PM Modi to visit China from April 27-28 for summit talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping will hold an informal summit in China's Wuhan city from April 27 to 28 to exchange views on bilateral and international matters and to enhance mutual communication between the two leaders, China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi announced here today.

Prime Minister Modi will be visiting the central Chinese city at the invitation of President Xi, Wang said at a joint media event with visiting External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj after their talks.

"The two leaders will have communications of a strategic nature concerning the once in a century shifts going on in the world. They will also exchange views on overarching long-term and strategic matters concerning the future of China-India relations," Wang said.

"The informal summit will be an important occasion for them to exchange views on bilateral and international matters from an over-arching and long-term perspective with the objective of enhancing mutual communication at the level of leaders," Swaraj said.

Swaraj is in China for talks with Wang and to take part in the two-day meeting of Foreign Ministers of the eight-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) from tomorrow.

Informed sources told PTI that it will be an informal summit meeting between Xi and Modi during which both leaders will try to work out a new paradigm for the bilateral ties bogged down with a host of disputes and differences.

This will be fourth visit of Modi to China after he came to power in 2014. He is again due to visit China to take part in the SCO summit to be held at Qingdao city on June 9-10.

The Modi-Xi summit meeting is taking place in the backdrop of series of high level interactions between both the two countries starting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang's visit to India in December, the first after Dokalam standoff.

It was followed by two meetings between National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi and the visit early this year by Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale to Beijing.

The two countries also held 11th Joint Economic Group meeting and the fifth Strategic Economic Dialogue (SED) here recently.

Besides meetings between officials from the two foreign ministries on both sides held working mechanism meeting on border affairs and cross border rivers as well disarmament and non-proliferation dialogue in which India's entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) was discussed and culminated in today's talks between Swaraj and Wang.