Ahead of a possible visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to India for the summit of the BRICS leaders next month, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval is travelling to Beijing Monday for Special Representative-level talks on the boundary issue with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi.

The 25th round of SR-level talks will be held Tuesday. Both Doval and Wang are the designated SRs for the boundary talks mechanism which was established in 2003 to comprehensively address the longstanding boundary dispute between the two countries.

In the last week of June, Wang visited India for a meeting of the BRICS NSAs and met Doval on the sidelines. Wang, who is also China’s Foreign Minister, underlined it is “imperative” for India and China to respect each other’s “core interests” and take concrete actions to implement the “important consensus” reached by both sides.

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The two countries have been moving to repair ties that plummeted after the military standoff along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh. Since late 2024, both sides have taken steps to ease tensions.

After he met Wang in New Delhi last year, Doval said the India-China border had been “quiet” and there had been an “upward trend” in bilateral ties.

Earlier this month, responding to a question on reports of some tension along the LAC, the Ministry of External Affairs said the state of the border with China will reflect on the state of the “larger bilateral ties” and that maintenance of peace and tranquillity along the LAC is of “utmost importance”.

Randhir Jaiswal, spokesperson for the MEA, also rejected China’s criticism of New Delhi identifying 27 places and features in Arunachal Pradesh by their standard names, maintaining that the state is an “inalienable and integral” part of India and nothing can change this “indisputable reality”.

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This was reiterated at a meeting of the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India-China Border Affairs (WMCC). “At this meeting, the two sides engaged in frank discussions and reviewed the situation along the LAC,” Jaiswal said.

On Saturday, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, speaking on the situation with China, said: “I think we went through a particularly bad patch between the summer of 2020 and the autumn of 2024, and that was primarily an outcome of the situation in the border areas.”

“At the end of the day, peace and tranquility in the border areas is a prerequisite for good relations, and the state of the border, to a very large measure, naturally would determine the state of the relations. Having said that, I think naturally, if assuming things are stable and the needle is more cooperative, obviously, I mean we are both very big economies. In many ways, we are markets to each other. We are part of the supply chain. They industrialised much faster and much bigger and much earlier, largely because of many of the policies we advocate,” he said.

“The world is competitive. We must build up our strengths. We have to do business with the entire world. That includes China too, but it is important we deal with them confidently. We stand our ground, as we have stood on the border. We develop our strengths, which unfortunately from the 1960s for half a century, we did not do. We have to make up for the shortcomings and the mistakes of the past, and that is really what we are hoping to do. So I think a stronger, more self-reliant India, a more industrialised India, a more manufacturing India will be able to actually compete with China as it will with other major countries of the world,” he said.

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Jaishankar said the government had “taken up” with China the problem of business visas being faced by Indian applicants.