Indian PM Modi to visit China in May
February 9, 2015, 5:13 am

The Modi government unveils its first full-year budget later this month [Xinhua]

Chinese and Indian officials are preparing for talks between Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping, said China’s ambassador to India, Le Yucheng in a Reuters interview.

“We have a come a long way in our relations. It’s not easy, we have achieved a lot, we want to expand our cooperation, we want to enhance cooperation and not vice versa,” said Le.

India and China fought a brief border war in 1962. They share a 2,000-km-long border that has never been formally delineated. The two countries began discussing border issues in the 1980s and signed a historic border accord in 2013.

On February 2, the foreign ministers of Russia, India and China met in Beijing to discuss a wide range of international and regional issues.

In a joint communique, the three nations vowed to “build a more just, fair and stable international political and economic order” and a “multi-polar” world.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said all states should be involved in creating “a modern security architecture” in the Asia-Pacific; his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi , said the region should not be caught up in a zero-sum game.

“We advocate the principle of partnership rather than alliance,” Wang said.

India, wooed aggressively by US President Barack Obama during a recent Delhi visit, has signed onto Chinese initiatives in the region like the RCEP trade talks and the landmark Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

China and India are also working on the ambitious “Bangladesh-India-Myanmar-China” (BIMC) economic corridor, a region host to 40 per cent of the world’s population. The planned corridor would run from Kunming to Kolkata, linking Mandalay in Myanmar as well as Dhaka and Chittagong in Bangladesh.

TBP