Why was India in a hurry to recognise China after the takeover by Mao Zedong’s Communist Party? An excerpt from ‘The Long Game: How The Chinese Negotiate With India’, by Vijay Gokhale. Jawaharlal Nehru and Mao Zedong during their 1954 meeting. The decision of the Government of India to recognise the People’s Republic of China on 30 December 1949, and to establish diplomatic relations with the new regime on 1 April 1950, was the first diplomatic negotiation between the two sides. Neither side had much accumulated experience with such matters in such an exercise, even though the government of independent India had been in existence since 1947 and the Chinese Communists had had their share of handling foreign powers, including the Soviet Union as well as China’s allies – the Americans and the British – during the Second World War.