New Delhi, Sep 13: Chinese President Xi Jinping wrapped up his two-day visit to New Delhi on Sunday after attending the BRICS summit and holding a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on its sidelines.
Xi arrived on Saturday accompanied by a large delegation of officials and businessmen. This was his first visit to India after about seven years.
In his address at the concluding session of the BRICS Summit on Sunday, Xi said BRICS should leverage its close ties with emerging markets and the Global South to safeguard supply chains and foster a large integrated market, as he proposed a five-point initiative to boost trade, manufacturing, investment and technology cooperation.
He called upon the leaders of the grouping to work towards writing a “new chapter of strength through unity for the Global South,” asserting that the logic that “might makes right” should have been discarded long ago.
The talks between Modi and Xi held on the sidelines of the BRICS summit on Saturday covered a range of issues, including reducing their trade deficit, tackling challenges like terrorism and ensuring fair trade in multilateral platforms.
A Chinese readout said Xi made four specific points on promoting the steady and sustained development of China-India relations that included calibrating the direction of the ties with a clear objective to move forward and considering each other as partners rather than rivals.
The two leaders reaffirmed that both the countries should take a strategic and long-term perspective of their ties and differences should not become disputes, according to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA).
On economic front, Modi and Xi underlined the need to address each other’s concerns, including structural trade imbalance and supply chain issues, and facilitation of meaningful and predictable market access, the MEA said.
The two leaders expressed commitment to a “fair, reasonable, and mutually acceptable” resolution of the boundary question proceeding from the political perspective of their overall bilateral relations and the long-term interests of the two sides, it said.
In his remarks, PM Modi highlighted that both sides must be “guided by three mutuals — mutual respect, mutual sensitivity and mutual interest” in the ties.
After over four years of frosty ties over the eastern Ladakh military standoff, India and China began to repair relations following a meeting between Modi and Xi in the Russian city of Kazan in October 2024 that took place after the face-off ended.
In his address to the BRICS summit on Saturday, he said that the BRICS cooperation mechanism has become the world’s most influential platform for cooperation among emerging markets and developing countries and called on the grouping to play its “due role” in bringing peace in West Asia.
Xi noted that this year marks the 20th anniversary of BRICS cooperation and that over the past two decades, the BRICS cooperation mechanism has continued to grow and expand, and has demonstrated remarkable vitality and dynamism.
