On Friday, China officially announced the impending visit by Prime Minister Narendra Modi from August 31 to September 1 to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin. The spokesperson of the Chinese foreign ministry, Guo Jiakun, when he answered a question by the media, said that China is interested in having Prime Minister Modi visit China at the upcoming SCO summit in Tianjin. “We hope that through the goodwill of all concerned parties, the summit shall be a summit of solidarity, friendship, and productive outcomes. SCO will now move into the phase of high-quality development with additional solidarity, coordination, dynamism, and productivity.”
It has been projected that since PM Shri Modi is visiting China at the time of the SCO Summit, he will also visit Japan at the time of the annual bilateral summit with his counterpart in Japan, Shigeru Ishiba. This is the first time he has visited China after seven years. Modi had last visited the country in 2018, during which he had a bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Wuhan during the informal summit in April, and the SCO Summit in Qingdao in June.
Indian and Chinese relations, however, deteriorated significantly in 2020 following the clashes of violence between the two countries in the Galwan Valley that led to the death of 20 Indians and at least four Chinese soldiers. This followed clashes in the Ladakh region of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in April-May 2020 and took bilateral relations to their lowest in six decades.
Later, in a positive development, the two countries agreed on October 21, 2024, to end a long LAC standoff. A mere two days later, PM Modi and President Xi met at Kazan in Russia, and they decided to restart significant processes to normalise relations and to discuss the matter of the boundary dispute. The upcoming Tianjin summit is also being considered as a possible avenue through which such reconciliation efforts can be advanced at the same time, intensifying multilateral cooperation.
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