Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Sept 10: Ending the days of diplomatic suspense, China announced on Thursday that the President Xi Jinping would be visiting India this weekend to attend the BRICS Summit in New Delhi starting from September 12, marking his first visit in about seven years.
“At the invitation of Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, Chinese President Xi Jinping will attend the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi from September 12 to 13,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
Mr Xi last visited India in October, 2019 for an informal meeting with the Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Mamallapuram near Chennai. The visit was followed by a deterioration in bilateral ties after the 2020 Galwan Valley border clashes. He had earlier travelled to India in 2016 to attend the BRICS summit in Goa. His first visit to the country came in September 2014, when he held extensive talks with Modi during the first terms of both leaders in office.
Mr Xi and Mr Modi are again expected to meet for bilateral talks on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in New Delhi. Mr Xi will be accompanied by a large delegation, including Politburo member and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and Commerce Minister Wang Wentao, who is likely to have talks on the sidelines with the commerce minister Piyush Goyal.
The talks between the two trade ministers will give both sides the opportunity to take stock of a growing but challenging trade relationship and air their respective concerns, with India seeking an easing of export controls and China wanting further relaxation of investment restrictions.
Besides Xi Jinping, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Russian President Vladimir Putin, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto are among the prominent leaders set to attend the meeting.
With three days to go before the summit, it remains unclear whether the member countries have reached a consensus on a joint statement. Differences between Iran and the United Arab Emirates over the West Asia crisis could complicate efforts, particularly as BRICS operates on the principle of consensus.
The two-day BRICS summit, hosted by India from Saturday, will focus on strengthening collective resilience in areas including food, energy, healthcare, disaster management and critical supply chains, as the grouping seeks to play a greater role in navigating an increasingly fragmented geopolitical landscape.
The summit in New Delhi comes against the backdrop of mounting challenges to the global economy, including the Russia-Ukraine war, the West Asia crisis and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, as well as the trade and tariff policies of the Trump administration.
Originally comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, BRICS expanded in 2024 to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Indonesia joined the grouping in 2025.
Belarus, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Vietnam were added as partner countries last year.
BRICS has emerged as an influential grouping of major emerging economies, with its 11 members accounting for around 49.5 per cent of the world’s population, 40 per cent of global GDP and 26 per cent of global trade.
Under India’s chairmanship, the grouping’s agenda has centred on four key pillars: Resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability.
Beyond the outcomes in the summit, Mr Xi’s visit in itself holds enormous significance for the relationship in the view of India and Chinese officials, and for the continued normalisation process. Especially on the Chinese side, a visit by Mr Xi to India, after a seven-year gap, is seen as important signalling to the Chinese system on where relations are headed after a difficult period.
Bilateral ties between the two nations have improved in recent years, especially since PM Modi visited China last year and as both nations grapple with volatile relationships with the US. New Delhi has since then eased some of the restrictions on Chinese investment that it imposed following the 2020 clashes, focusing on electronics, capital goods, and solar cell sectors.
China’s foreign ministry had said Mr Xi and PM Modi, who briefly met this month at a regional forum in Kyrgyzstan, think the two countries were “partners, not competitors, and they represent opportunities, not threats, for each other’s development.” The bilateral trade between the two nations last year rose 12.4 per cent to a record $155 billion, more than double the $71.6 billion reported 10 years earlier, according to Chinese customs data. In the first seven months of this year, trade further jumped a 23 per cent compared with the same period a year ago.
With the upcoming summit, there was “a valuable opportunity to deepen China-India cooperation on issues of mutual concern, from trade and connectivity to climate action, public health and the digital economy, while contributing constructively to a more balanced, inclusive and equitable global order,” Indian Ambassador to China Vikram Doraiswami wrote in an article published on Thursday in the Communist Party-run Global Times.
“As two of the world’s most populous emerging economies, a stable, predictable and amicable relationship between India and China is not only in the interest of our 2.8 billion people, but is also a significant factor for peace, stability and prosperity in Asia and the wider world,” he said, adding that “peace and tranquillity in the China-India border areas provide an essential foundation for this partnership.”
In China, the visit by Mr Xi is being seen as an effort by both sides to keep ties stable, rather than as an indicator of any significant realignment. “I would describe it as strategic risk management rather than strategic realignment,” Hu Shisheng, Director of the South Asia Institute at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR) in Beijing said.
“Recent difficulties in India-U.S. relations may give New Delhi greater incentives to diversify its strategic options, while the relative stabilisation of China-U.S. ties reduces some of the external pressure on China-India relations. But the structural differences between China and India have not disappeared. What we are seeing is an attempt to build a more stable form of competitive coexistence – keeping the border peaceful, restoring practical cooperation, and expanding coordination through BRICS and the Global South without pretending that strategic competition no longer exists.”