China ready to work with India: Wang Yi
China is ready to work with India towards achieving “sound growth” of bilateral ties, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said in a year-end review of Beijing’s diplomacy in 2022 on Sunday, weeks after Chinese troops attempted to transgress the Line of Actual Control (LAC) at Yangtse in Tawang sector and were pushed back by Indian soldiers
China is ready to work with India towards achieving “sound growth” of bilateral ties, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said in a year-end review of Beijing’s diplomacy in 2022 on Sunday, weeks after Chinese troops attempted to transgress the Line of Actual Control (LAC) at Yangtse in Tawang sector and were pushed back by Indian soldiers.
Wang’s statement also comes amid the dragging India-China border row, which erupted in eastern Ladakh in 2020 but now threatens to disrupt the fragile peace in other parts of the disputed boundary as well.
“China and India have maintained communication through the diplomatic and military-to-military channels, and both countries are committed to upholding stability in the border areas,” Wang, who is a member of the Communist party’s Politburo and a state councillor, said at a symposium on “International Situation and China’s Foreign Relations”.
Wang’s speech at the symposium was released by the Chinese foreign ministry on Sunday.
“We stand ready to work with India in the direction toward steady and sound growth of China-India relations,” he said in a brief mention of the state of India-China ties, which have plunged to their lowest in decades since May 2020.
Indian and Chinese troops clashed as recently as on December 9 in the Tawang sector of Arunachal Pradesh in the eastern sector of the Line of Actual Control (LAC), thousands of kilometres from Ladakh, which experts say could be a sign of mistrust and suspicion not only between the two armies but between New Delhi and Beijing.
“There was hand-to-hand fighting between Chinese and Indian troops on December 9. Indian troops stopped PLA (People’s Liberation Army) troops from entering our territory,” defence minister Rajnath Singh told Parliament recently.
Thousands of troops remain deployed on both sides of the LAC, though frontline soldiers have disengaged from most of the friction points that were at the centre of the dispute in 2020.
The 17th round of army commander-level talks held last earlier this week did not yield much, though the two sides issued a joint statement, promising to meet again. There was little indication of any forward movement from the joint statement.
The corps commanders of the two countries held talks on the Chinese side of the Chushul-Moldo border meeting point on December 20. The two sides agreed to maintain “security and stability on the ground in the Western Sector” of the LAC.
“The two sides agreed to stay in close contact and maintain dialogue through military and diplomatic channels and work out a mutually acceptable resolution of the remaining issues at the earliest,” the joint statement read.
India has consistently maintained that peace and tranquility along the LAC are critical for the overall development of bilateral relations with China. India’s external affairs minister S Jaishankar has said the normalisation of India-China relations is in the interest of the countries and the region.
In November, Jaishankar told China’s outgoing ambassador Sun Weidong that the “3 Mutuals” — mutual respect, mutual sensitivity and mutual interest — should guide India-China ties and that “peace and tranquility in the border areas is essential”.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping did not hold bilateral talks during the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, in September, though they shook hands briefly at the G20 summit in Bali in November. This was a long way from their walks in a manicured garden in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in 2018, or the beaches of Mamallapuram in 2019.
