The year 2008 is a year of jubilation for the Chinese people. On these golden days of the early year, we take pride in greeting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from India, a friendly neighbor, on his first trip to China in his term of office.
In fact, the two Asian nations have had a frequent, high-level exchange of visits from the entry of the new century, and the apparent in-depth development of bilateral ties is ascribed to the exchange of visits frm the high level. Prime ministers of the two successive terms visited each other's nation years ago. Meanwhile, President Kocheril Rama Narayanan of India came to visit China in 2000 and Chinese President Hu Jintao visited India in 2006, and such an intensity in the exchange of visits between top leaders of the two nations has been unprecedented in the annals of bilateral relation. It has given an eloquently proof that bilateral ties have indeed embarked onto a track of benign growth.
Fresh progress of vital importance was made especially in bilateral ties in 2007, with a prominent manifestion recorded in the military and security spheres. The armed forces of the two countries conducted two rounds of defense and security talks in November 2007, making the dialogue a most crucial platform to build up their mutual trust. In the following month, the armies of China and India each dispatched about 100 ground troops for the joint anti-terrorist exercise, cod-named "Hand-in-Hand 2007," to the provincial capital of Kunming in southwest China's Yunnan province.
At the third China-India strategic dialogue held in December of the same year, both sides were candid to swap each other's concerns and worries, and thus beefed up their strategic mutual trust.
Moreover, an encouraging headway was attained in the border and trade issues over the past year. The two nations held the 11th round of talks on the border issue in September 2007 and their Special Representatives agreed to set up a joint-working group during the talks so as to work out a framework for settling the issue, and the border issue is now heading for an orbit for substantial progress towards its eventual resolution.
In view of bilateral trade, the Sino-Indian trade volume from January to November last year reached 34.2 billion US dollars, a hefty rise of 54 percent year-on-year, and so a goal set by leaders of the two nations two years earlier of achieving 20 billion dollars in bilateral trade by 2010 is within an easy reach.
As far as bilateral ties are concerned, the only pity is that the people-to-people exchange between the two nations is not smooth enough. Indians are reported to have made a total of 629,947 trips to China in 2006, whereas there were only 46,805 trips made by Chinese visitors to India that year. In the ensuing 2007, which was named as "the Year of Friendship through Tourism", India only received 67,600 trips by Chinese travelers while China had 35 million outbound tourists in the year.
Frequent visits make friends closer and nearer still, as a Chinese popular saying goes. Closer bilateral ties are attributed to an exchange of visits as a matter of course. Without any contact, there will be practically no personal experience and direct understanding to speak of and; without any people-to-people exchange of visits, erroneous views and even misconception or misunderstanding could be prevalent. To a greater extent, a negative influence from bias, prejudices and disparities in mutual recognition of each other's nation is not inferior to that inflicted by the border issue.
We aspire to have a growing, bilateral exchange of visits at the high level and make it a regular practice, or even on a yearly basis, and turn it into an extensive education on bilateral ties. Furthermore, with better mutual understanding and more subsequent contacts between the people of both nations, bilateral relations will naturally be smooth and, consequently, some thorny issues will be readily resolved.
Besides, government leaders of both nations should regard this issue from the whole global perspective. In the wake of the emergence of both nations, there would be improved mutual understanding, as the rise of the world's two most populous nations is of a revolutionary significance. More importantly, the two Asian neighbors will have an ample capacity for changing the overall global outlook. In this sense, bilateral relations should overstep the limits of geopolitics and the scope of bilateral relations, and should especially exceed the security predicaments and grudges against each other in history.
Indeed, Prime Minister Singh's ongoing China visit is sure to raise bilateral ties to a new height with a much broader global vision, just as any preceding high-level exchange of visits between the two countries has greatly boosted the Sino-Indian bilateral relations.
By Hu Shisheng, a noted researcher and director of the South Asia Studies Center under the China Institute of Contemporary Relations and translated by People's Daily Online
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