India and China have decided to move more quickly to resolve their long-standing boundary dispute, a news report said yesterday.
"Both of us agreed that these negotiations should be expedited and both of us expressed our commitment to find a mutually satisfactory solution to the border issue," Indian Premier Manmohan Singh said after meeting his Chinese counterpart, Wen Jiabao (溫家寶), on the margins of the East Asia summit in Kuala Lumpur.
Singh said the two sides had a "good discussion" on the resolution of the border dispute, but did not specify any timeframe for a settlement.
Faster
"We are dealing with difficult issues. Without setting any deadline, I do think it is possible to move forward at a faster pace," Singh was quoted by the Hindu newspaper as saying.
Officials are slated to meet in January.
The two neighbors dispute large areas along their 4,000km border after a brief border war fought in the Himalayas in 1962.
China occupies part of the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region with India accusing Pakistan of illegally ceding it to Beijing.
India alleges that China illegally occupies 43,000km2 of land in Kashmir while China has laid claim to large parts of India's northeastern Arunachal Pradesh state and earlier claimed Sikkim.
Mutual recognition
During former Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's visit to China in June 2003, India said that it recognized the Tibet region as an autonomous part of China and Beijing recognized Sikkim as part of India.
Booming two-way trade and increased dialogue between the countries has contributed to significantly improving bilateral relations in the past few years.
Singh said the meeting with Wen was his most important engagement in Kuala Lumpur in the last three days.
The two countries have agreed to implement recommendations of a joint study group on economic relations which includes a preferential trading arrangement between the countries.
Two-way trade between the countries is valued at about US$20 billion.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema