Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping on April 27-28 in Wuhan city, ahead of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in June. The two have met more than five times since Modi took office in 2014, the last one being on the sidelines of Brics in 2017.
The informal summit in, on the banks of Yangtze river, is expected to focus more on points of convergence. It is being seen as a move to get the India-China ties back on track following the Doklam stand-off last year.
China’s foreign minister Wang Yi, made this announcement while addressing a joint press conference with India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj On April 23. China will make sure the informal summit between the two leaders will prove to be a milestone in the relation between the two countries, he added.
Currently, Swaraj is on a two-nation visit to China and Mongolia. She will attend the SCO foreign ministers’ meet, on April 24, in Beijing.
The two countries have a complex relationship peppered with old and new issues. Old ones include the border dispute, India sheltering the Dalai Lama and Beijing’s ties with Islamabad combined and the new ones, include China’s increasing clout in south Asia.