Xi-Modi meeting a new milestone, experts say

BEIJING -- President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi held an informal meeting Friday and Saturday in the Central Chinese city of Wuhan, underscoring mutual trust and cooperation.

The Xi-Modi meeting has become a new milestone in the development of China-India bilateral relations, said Russian expert Boris Volkhonsky, associate professor of the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Moscow State University.

"The meeting is of great symbolic significance ... It will undoubtedly give impetus and new dynamics to China-India relations," Volkhonsky told Xinhua.

Volkhonsky said addressing global development issues without the participation of China and India is simply impossible. Building trust between the two largest countries in the region would contribute to global peace and stability, he added.

The historic "informal" summit between Xi and Modi would lead to consensus on many long-pending issues between India and China, and it would usher in a new world order of "equals," said Prof. Manoranjan Mohanty, former chairperson of India's premier Institute of Chinese Studies.

This was a milestone like former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's visit in 1988, Mohanty told Xinhua.

Being billed as an informal summit which did not focus on specific issues, the meeting could be an occasion for a frank exchange of views, said Mohanty, who is the incumbent chairperson of the Bhubaneswar-based Development Research Institute.

The important thing was to recognize that it's a new framework for the relationship that the two countries want to develop, in which three things have become important and apparent, said the Indian analyst on China.

First, respecting each other as equals; second, it is a comprehensive framework, not issue-bound; third, it is not about gains in a power-relationship in a particular sphere, but about 2,000 years of history and the future, Mohanty said.

So this is a new framework that has emerged in the two countries' understanding of each other, the expert said.

"The bilateral tete-a-tete may well prove a game-changer," said Alka Acharya, who teaches at the Center for East Asian Studies at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University. Acharya, along with many of the Indian media and strategists, was upbeat about the Xi-Modi meeting.

Not that one informal summit between the two leaders would solve the major bilateral problems between India and China, she was quoted as saying by "The Daily Star," the largest English-language newspaper in Bangladesh.

Given their divergences on a host of issues, the fact that Modi and Xi were meeting again is viewed in New Delhi and Beijing as an indication that bilateral ties are resilient, the daily said in an opinion piece published before Xi and Modi met.