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Army Chief on China visit |
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The Chief of Army Staff, Gen. N.C. Vij, who is on a week-long visit to China, visited military facilities there and exchanged views with senior defence officials on Dec. 23, aimed at boosting mutual trust and defence cooperation. Gen. Vij visited the PLA’s garrison in Shanghai and the eastern port city of Qingdao before flying to Beijing for further talks with his Chinese counterpart and the Defence Minister, Gen. Cao Gangchuan who visited India in March. This visit is the first by an Indian Army Chief in over a decade. The last Indian Army Chief to visit Beijing was Gen. B.C. Joshi in July, 1994. Gen. Vij in his talks with Chinese leaders will seek ways to take further ahead the confidence-building measures already initiated at various levels of official talks between the two countries.
Chinese road construction wakes up India
Meanwhile, the Indian military brass have taken note of the massive programme of China to build roads all along the border in Tibet. Over the last decade, sources say, China has nearly doubled the length of its road transport network in Tibet to nearly 40 thousand kilometres. It has added more than 2000 km of highways per year on an average in the last ten years. And since the late beginning in the 1990s, China has invested nearly 10 trillion Yuan in Tibetan highway construction.
Not only is China expanding the internal connectivity of Tibet but also laying the foundations for its economic integration with the neighbouring regions of the sub-continent in India, Nepal and Bhutan.
Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran travelled to the eastern borders a couple of weeks ago and flew along the Tibetan frontier to get a sense, first hand, of the scale of Chinese transport infrastructure.
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