The Chinese foreign minister will make a surprise visit to India for talks in New Delhi on Friday, an Indian official said, although none of the side has formally announced it. Since the deadly clashes along the border in 2020, this will be the highest-level visit from Beijing.
Foreign Minister Wang Yi attended a conference of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Pakistan this week and is further scheduled to visit Nepal on Friday.
According to reports, Wang Yi is scheduled to meet National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. While the agenda is unclear as of now, it is expected that they will be discussing the Ukraine conflict, along with their own Himalayan conflict.
The Indian foreign ministry did not respond on the request for confirmation, while the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said on Wednesday at a news briefing that he had no information at the moment to offer.
Notably, neither China nor India has condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Moscow, which refers to its actions in Ukraine as a “special military operation”, sees China and India as its friendly nations, and has cultivated strong diplomatic and economic allegiance since the Cold War.
Relations between China and Indian went down in June 2020, when 20 Indian and over 38 Chinese soldiers were killed during a high altitude skirmish on a disputed border front in the western Himalayas.
Without naming anyone, he went on to say that “some forces” had tried to create conflict and division between the two countries.
Other than the tensions in the eastern sector bordering China, India’s mistrust on China arises from Beijing supporting its old adversary Pakistan, the competition for influence in Nepal, and the concerns over China’s economic influence in Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.
In the recent weeks, India has been at the centre stage with a gust of visits and phone calls from senior officials from countries such as Australia, Britain, Japan and the United States.
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Since then, India has banned multiple Chinese firms from operating in the country.
Wang Yi said at an annual news briefing in Beijing this month that Asia’s two largest nations should help each other accomplish goals, rather than “draining each others’ energies”.
