Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi could meet at least three times this year, with both of them together at different multilateral events, to take forward a friendship forged during their informal summit in Wuhan, said China’s ambassador to India, Luo Zhaohui, on Friday.

Addressing a seminar here on the ‘Wuhan Summit: Sino-india Relations and its Way Forward’, Luo said Modi and Xi arrived at a broad consensus on the overarching, long-term and strategic issues of global and bilateral importance during their two-day informal summit in Wuhan last week. It was seen as an effort by India and China to rebuild trust and improve ties hit by the Doklam standoff last year.

Giving a first-hand briefing to scholars and journalists on the informal summit, which he dubbed as a “very special event” in Chinese diplomacy, Luo noted that Xi has never hosted a foreign leader twice outside the Chinese capital Beijing. Xi hosted Modi in the central city of X’ian in 2015 and then in Wuhan.

“This shows that China attaches high importance to its relations with India,” he said.

The envoy said the idea of holding an informal summit was first mooted by Modi when he met Xi on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Astana, Kazakhstan, in 2017. After that, the two sides worked very hard to make it happen, he said.

Luo said Xi and Modi will have three more opportunities this year to carry forward their fruitful and wide-ranging conversations in Wuhan.

Luo said the two leaders could meet at the next SCO summit in June in Qingdao, China, the BRICS Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the G20 Summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina.he said the officials of the two countries were working to facilitate these meetings and implement the consensus reached in Wuhan.

Luo said the two leaders had in-depth discussions and reached consensus on their respective visions for national development as well as domestic and foreign policies.

China and India, the two biggest developing countries and emerging economies, each with a population of over one billion, are important countries with strategic autonomy.

“A peaceful, stable and balanced relationship between China and India is an important positive factor for the stability of the world,” he said.

On the differences between China and India, including the boundary issue, the envoy said the two leaders have given strategic guidance to the officials on both sides to properly manage and control their differences.

Courtesy: Hindustan Times: 5 May 2018: New Delhi