China’s Xi to skip BRICS summit in New Delhi, PTI reports

Chinese President Xi Jinping will not attend the BRICS summit scheduled for Sept. 12-13 in New Delhi, the Press Trust of India reported Tuesday, citing sources. The decision comes ahead of National Security Adviser Ajit Doval's talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the latest round of special-representative discussions on the India-China boundary question.

Xi's absence would mark a break from the Kazan summit in October 2024, where he and Prime Minister Narendra Modi met and agreed that the two countries were development partners, not rivals. A trip to New Delhi would have been Xi's first in seven years. The Indian foreign ministry did not immediately confirm the report.

The PTI report was published shortly after the Indian embassy in Beijing said Doval had met Chinese Vice President Han Zheng on Tuesday. In a social media post, the embassy said the two discussed maintaining peace along the border and strengthening bilateral ties across economic, political and multilateral areas, building on the consensus reached between Modi and Xi.

Doval arrived in Beijing on Monday for the 25th round of Special Representatives talks, a mechanism established in 2003 to address the 3,488-km boundary. He is scheduled to meet Wang Yi later Tuesday. The two last met in June in New Delhi on the sidelines of the BRICS National Security Advisers meeting.