The report poked a sensitive spot in Sino-Indian ties but severely lacked factual evidence. The article was coarse, but was soon responded to by Indian media which were extremely excited to see such a topic. Thus it created a hotspot event almost instantaneously.
China has begun large-scale mining operations on its side of the disputed border with India in the Himalayas, where a huge trove of gold, silver and other precious minerals – valued at nearly US$60 billion by Chinese state geologists – has been found.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “informal” summit meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, significantly, began on the same day as the inter-Korean summit on April 27. That Xi chose the same date for the two-day summit might not have been a mere coincidence, given that the historic meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea left China on the sidelines, with little influence over those proceedings.
Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Central China, saying he expected their two-day informal meeting will open a new chapter in bilateral ties. Welcoming Modi’s visit to Wuhan, capital of Central China’s Hubei Province, Xi said in the past three years, he and Modi have established a good working relationship through mutual visits and meetings at multilateral events.
China will be keen to woo India away from a US alliance against Beijing when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi meets Chinese President Xi Jinping for informal talks in Wuhan this week, diplomatic observers said. The two days of talks starting on Friday come as China faces threats of US trade action and India seeks to put its economic development on track ahead of an election next year.
Leader-led engagement may not have come a day too soon for India and China. Few major bilateral relations in the world have been as bureaucratised as the one between Delhi and Beijing. A handful of professionals on both sides now speak in a code that few of their own foreign office colleagues can understand.
As the new year gets underway, and Chinese foreign policy analysts join their counterparts around the world in assessing the events of 2017, the emerging international relations (IR) discourse in Beijing is quite a revelation — at least to the Japanese and Indian strategic affairs community. While most Chinese believe Japan to be the second biggest threat to China’s “peaceful rise,” according to a few Chinese experts, the rising global profile of India, especially under the “right-wing” nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has gone unacknowledged.
The King and Queen of Bhutan—Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck and Jetsun Pema Wangchuck—begin a four-day visit to India on Tuesday. The visit is significant because this is their first since the end of a military standoff between India and China on Bhutan’s Dokalam plateau on 28 August. The King and Queen will be accompanied by their young son Jigme Namgyel Wangchuck, an Indian foreign ministry statement said.
Also read: In Letter To Tibetan Herders, Xi Sends Message On China’s Border Row With India
Beijing is fashioning water into a political weapon by denying India flood-related hydrological data since May, even as major flooding has hit the region from Assam to Uttar Pradesh. Data on upstream river flows is essential for flood forecasting and warning in order to save lives and reduce material losses. China’s data denial crimps flash flood modelling in India.
The two-month border standoff between China and India is not a huge concern for the Chinese business community in India because few are expecting a full-fledged war between the two Asian giants. The biggest worry for them is the chronic shortage of Chinese staff in India.
