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Chinese foreign minister to visit India this week to attend SCO meeting
Several key meetings in the run-up to the summit have already been held in India including the national security advisers’ meeting on March 29 and the defence ministers’ meeting in late April
Beijing: Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang will visit India to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s (SCO) foreign ministers’ meeting this week, his second visit to India in two months.
“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 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 that Qin “will exchange views with other SCO member states’ foreign ministers on the international and regional situation and SCO cooperation in various fields, among other topics, to make full preparation for this year’s SCO summit.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin are expected to attend SCO summit in New Delhi on July 3 and 4.
Several key meetings in the run-up to the summit have already been held in India including the national security advisers’ meeting on March 29 and the defence ministers’ meeting in late April.
Chinese defence minister Li Shangfu attended the defence ministers’ meeting in late April, which was 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 during the meeting, their first since Qin took over as China’s foreign minister, replacing Wang Yi.
“The two sides should implement the important consensus between the leaders of the two countries, maintain dialogue, settle differences, and promote the improvement of bilateral relations as soon as possible and move forward steadily,” Qin said, according to a Chinese foreign ministry readout released on March 3, several hours after the bilateral meeting took place in New Delhi.
On his part, Jaishankar had described the Sino-Indian ties as “abnormal” during his talks with Qin, adding that their conversation was about the challenges in bilateral ties, especially for restoring peace and tranquillity in the 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 said, according to a report by the Press Trust of India.
