Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to meet at least thrice this year after their successful informal summit at Wuhan late last month, Chinese Ambassador to India Luo Zhaohui said here on Friday.

The two leaders could meet at the next Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit to be held in June in Qingdao, China, the BRICS Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa and the G-20 Summit in Argentina, he said addressing a seminar on the ‘Wuhan Summit: Sino-India Relations and its Way Forward’, organised by the Chinese Embassy and the Institute of Chinese Studies.

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He said the officials of the two countries were closely working to facilitate these meetings and implement the consensus reached between the two countries in Wuhan.

Luo said the two leaders reached broad consensus on the overarching, long-term and strategic issues of global and bilateral importance during their two-day summit in the central Chinese city last week.

The Wuhan summit was seen as an effort by India and China to rebuild trust and improve ties in the wake of last summer’s Doklam military stand-off that hit bilateral ties

Describing the Wuhan Summit as a “very special event” in Chinese diplomacy, Luo noted that President Xi has never hosted a foreign leader twice outside the Chinese capital Beijing. Xi had earlier hosted Modi in the central Chinese city of X’ian in 2015. “This shows that China attaches high importance to its relations with India,” he said.

The envoy said the idea of holding an informal summit was first mooted by PM Modi when he met President Xi on the sidelines of the SCO Summit in Astana, Kazakhstan in 2017. After that, the two sides worked very hard to make it happen, he said.

The Chinese envoy said the two leaders had in-depth discussions and reached consensus on their respective visions for national development as well as domestic and foreign policies. China and India, the two biggest developing countries and emerging economies –each with a population of over one billion, are important countries with strategic autonomy. “A peaceful, stable and balanced relationship between China and India is an important positive factor for the stability of the world,” he said.

On the differences between China and India, including the vexed boundary issue, he said the two leaders have given strategic guidance to the officials on both sides to properly manage and control their differences.