First in six months: Jaishankar meets China counterpart

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi have met briefly in Germany on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, their first meeting in more than six months.

Video footage from the Munich Security Conference showed Jaishankar and Wang having a brief chat on the sidelines of the prestigious event attended by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other top diplomats from across the world.

However, there is no official word on the gist of their discussion from both capitals.
This was the first meeting between the two leaders in over six months. The two last met in July in the Indonesian capital Jakarta at the ASEAN Regional Forum.

The India-China relations have remained frozen since May 2020 when the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) amassed troops in eastern Ladakh led to a deadly clash.
Since then both countries have held 20 rounds of corps commanders-level talks and agreed to pull back forces at four points.

India is pressing the PLA to disengage from the Depsang and Demchok areas, maintaining that there cannot be restoration of normalcy in its relations with China as long as the state of the borders remains abnormal.

Wang along with Jaishankar and a host of ministers from various countries attended the Munich Security Conference, an important forum for the exchange of views by global policymakers. Wang in his address to the conference on Saturday said protectionism and concerns about security have impacted the world economy, while unilateralism and bloc politics have dealt a heavy blow to the international system, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The Ukraine crisis has dragged on and intensified, and conflicts in the Middle East have flared up again, Wang said, adding that new challenges have emerged one after another, such as artificial intelligence, climate change and polar regions in space.

China will work with the United States to implement the common understandings reached by their heads of state and push China-US relations forward on the right path of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation, he said.

China will push for the stable development of relations with Russia and promote strategic stability in the Asia-Pacific region and the world at large, meanwhile, adhering to the China-EU partnership and injecting positive energy into endeavours addressing turbulence, he said.