Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to visit China this week for an informal summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in a move aimed at resetting relations between the neighbour countries, rocked by the 73-day-long Doklam military standoff last year.
The two-day meet on April 27 and 28 will be an informal summit between President Xi and PM Modi during which both world leaders will try to reboot bilateral ties bogged down by a host of disputes and differences.
The surprise announcement came after talks on bilateral ties between Indian and Chinese foreign ministers in Beijing on the sidelines of the regional Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meet in Beijing on Sunday. Besides his visit to China this week, Modi is also to travel to China again in June for a summit of SCO leaders in Qingdao.
China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said, “President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi will have an informal summit from the 27-28 April in Wuhan, Hubei province. The two leaders will have communications of a strategic nature…concerning the shifts going on in the world.”
There are signs that Xi will seek Modi’s support in the most important task on his hand, which is to find ways to deal with the rising antagonism from Trump over trade issues, and the possibility of a US-China trade war.
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who is in Beijing for the two-day meeting of Foreign Ministers of the eight-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) that starts tomorrow, has been laying the groundwork ahead of the PM’s visit.
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