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Chinese foreign minister to visit India for SCO meet
Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang will visit India to attend the SCO foreign ministers’ meeting this week, his second trip to the country in two months, and also travel to Myanmar to deepen cooperation.
Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang will visit India to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) foreign ministers’ meeting this week, his second trip to the country in two months, and also travel to Myanmar to deepen cooperation.
“From May 2 to 5, Chinese state councillor and foreign minister Qin Gang will visit Myanmar and attend the meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the SCO in India,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning announced on Tuesday.
“The upcoming SCO foreign ministers’ meeting will be held on May 4 and 5 in Panaji, the capital of Goa, India,” Mao said, adding Qin will exchange views with counterparts from SCO member states on the international and regional situation and SCO cooperation in various fields. These deliberations will help prepare for the SCO summit in July, she said.
There were also indications that Qin is expected to travel to Pakistan following the SCO meeting, with reports saying the UN Security Council has cleared a visit to Islamabad by Taliban acting foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi for a meeting with his Pakistani and Chinese counterparts.
The Taliban’s top leadership is currently subject to a travel ban and all visits by the group’s leaders have to be cleared by a sanctions committee under the UN Security Council. Reports said a letter sent to the Taliban sanctions committee by Pakistan’s UN mission requested an exemption for Muttaqi to travel during May 6-9 “for a meeting with the foreign ministers of Pakistan and China”.
Both China and Pakistan have spoken of a role for the Taliban administration in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.
China’s foreign ministry said Qin’s visit to Myanmar will follow-up on the outcomes of President Xi Jinping’s trip to that country in January 2020 and to deepen cooperation in areas such as the economy. The visit will also Myanmar’s efforts to maintain stability.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin are expected to attend the SCO Summit in New Delhi during July 3-4.
Several key meetings in the runup to the summit have already been hosted by India, including the national security advisors’ meeting on March 29 and the defence ministers’ meeting in late April.
Chinese defence minister Li Shangfu attended the defence ministers’ meeting – the first visit to India by a Chinese defence minister since the Galwan Valley clash in June 2020 and the subsequent chill in bilateral ties.
Qin visited India in early March to attend the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in New Delhi, where he told external affairs minister S Jaishankar that India and China should put the border problem in its “appropriate” place and ease the situation to “normalised control”.
“We should put the border issue in the appropriate place in bilateral relations and promote the early shift of the border situation to normalised control,” Qin told Jaishankar at the meeting, their first since Qin replaced Wang Yi as China’s foreign minister.
The two sides should maintain dialogue, settle differences and promote the improvement of bilateral ties “as soon as possible and move forward steadily”, Qin said, according to a Chinese foreign ministry readout.
On his part, Jaishankar described Sino-Indian ties as “abnormal” during his talks with Qin, adding that their conversation was about challenges in bilateral relations, especially for restoring peace and tranquillity in border areas.
“It’s our first meeting after he took over as foreign minister. We spent maybe about 45 minutes talking to each other…about the current state of our relationship, which many of you heard me describe as abnormal and I think those were among the adjectives I used in that meeting,” Jaishankar had said at the time.
