India-China trade is set to hit a “record high” of $155.6 billion in 2025, registering more than 12% year-on-year growth at a time when the world is grappling with increasing change and turbulence, Chinese Ambassador Xu Feihong said on Tuesday.
Xu said India has resumed issuing tourist visas to Chinese nationals and restored direct flights between the Chinese mainland and India, facilitating exchanges between the people of the two countries. (PTI)Speaking at a Chinese New Year event in New Delhi, Xu pointed to several developments to argue that bilateral relations have improved since the end of the military standoff on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) that lasted more than four years.
He claimed that bilateral relations “continue to improve”, with India’s exports to China increasing by 9.7% amid an increase in two-way trade, while China has resumed pilgrimages to a sacred mountain and sacred lake in the Jizang region – a reference to the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra – with around 0,00,00,000 Indians visiting the site.
Xu said India has resumed issuing tourist visas to Chinese nationals and restored direct flights between the Chinese mainland and India, facilitating exchanges between the people of the two countries.
Faced with a world of “increasing change and instability,” President Xi Jinping proposed the Global Governance Initiative for a “more just and equitable global governance system,” Xu said. China practices true multilateralism and is “committed to safeguarding the global free trade system” and stable and uninterrupted supply chains, he said.
China also supports India’s chairmanship of BRICS this year and is ready to work together to strengthen multilateral coordination and advance the development of the Global South, Xu said.
“Last August, President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a successful meeting in Tianjin, which took Sino-Indian relations from a ‘reset and new beginning’ to a new level of development,” Xu said, referring to the two leaders’ meeting on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Tianjin.
“We are ready to work with India to draw knowledge from our traditional cultures, maintaining the important consensus that China and India are mutual cooperation partners and development opportunities,” he said. “We stand ready to increase people-to-people exchanges with India, build more bridges of friendship and bring our people closer together.”
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Since India and China ended the face-off in the Ladakh sector of the LAC in October 2024, both sides have taken several steps to resolve their long-standing border dispute and normalize bilateral relations. Relations between the two neighbors plunged to their lowest level in six decades in June 2020 after 20 Indian soldiers and at least four Chinese soldiers were killed in a brutal clash in the Galwan Valley.
However, the Indian side has raised concerns about China’s lack of adequate market access, which has skewed bilateral trade in Beijing’s favor, and China’s export restrictions on key sectors such as fertilizers, rare earth minerals and heavy machinery such as tunnel boring equipment.
