Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang to visit India for SCO diplomats' meet

Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang will travel to India to take part in the two-day Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) foreign ministers' meeting which will kick off on Thursday (4) in Goa, the country's foreign ministry in Beijing said on Tuesday (2).

Qin will attend the upcoming SCO foreign ministers' meeting in Panaji, the capital of Goa, the announcement said.

At the meeting, Qin will exchange views with other counterparts on the international and regional situation and cooperation among the member states in various fields, besides other topics, to make full preparation for this year's SCO summit, the statement said.

India is holding the presidency of the SCO, which also comprises Pakistan, Russia, the four central Asian republics of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and new entrant Iran.

This will be Qin's second visit to India as the foreign minister inside two months. He took over as the foreign minister in December last year.

In early March, he visited India to take part in the G20 foreign ministers' meeting during which he also held talks with his Indian counterpart Subrahmanyam Jaishankar on the current round of India-China tensions over the Chinese military actions in eastern Ladakh in May 2020, leading to a four-year standoff.

In his meeting with Qin, Jaishankar had said the state of India-China ties is "abnormal" and there are real problems in the bilateral ties which needed to be open and candid dialogue.

"It's our first meeting after he took over as foreign minister. We spent maybe about 45 minutes talking to each other and the bulk of our conversation, understandably, was about the current state of our relationship, which many of you have heard me describe as abnormal," Jaishankar told reporters after he met with Qin on March 2.

"And those were among the adjectives that I used in that meeting. There are real problems in that relationship that need to be looked at, that need to be discussed very openly and candidly between us," he had said.

Before travelling to India for his latest visit, Qin will visit Myanmar starting Tuesday. The visit to Myanmar is aimed to further follow through on the outcomes of Chinese president Xi Jinping's visit to the country in January 2020, deepen practical cooperation in such fields as economy and livelihood, and support Myanmar's efforts to maintain stability, revitalise the economy, improve people's lives, and realise sustainable development, an official statement in Beijing said. 

(With PTI inputs)