PM Modi to host China’s Xi Jinping for informal summit

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will host Chinese President Xi Jinping this year for an informal summit, an Indian foreign ministry spokesman said on Wednesday, after meeting several times over the past year to try to defuse tension.

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on Wednesday said that India and China were in touch with each other to finalise the date and venue for the next informal summit between the heads of two states.

The two held their first informal summit in Wuhan in April 2018 and at that meeting Xi had accepted Modi’s invitation to come to India for a second meeting.

“You invited us for the first summit and today that dream has come true and I am happy that this informal summit will develop into a regular practice and I would be delighted to get an opportunity to host such an informative summit in 2019 on the soil of India,” Modi had said.

“The two sides are in touch, through diplomatic channels, to finalise the date and venue for the meeting,” the spokesman said.

The MEA also said that Jinping had accepted Modi's invitation and the details about his visit will be announced soon.

Besides this, Jinping and Modi will also meet on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit and the G20 Osaka summit scheduled for next month.

The two nations will have several ministerial-level engagements this year, including a foreign ministers' meeting, to prepare the ground for the second informal summit between, a senior Indian diplomat had said on Monday.

Modi and Xi met on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Buenos Aires in November last year.

In Wuhan, the two leaders had held long discussions on the Doklam standoff, which lasted almost three months, and other economic engagements between two Asian giants.