Chinese President Xi Jinping will travel to New Delhi this weekend to attend the 18th BRICS Summit, China’s foreign ministry confirmed on Thursday, ending several days of uncertainty over whether he would attend in person.
The summit, hosted by India under its 2026 BRICS chairmanship, runs September 12-13 at Bharat Mandapam. It will be Xi’s first visit to India in nearly seven years; his last trip was in 2019 for an informal summit with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Mamallapuram.
Indian government sources said Xi is expected to arrive Saturday and hold a bilateral meeting with Modi before departing Sunday morning. Officials said preparations for the visit were complete, though neither side has issued a formal agenda for the one-on-one talks.
The trip follows a gradual thaw in relations between the two Asian powers since a deadly 2020 border clash in the Galwan Valley froze high-level contact for years. Modi and Xi held their first formal bilateral meeting since that clash on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, in October 2024, shortly after the two countries reached an agreement on military patrolling arrangements along their disputed Himalayan frontier.
Since then, the two countries have restored some direct flights and eased visa rules, even as the underlying territorial dispute remains unresolved and both militaries maintain large deployments along the Line of Actual Control.
Beijing’s confirmation came after several days in which Chinese officials declined to confirm Xi’s attendance, with a foreign ministry spokesperson saying only that details would be released “in due course.” The announcement was made via China’s foreign ministry on social media, stating Xi would attend at Modi’s invitation.
The BRICS bloc has expanded significantly in recent years and now includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Indonesia. This year’s agenda is expected to cover global governance reform, trade, technology cooperation and energy security.
Analysts say a direct Modi-Xi meeting, if confirmed in detail afterward, would be watched closely as a signal of how far the two governments are willing to go in normalizing ties while leaving core security disputes unresolved.
