Xi, Modi to hold second informal summit
New Delhi and Beijing announced on Wednesday that Chinese President Xi Jinping would pay a two-day visit to India on Friday to hold a second informal summit with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, over a year after they first met in Wuhan.
The meeting will take place in Mamallapuram, a temple town located along the Bay of Bengal near Chennai, the capital of the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. According to the plan, the Chinese leader will land in Chennai on Friday afternoon and meet Modi in the evening over dinner. On Saturday morning, there might be some more discussions before Jinping flies to Nepal. “At the invitation of Prime Minister Modi of the Republic of India and President Bhandari of Nepal, President Xi Jinping will attend the second informal meeting between Chinese and Indian leaders in India and pay a state visit to Nepal from Oct. 12 to 13,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said. India’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that “the forthcoming Chennai Informal Summit will provide an opportunity for the two leaders to continue their discussions on overarching issues of bilateral, regional and global importance and to exchange views on deepening the IndiaChina Closer Development Partnership.”
There was a lot of uncertainty surrounding the summit, with both countries not confirming the date until the last minute.
Political analysts said that it is unusual for such a high-level summit to be announced just two days before it is scheduled to take place. In April 2018, when the first informal summit took place in Wuhan, the itinerary of the meet was announced five days in advance. The summit comes just a couple of days after Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s visit to Beijing with a high-level delegation.
The upcoming meeting will allow the leadership of the world’s most populated countries to discuss a range of issues and bilateral relations, which seem to have cooled after India’s unilateral decision to revoke the special autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir on Aug. 5.
Beijing took an aggressive stance on Kashmir at the UN, with Foreign Minister Wang Yi saying in his address that no unilateral action should be taken to change the region’s status.