New Delhi: Chinese President Xi Jinping began a two-day visit to New Delhi to attend the BRICS Summit on Saturday, marking his first trip to India in seven years and signalling a key opportunity to normalise bilateral ties through expansion of trade and investment ties.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will host President Xi for bilateral talks on Saturday evening.
It is understood that both sides will carry out a comprehensive review of their bilateral relations, focusing on new steps to enhance the two-way engagement.
The Chinese leader’s trip to India comes on the heels of several high-level exchanges, including the Special Representative dialogue in Beijing between National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, even as concerns linger over aggressive Chinese military posturing along the Arunachal Pradesh sector.
Xi was received at the Delhi airport by Union Minister Jitin Prasada, as cultural artistes performed traditional dances to welcome the Chinese president.
“We look forward to constructive discussions as BRICS continues to advance cooperation and contribute to a more balanced, representative and multipolar world,” External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said on social media, welcoming the Chinese leader.
Xi’s delegation includes Cai Qi, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee.
People familiar with Xi’s visit said it presents a key opportunity to further normalise relations that came under severe strain following the eastern Ladakh military standoff.
In the last few months, both sides have rolled out a series of confidence-building measures to repair ties frayed by the more than four-and-a-half-year military standoff in eastern Ladakh.
In their talks, Modi and Xi are expected to review the overall situation along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and explore further ways to normalise bilateral relations, including through expanded trade and investment ties, the people cited above said.
The meeting is slated to take place at 6 pm.
Modi and Xi held wide-ranging talks on August 31 last year on the margins of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in the Chinese city of Tianjin.
NSA Doval held the Special Representative (SR) talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang late last month that focused on delimitation of the frontier and sustaining work on trans-boundary cooperation as well as maintaining peace along the LAC.
Both Doval and Wang are the designated SRs for the boundary talks mechanism, which was established in 2003 to comprehensively address the dispute over the India-China border spanning 3,488 km.
“China will work with India to act on the strategic guidance of the two leaders, handle the bilateral relations from a strategic height and long-term perspective, step up communication, enhance cooperation, properly handle differences, and be friends enjoying good-neighbourliness and partners helping each other succeed,” Chinese ambassador to India Xu Feihong said on Friday.
