Xi Jinping to reach Delhi on 12 September, his first India visit in seven years

China's foreign ministry said on 10 September that President Xi Jinping will attend the 18th BRICS summit in New Delhi on 12 and 13 September, at the invitation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The notice ended a week of uncertainty about whether Xi would make the journey.

It will be his first visit to India since October 2019, when he and Modi held an informal summit at Mamallapuram near Chennai. He last came for a BRICS meeting when India hosted the grouping in Goa in 2016. His first trip as president was in 2014.

The two men met most recently on the sidelines of the 2024 BRICS summit in Kazan. That encounter opened a thaw after the June 2020 clash in the Galwan Valley, when soldiers from both armies died on the Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh. Direct flights were later suspended. Journalists were expelled. India banned Chinese apps, including TikTok, and slowed Chinese investment. Beijing thickened posts and settlements along the boundary.

Who is on the plane

Xi will travel with Politburo member and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Commerce Minister Wang Wentao. Wang Wentao is expected to sit with Piyush Goyal, India's commerce minister. That meeting is where the practical file lives: India's request for looser Chinese export controls on machinery and inputs, and China's request for a wider door to invest.

Two-way trade is large and lopsided. India buys far more from China than it sells. The political constraint is still the border. Officials on both sides now describe the relationship as being in a normalisation phase. A presidential visit is the signal that phase is meant to send inside the Chinese system as much as it is a message to Delhi.

Vikram Doraiswami, India's ambassador in Beijing, wrote in the Communist Party-run Global Times on 10 September that the summit was a chance to deepen work on trade, connectivity, climate, public health and the digital economy. The choice of outlet was itself part of the signalling.

Two theories of BRICS

China has pushed to widen the club as a counterweight to the United States. India has accepted new members more slowly and treats the group as a bridge that should not force a choice against the West. That split will be visible even if the communique papers it over.

Shared irritation with U.S. tariffs has pulled the two capitals closer than they were in 2022. It has not settled the Himalaya. Patrol protocols and buffer zones along the LAC remain the test of whether the Kazan thaw has substance. Nothing announced on 10 September said those protocols will change in Delhi.

China takes the BRICS chair after this summit. That fact gives Xi a reason to come that is larger than bilateral repair. It also gives Modi a reason to host him without calling the visit a reset.

The weekend sequence

Putin is already in Delhi. Pezeshkian arrived on Friday. Xi is due on Saturday. The leaders' sessions run through 13 September. A structured Modi-Xi bilateral is expected on the sidelines. If that meeting produces only a handshake photograph and a line about stable borders, the visit will still have done the minimum both sides needed: put the Chinese president on Indian soil for the first time in seven years without a new crisis on the ridge.