinese firms, out of Tianjin, about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Beijing if traffic is good.

Amrita quit as administrator of the International School and started a company with a name she believes is its biggest capital : Beyond Frontiers Trading (Tianjin) Limited.

She would like to believe that it is the name of her company — and not her company — that attracts attention from the gathering of business people and chief executives in the banquet hall of the the five-star China World Hotel.

Manmohan is camping here. Minutes before he was expected, Amrita had been speaking to Indian businessmen, some of who sought her out from among the participants of the India-China Economic Summit.

“I really believe in the name. I think that’s what we are doing, going beyond frontiers. We are chipping away at, you know, the Haqeeqat kind of memories,” the Amritsari from Tianjin says, referring to the Hindi film that portrayed the tragedy of the 1962 war.

Her company is now executing orders to export freshwater pearls sourced from farmers in Zheijiang province in the Chinese south — China is the world’s largest producer of the gems — to the jewellery market in Mumbai and Surat.

Manmohan: Rare praise

Back in Delhi, Manmohan has received rare praise for his China visit from both the Left and the Right. Yesterday, the BJP’s L.K. Advani hoped Pakistan would take a cue from India’s ties with China and opt to work around sticky issues, go “beyond borders” as it were.

Today, through an editorial in the party paper People’s Democracy, the CPM has conveyed its goodwill: “By all accounts, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to the People’s Republic of China was highly successful and has positively contributed towards carrying forward the improvement of relations between the two Asian giants.”

For such a warm reception, though, Manmohan’s achievements through the three-day visit, measured by cold diplomatic indices, are nano.

There has been no breakthrough in border talks; China has not committed to support India’s bid for a Security Council seat; Manmohan has himself said he has no assurance from Beijing on support for a waiver in the Nuclear Suppliers Group to the India-US civilian nuclear deal and the announcement of new direct flights through India and China is delayed.

It is not entirely out of place to describe the achievements as “nano”. Even as Manmohan was going from Zhoingnanhai to Tian An Men in Beijing, India was figuring in everyday conversation not because of his presence but because it had just unveiled a Rs 1-lakh car. Chinese newspapers and TV channels gave the Tata car huge publicity. Some of that rubbed off on the summit meeting. The state-run China Daily newspaper ran the euphoric headline “China, India cement ties”.

But Manmohan has scored in notching up nano gains on a range of issues with China, without being able to claim “pathbreaking” status anywhere. He is himself aware of this, claiming the trip was “incremental”.

Not since Rajiv Gandhi’s 1988 visit to China, when the agreement on peace and tranquillity on the border was worked out, has an Indian Prime Minister and his men been able to claim breakthroughs. But the aggregate of Manmohan’s scores in China total up to gains on both the domestic and international stages.

For instance, China has acknowledged India’s aspirations to be a permanent member of the UN Security Council. It has responded positively to a suggestion that its atomic energy authority chairperson visit India and, importantly, both China and India decided to intensify bilateral exchanges between their military establishments. Also, India and China shared security concerns over Pakistan without putting it down on paper.

Perhaps sensing that it is people and trade that can add muscle to the bilateral relationship, Manmohan and Wen Jiabao decided that China-India trade relations were so robust now that the target should be revised upwards from $40 billion to $60 billion by 2010. This means that Amrita and Harpreet, and entrepreneurs like them can look forward to making more money and increasing contacts.

More, both leaders said more than once that they had noted the joint army drill in Kunming. They can claim credit for sensing that it is at the level of ordinary people that the intensity of the India-China ties is most palpable.