China proposes visits, events to revive India talks

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Two years into a military deadlock along the actual control line in Ladakh, Beijing has reached New Delhi to revive bilateral dialogue and set the stage for KTT BRICS (Russia-Russia-India-China-South Africa) in China later this year.

Beijing has proposed a series of events to start a dialogue, starting with the possibility of high-level visits from both parties.

To start, Beijing has submitted a visit by members of the Chinese State Council and Foreign Minister Wang Yi to India earlier this month. This was followed by reciprocal visits by the Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar. The Chinese side has also proposed a series of high-level visits by top politbiro members and major officials in the President XI Jinping regime.

The Chinese have also proposed ‘Indian-Chinese civilization dialogue’ which will be held in both countries. They have also proposed India-China trade and investment work forum and Indian-China film forum.

But the main and clear purpose of China is to hold Prime Minister Narendra Modi for direct strics summit which will be attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin too. China, who also holds a chair for the Trilateral Ric (Russian-India-China) this year, can also hold the peak of the leader on the sidelines of the BRICS summit.

In the current state, politically it is difficult for mod to attending direct meetings with XI – when the border deadlock is still unresolved. Their last face-to-face meeting was in Brazil for the BRICS summit in November 2019. In October 2019, XI had visited India for the informal Summit in Mahabalipuram.

The last stric summit that took place in China was in Xiamen in September 2017 which was attended by Modi. In fact, the deadlock Doklam border was completed after two and a half months, just before the KTT strics.

This time, by reaching out to the proposed Minister of Foreign Minister’s visit, Beijing indicated that it wanted to bring a bond back to his track.