New Delhi: External affairs minister S Jaishankar is expected to visit China in the third week of July to attend a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) foreign ministers’ meeting and for bilateral meetings with key Chinese leaders, people familiar with the matter said.
This will be Jaishankar’s first visit to China since bilateral relations were taken to their lowest point in six decades by a military standoff in Ladakh sector of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) that began in April-May 2020. Since India and China reached an understanding on ending the face-off last October, Jaishankar has met his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on the margins of multilateral events several times.
Jaishankar is expected to travel to Beijing for a bilateral meeting with Wang before going to Tianjin for the meeting of the SCO Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs on July 14 and 15, the people said on condition of anonymity. The bilateral meeting will be part of an ongoing series of meetings between senior Indian and Chinese officials to normalise relations and find a solution to the long-standing border dispute.
Efforts to speed up de-escalation and withdrawal of troops to peacetime positions along the LAC and measures to normalise ties in areas such as trade and people-to-people contacts are expected to figure in Jaishankar’s discussions with Wang, the people said. While the two sides recently agreed to revive the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra in Tibet after a gap of five years, Beijing has pushed for normalisation of trade and resumption of direct flights.
{{/usCountry}}Efforts to speed up de-escalation and withdrawal of troops to peacetime positions along the LAC and measures to normalise ties in areas such as trade and people-to-people contacts are expected to figure in Jaishankar’s discussions with Wang, the people said. While the two sides recently agreed to revive the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra in Tibet after a gap of five years, Beijing has pushed for normalisation of trade and resumption of direct flights.
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The Indian side has also taken up China’s export curbs on rare earth minerals – which are used in everything from smartphones to electric vehicles and in many of which Beijing has a near monopoly – and long-standing concerns about lack of adequate access to Chinese markets.
National security adviser Ajit Doval visited China last December and in June to attend a meeting of the SCO Security Council Secretaries in Beijing. Doval and Wang, who are the Special Representatives for the border issue, also held a bilateral meeting. This was followed by a visit by defence minister Rajnath Singh to attend a meeting of the SCO defence ministers in Qingdao. At a meeting with his Chinese counterpart Dong Jun, Singh called for a structured roadmap for “permanent engagement and de-escalation” and pushed for a “permanent solution of border demarcation”.
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The upcoming SCO Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs meeting will be closely watched to see if it produces a joint communique. The SCO defence ministers’ meeting last month was unable to issue a communique as India refused to endorse the document when Pakistan insisted that it couldn’t refer to the Pahalgam terror attack.
Jaishankar is also expected to have bilateral meetings with his counterparts from Russia and several Central Asian states on the margins of the SCO meet.
The Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs usually meets a month ahead of the SCO Summit. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to attend this year’s summit, and this will be his first visit to China since the military standoff on the LAC.