New Delhi:  The Modi-Xi summit in Wuhan was not just a "talk shop", but both leaders took real decisions and there was a consensus , which will be implemented, said Luo Zhaohui, China's ambassador to India.

Speaking to journalists on Friday Zhaohui gave an ac­count of the summit, its driv­ers and the outcomes at the end of the series of meetings. The way forward for both gov­ernments, he said, were "im­plementation, transmission and action."It was important, he added, to build personal re­lationships between the lead­ers, which helped to imple­ment decisions taken at meet­ings such as this.

Modi and Xi met for nine hours through seven ses­sions of which four were one-on-one meetings. "We want­ed Modi ji to feel like he had come home," he said. The ta­ble covers at the summit meeting, he said, came from Gujarat, and Chinese chefs were employed to cook Gujarati delicacies. "In 2014, when President Xi visited Modi ji on his birthday, he gave him a vegetarian cake," Zhaohui said emphasising the person­al relationship that the two leaders had built.

The "informal summit' he said, had been decided during the Xiamen meeting, and both sides worked hard to make a success of it, he said. While there have been several bilateral summits, for China it was different this time in three ways — it was held outside Beijing, there was no set agenda and the two leaders dwelt in depth on global and strategic issues.

India, he said, spoke about the trade deficit and wants China to open up its market to Indian sugar, pharmaceutical products and non-basmati rice. On Thursday, Zhaohui had tweeted, "China has ex­empted import tariffs for 28 drugs from May 1. Good news for India's pharmaceutical in­dustry and medicine export to China. I believe this will help reduce trade imbalance be­tween China and India in the future." This, he said, was the first of several steps that will be taken. "President Xi asked the relevant ministries to see how China can import more from India," he said.

India and China had agreed to work on realising the BCIM (Bangladesh, Chi­na, India and Myanmar) grouping, as well as on a joint project in Afghanistan, Zhaohui said. On Thursday, when questioned, the MEA spokesperson said identifi­cation of the project was still in progress.

Narendra Modi and Chi­nese President Xi Jinping will meet on three other occasions through the rest of this year —at the SCO summit in Qingdao, BRICS summit in South Africa in July and at the G-20 summit in Argentina.

Both countries, he said, are focusing a fair amount of attention to "soft power cooperation" — this would include tourism, Buddhism, spiritualism, traditional medicine, films, sports etc. "President Xi told Modi ji that he had seen both Dangal and Secret Superstar."

Modi, he said explained to Xi the Indian strategy of "neighbourhood first" as well as the India development story Xi, for his part, spoke about his vision for Made in China 2025, climate change and other things. Zhaohui said Xi was surprised to find that Modi had visited the fa­mous Three Gorges Dam. "Modi ji had visited China four times when he was chief minister of Gujarat."

Courtesy: Times of India, Editorial, 5-5-2018.