Beijing: Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to hold two bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the SCO summit in Tianjin on Sunday, as both nations look to strengthen ties amid global trade tensions sparked by US President Donald Trump.
PM Modi, who will arrive in Tianjin on Saturday evening from Japan, will have a bilateral meeting with President Xi around Sunday noon and a possible second one before the official banquet of the SCO summit, according to sources.
On Monday, the Prime Minister will take part in the SCO Summit and is likely to have a bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin before leaving for home.
The summit of the 10-member bloc is regarded as significant and most consequential from the point of view of India-China relations in the current context of a sudden downturn in India-US ties after Trump imposed 50 per cent tariffs on Indian exports.
This will be Modi’s first visit to China in seven years, perhaps the most significant.
Though Modi is expected to have bilateral meetings with several leaders, his meeting with Xi will be the most watched one, not simply in India and China but all around the world.
The outcome of the meeting was expected to set the tone for the future course of bilateral relations, which, experts say, looks bright as the two countries faced the brunt of Trump’s tariffs.
Xi and Modi met last year at Kazan on the sidelines of the BRICS summit, which ended over a four-year deadlock or freeze in the bilateral ties over the military tensions in Eastern Ladakh.
Modi and Xi know each other well. Before the Ladakh tensions, they met numerous times in bilateral and multilateral summits, including informal summits, spending quality time to understand each other. Since the Kazan meeting, the two sides have stepped up wide-ranging interactions.
Special Representatives for the boundary issue, NSA Ajit Doval and his counterpart Wang Yi, have held two rounds of talks in the last nine months to set the tone for the normalisation process of the bilateral relations.
This month’s Doval-Wang meeting, which took place in the backdrop of Trump’s tariff tirade against India, has breathed new momentum into the Sino-Indian relations, which had a chequered history in the last seven decades.
The two officials even spoke of an early harvest of the boundary issue, which is rarely heard in the fraught India-China relations.
In this background, the Modi-Xi meeting acquires significance and raises expectations that they may provide a broader roadmap for enhanced ties. with agency inputs