External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar will make his first visit to China in the second week of August to finalise the preparations for President Xi Jinping's visit to India later this year for the second informal summit with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
While officials are tightly lipped about the schedule of his visit, an invitation being circulated to the media here by the China Public Diplomacy Association said Jaishankar along with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi would hold the 2nd India-China People-to-People exchange mechanism.
They would also address the 4th India-China Media Summit Forum on August 12, it said.
The first meeting of the People-to-People exchange mechanism at the level of Foreign Ministers was held in December in New Delhi and co-chaired by the then External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Wang.
At the meeting, heads of relevant departments of China and India had in-depth discussions and reached broad consensus on exchanges and cooperation in fields such as culture, media, film and television, museums, sports, youth, tourism, locality, traditional medicine and yoga, education and think tanks.
Jaishankar, who was the first career diplomat to become the External Affairs Minister, served as India's Ambassador to China from 2009 to 2013, the longest tenure by an Indian envoy.
While there is no official announcement, he was expected to visit Beijing from August 11 to 12.
He will be the first Indian minister to visit China after the Modi government began its second term.
During his visit, Jaishankar is expected to hold wide-ranging talks with Wang to finalise President Xi's visit which officials say would set the tone for the bilateral ties for the next five years.
Modi and Xi, who struck a personal rapport during their meetings on various forums in the last five years, set the bilateral relations back on track with their first-ever informal summit last year at Wuhan after a 73-day standoff at Doklam between the two militaries.
Xi’s visit to India, expected in October, may provide a roadmap for the bilateral ties in all areas including addressing India’s concerns over the yawning trade deficit which last year crossed over USD 57 billion in the USD 95.5 billion total trade.
Both sides expect the trade to cross USD 100 billion this year.
China's new Ambassador to India Sun Weidong, who took over his assignment recently, said before his visit to Delhi that with the improvement of relations after the Wuhan summit both the countries "need to do more" than managing differences with new initiatives to resolve disputes and differences.
"This year the two leaders are going to hold another informal meeting. I believe, this will be a top priority in our bilateral relations which will surely take our relations on to new heights," he said.
On the border dispute, he said, "I think an early settlement of the boundary issue is in line with the interests of the two peoples and two countries."
"But before we finally reach a solution to the boundary dispute we should properly manage our differences to ensure peace and tranquillity in the border areas," Sun said.
India-China border dispute covered 3,488-km and the two countries have so far held 21 rounds of border talks to resolve it.
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