By IANS
Beijing : Congress president Sonia Gandhi arrived here Thursday on a five-day visit, with Beijing saying it attached “great importance” to the trip by the head of India’s ruling coalition.
Gandhi will become the first foreign leader to meet China’s next generation of leadership following the Communist Party of China (CPC) Congress that concluded Sunday.
“We attach great importance to Sonia’s China visit, which will further promote the relations between the two parties, enhance the understanding between the two peoples and push forward friendly cooperation between the two countries,” Xinhua quoted foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao as saying.
Invited by the CPC, Gandhi is accompanied by her son and Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi, Minister of State for External Affairs Anand Sharma, Minister of State in Prime Minister’s Office Prithviraj Chavan and senior Congress leader Karan Singh.
The highlight of Gandhi’s programme will be her meetings Friday with President Hu Jintao, head of the CPC and the government, and Premier Wen Jiabao.
She will interact with officials of the Beijing Organizing Committee of the 2008 Olympic Games and will deliver an address at the Qinghua School of Management.
Gandhi will then travel to Xian, capital of the northwestern Shaanxi province and home of the famed terracotta warriors.
In Shanghai, China’s economic hub, she will meet a member of the new Chinese leadership, Xi Jinping, who has been elected to the Politburo Standing Committee and is widely seen as a possible successor to Hu.
Gandhi’s visit comes as Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee took part in trilateral talks with his Chinese and Russian counterparts in the northeastern city of Harbin.
Mukherjee also held bilateral discussions with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi.
According to an official announcement, the two ministers agreed to “strive for an early agreement on a framework which could be fair, rational and acceptable for both sides on resolving the bilateral border issue”.
State media quoted Yang as saying the fact that the Chinese and Indian ministers had met four times in six months reflected the “great attention paid by the two countries on bilateral ties.”
Mukherjee and Yang also “exchanged views on how to appropriately solve the Myanmar issue”.
New Delhi and Beijing have come under intense Western pressure to move against the military junta in Myanmar after it cracked down on the most sweeping pro-democracy protests in two decades that erupted last month.
Yang, Mukherjee and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov Wednesday jointly opposed sanctions against Myanmar, DPA reported.
The three foreign ministers also pledged support for the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and vowed to strengthen cooperation against terrorism, trans-national organised crime and drug trafficking.
Gandhi’s visit comes ahead of a trip to China by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh scheduled in the first week of December.
It also comes at a time when Gandhi’s Congress party is locked in a bitter row with its communist allies – who also enjoy fraternal ties with the Chinese communists – over the Indo-US nuclear deal.