NEW DELHI: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit China for the first time in over seven years, a government source said on Wednesday, in a further sign of a diplomatic thaw with Beijing as tensions with the United States rise.
His trip will come at a time when India’s relationship with the US faces its most serious crisis in years after President Donald Trump imposed the highest tariffs among Asian peers on goods imported from India, and has threatened an unspecified further penalty for New Delhi’s purchases of Russian oil.
Modi’s visit to the Chinese city of Tianjin for the summit of the SCO, a Eurasian political and security grouping that includes Russia, will be his first since June 2018. Subsequently, Sino-Indian ties deteriorated sharply after a military clash along their disputed Himalayan border in 2020.
Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping held talks on the sidelines of a BRICS summit in Russia in October that led to a thaw. The giant Asian neighbors are now slowly defusing tensions that have hampered business relations and travel between the two countries.
Trump has threatened to charge an additional 10% tariff on imports from members — which include India — of the BRICS group of major emerging economies for “aligning themselves with Anti-American policies.”
The internal assessment report is the government’s initial estimate and will change as the quantum of tariffs imposed by Trump becomes clear, all four sources said.
India exported goods estimated at around $81 billion in 2024 to the US.
By Associated Press
