Prime Minister Narendra Modi to hold summit meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping from April 27 to 28. PTI Photo (PTI9_17_2014_000127B) Beijing: Chinese President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi will hold a summit meeting in Wuhan from April 27 to 28. Modi will be visiting the central Chinese city at the invitation of President Xi. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who is in Beijing for the two-day meeting of Foreign Ministers of the eight-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, has taken care of the nitty-gritty ahead of the PM’s visit.
Informed sources said that it will be an informal summit meeting between Xi and Modi during which both leaders will try to work out a new paradigm for the bilateral ties that are bogged down in a host of disputes and differences. Media experts are already hyping the visit as a replica of the ice-breaking visit undertaken by late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1988, when he held far-reaching talks with Deng Xiaoping and charted a new course for the relations.
Apart from Doklam, which remains an irritant, Beijing also threw a spanner in India’s membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group; it has also thwarted our efforts at the UN to designate Masood Azhar, who heads the Jaish-e-Mohammed, as a terrorist. This will be the fourth visit of Modi to China after he came to power in 2014. He is to visit China again in June to take part in the SCO summit to be held at Qingdao city. Modi has already visited China thrice – he had visited Xian, Beijing and Shanghai during a bilateral visit in 2015; he had visited Hangzhou in 2016 for a G-20 visit; in 2017, he visited Xiamen for the BRICS summit.
The Modi-Xi summit is taking place in the backdrop of a series of high level interactions between both the two countries starting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang’s visit to India in December, the first after Dokalam standoff. It was followed by two meetings between National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi and the visit early this year by Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale to Beijing. Last month Modi rang up Xi to congratulate him on his re-election, when both of them agreed that as two major powers growing rapidly, bilateral relations are vital for realisation of the 21st century as an “Asian century”.