Multiple news outlets reported on Thursday that genocidal Chinese dictator Xi Jinping is planning not to attend the G-20 leaders’ summit in New Delhi, India, on September 9.
Reuters and the Agence France-Presse (AFP) both claimed to speak to anonymous Indian officials who confirmed that the country is not expecting the Communist Party chief to visit in the near future. Chinese Premier Li Qiang will attend the summit instead, according to Reuters.
Reuters cited two sources within the Indian government in a report on Thursday stating that New Delhi does not expect Xi to be present for the summit. The alleged officials claimed they were planning for Premier Li Qiang to be present, but Beijing never gave a reason for Xi’s absence. AFP published a similar report but cited a European Union official. The European Union, as a whole, is one of the 20 members of the G-20.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry has neither confirmed nor denied the reports at press time regarding Xi’s attendance at the event. Indian media reported on Friday that Xi is believed to be the only leader invited to the event not to have given India the courtesy of an RSVP with a week to go before the summit. The only two leaders known to have declined the invitation are leftists Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico and Vladimir Putin of Russia. Far-left American President Joe Biden is expected to attend, as is conservative Japanese Foreign Minister Kishida Fumio, leftist Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, socialist convicted felon President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, among others.
Hosting the G-20 Summit, which brings together the leaders of the world’s largest economies, is considered a prestigious privilege, one that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expecting to use to advertise India as a foreign investment paradise and lure major global corporations to expand operations in the country.
By snubbing the summit, if reports are true, Xi would effectively be issuing a vote of no confidence for India’s presidency of the organization, straining already difficult relations between the two countries. Xi has attended every G-20 summit that has occurred since he became his nation’s dictator in 2013, with the exception of the 2021 summit in Rome as a result of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. Especially given that Xi visited South Africa less than a month before the New Delhi summit is scheduled to occur, there is no overt reason for his absence the way that there was at the height of the pandemic.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa (C) with fellow BRICS leaders Chinese dictator Xi Jinping (L) and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (R) during the closing day of the BRICS summit on August 24, 2023, in Johannesburg, South Africa. (Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images)
While India and China retain diplomatic ties — Xi and Modi met in person in August during the BRICS summit in South Africa — China dramatically escalated tensions this week by publishing a new “standard” map of China, including large pieces of the sovereign territory of India, outraging the nation’s External Affairs Ministry.
India and China have engaged in several military battles on their mutual borders in the past half-decade, most notoriously the Galwan Valley battle in which Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers attacked Indian border troops within Indian territory. An estimated 20 Indian and 40 Chinese soldiers died in the bloody exchange despite neither side wielding firearms.
Addressing the rumors that Xi would skip the summit, Foreign Policy described the reported move as a way to both undermine the G-20 as a powerful economic bloc — particularly compared to the expanding BRICS coalition — and to “undermine New Delhi’s efforts to establish itself as a global leader.”
BRICS is a coalition composed of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — the countries that give it its name — but it recently approved applications for six new members: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Argentina, Egypt, and Ethiopia. The BRICS countries focused heavily during their summit in August on economic developments, attempting to divorce their economies from the U.S. dollar and establish a “development bank” to rival the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. BRICS, in many ways, is an alternative to the G-20, even though all five of the original BRICS countries and two of the newly approved members are in the G-20.
New Delhi’s “efforts to establish itself as a global leader” have been transparently directed at enticing foreign business in China to abandon that economy for India’s. Modi launched an initiative in 2014 known as “Make in India” designed to attract foreign companies to manufacture in the country, often seeking to encourage them to shut down operations in China. In the aftermath of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic — when China shut down entire cities and forced thousands into oppressive and unsanitary quarantine camps — India successfully attracted deals to build factories and other facilities for major tech companies Apple and Foxconn. Walmart, meanwhile, tripled imports from India, at China’s expense, in 2020.
Territorial disputes add to the already simmering tensions arising from economic competition. On Wednesday, China’s National Resources Ministry published the 2023 edition of the “standard map” of China, which observers noted included slices of territory far from China’s borders belonging to India, Vietnam, and the Philippines, among others. The entire sovereign nation of Taiwan appeared on the map as part of China.
2023 China Standard Map (China Ministry of Natural Resources)
India’s state of Arunachal Pradesh and other parts of Himalayan northern India appeared on the map as “Zangnan,” or “south Tibet.” China regularly and illegally claims northern India as its own.
“This is not the first time China has made such an attempt. We reject this outright,” External Affairs Ministry spokesman Arindam Bagchi said on Tuesday. “Arunachal Pradesh is, has been, and will always be an integral and inalienable part of India. Attempts to assign invented names will not alter this reality.”
External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar dismissed the map as “absurd” and called it an “old habit” of the communists’ to falsely claim Indian land.
“Putting out maps with parts in India doesn’t change anything. Our government is very clear about territory. Making absurd claims does not make other people’s territories yours,” Jaishankar said.