New Delhi: Beijing has said today that Chinese Premier Li Qiang will attend the G20 Summit in New Delhi, officially confirming speculation that Chinese President Xi Jinping will be giving the meet a miss.
“At the invitation of India, Chinese Premier Li Qiang will attend the G20 Summit from September 9 to 10 in India,” the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at the start of the daily briefing.
Indian authorities, sources earlier told The Wire, had known for a month that Xi will not attend it.
It will be only be the second time that Xi Jinping has not attended a G-20 meeting in his presidential tenure. He didn’t take part in the 2021 summit in Rome, when China was still in the midst of zero-covid regulations. He didn’t leave the borders of China for over two years till mid-2022.
The G20 summit will take place on September 9 and 10 in India’s capital city.
This will be Li’s first visit to India as premier.
During the media briefing, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson was asked repeatedly about the reason for Xi skipping the summit, but she dodged all those questions.
“As the world economy experiences more downward pressure and challenges grow for global sustainable development, it is important that the G20, being the premier forum for international economic cooperation, strengthen partnership and rise up to the big challenges facing global economy and development so as to contribute to world economic recovery and growth and global sustainable development,” she said.
This year, the Chinese President has already been on two foreign trips for a state visit to Russia in March and the recently concluded BRICS summit in South Africa.
The absence of Xi at G-20 summit is largely been seen as a snub to India, rather China’s relations with the rest of the G-20 members.
At the start of the year, it had been expected that there would be a number of opportunities for Indian and Chinese leadership to meet and find a political solution to the stalemate in negotiations for ending the border stand-off. They were expected to attend at least three multilateral summits through the year.
However, India called off the in-person summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and turned it into a virtual meeting. Since the Russia and others had already scheduled a trip to Delhi for the SCO summit in their travel calendar, the decision to make it a virtual summit was not very well-received.
Earlier, Beijing had even confirmed Xi Jinping’s attendance at an initial date proposed for the SCO summit in June, before that was changed again by India.
The two leaders participated together at the BRICS summit in South Africa, but there was no meeting as requested by China. Instead, there was a ‘conversation’ which seemed to have taken place at the BRICS dinner.
If Xi had attended the G-20 summit, it would have meant a mandatory meeting with the host, as per protocol.
As a member of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the Chinese president has also been invited for the summit in San Francisco in November. During the trip to Washington, US President Joe Biden invited Modi to the summit as a guest of the host.
However, there is still uncertainty whether Xi will actually attend the summit. As per The New York Times, China’s Ministry of State Security posted on its WeChat account that United States needed to “show sufficient sincerity” to justify Xi’s attendance in San Francisco.
Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden, who is going to attend the meet in Delhi had said he was “disappointed” that Xi would not be there. “I am disappointed… but I am going to get to see him,” Biden told reporters on Sunday, but did not say when that meeting would take place.
With Chinese President Xi not attending, it would mean that at least three heads of states would not be attending the G-20 summit. Russian President Putin is not attending the meeting as Kremlin announced. Besides, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador will also likely not travel to India, as he hasn’t attended any G-20 summit since 2018.
Indian official sources had on Saturday issued a background brief on the number of times that heads of states skipped G-20 summits. “These things do not reflect anything about the host country,” said sources.
Note: This report was updated with additional details after publication.