New Delhi: Xu Feihong, the newly appointed Chinese Ambassador to India, arrived in New Delhi on Friday to assume office, according to the Chinese embassy in India. He is the 17th Chinese envoy to India, replacing Sun Weidong, who left in October 2022 after serving three years in Delhi and later became China’s Deputy Foreign Minister.
Officials from the Protocol Division of the Ministry of External Affairs of India, Dean of Diplomatic Corps, Ambassador of Eritrea to India Alem Tsehaye Woldemariam and Minister Ma Jia, Minister Wang Lei, Minister Counselor Chen Jianjun from the Chinese Embassy greeted the ambassador and his wife Tan Yuxiu at the airport, said the Chinese embassy in its official statement.
Sun Weidong left Delhi at a time when India and China were trying to manage ties via multiple channels, following the Ladakh border clash in 2020 that has remained the dominant issue between the two sides. Since April 2020, India and China have had several rounds of diplomatic and military level meetings on the situation along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), in the India-China border areas.
Who is Xu Feihong?
Xu is a member of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CPC) Ministry of Foreign Affairs and served as the Assistant Foreign Minister. He was appointed as the Chinese ambassador to India after an unusually long delay and 18 months amid frozen relations between the two countries over the eastern Ladakh military standoff.
The Chinese foreign ministry earlier confirmed to news agency PTI that Xu, former Ambassador to Afghanistan and Romania, has been appointed as China’s new envoy in India. The 60-year-old diplomat was the assistant minister for financial and administrative affairs in the Chinese foreign ministry.
He will succeed veteran Chinese diplomat Sun Weidong who completed his tenure in India in October 2022. Sun was China’s envoy to Pakistan before his India stint and is currently the Vice Foreign Minister overseeing China’s South Asia policy. Xu’s appointment coincides with the ongoing general elections in India amid protracted military and diplomatic negotiations between Beijing and New Delhi to resolve the prolonged military standoff.
India-China border talks
Xu’s arrival in India comes after both countries held the 29th meeting of the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India-China Border Affairs (WMCC) on March 27 in Beijing. The meeting was co-chaired by the Joint Secretary of India’s Ministry of External Affairs who led the Indian delegation and the Director General of the Boundary and Oceanic Department of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs led the Chinese delegation.
After the meeting, both sides agreed to open diplomatic and military channels open to uphold peace and tranquility on the ground in the border areas. Last month, the Chinese military has asserted that the situation along the India-China border is “generally stable at present” and both sides are maintaining “effective communication” to resolve the military standoff in eastern Ladakh.
This came after Prime Minister Narendra Modi stressed an urgency to resolve the “prolonged situation” at the border to remove the “abnormality in bilateral relations” and restore peace and tranquillity in the border areas. He asserted that India’s relationship with China was important not just for the region but for the entire world.
While India has maintained that there cannot be restoration of normalcy in its relations with China as long as the state of the borders remains abnormal, China continues to press India to delink the border issue and bilateral relations and work for normalcy. China has stressed multiple times that the boundary question does not represent the entirety of the China-India relations, which should be placed appropriately in the bilateral relations and managed properly.
(with inputs from agencies)
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