Pakistan Army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir formally met Chinese President Xi Jinping, as part of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s delegation, on Tuesday.
The meeting comes a day after a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), at which India’s PM Narendra Modi was among the attendees, concluded with a joint declaration condemning the Pahalgam attack in particular, and terrorism in general.
Pakistan was not expressly mentioned but PM Modi spoke of “some nations” using terror as policy. And the declaration was a big step forward from India’s perspective for Pahalgam to be mentioned directly, as the Modi government has blamed Pakistan for the attack in April. Indian forces carried out retaliatory strikes on terror bases as part of Operation Sindoor in May.
Munir, who is considered the most powerful man in Pakistan, was promoted from General to Field Marshal soon after the operation as he claimed a successfully pushback.
He was part of the Pakistan team that participated in the SCO summit in Tianjin and will attend a grand parade of the Chinese army to on Wednesday to mark the 80th anniversary of the Chinese win against the Japanese in World War 2.
This is his second visit to China as army boss. In his first visit to China in July after taking over as Field Marshal, Munir met Vice President Han Zheng but not President Xi, unlike his predecessor General Qamar Javed Bajwa.
Before that, Munir was hosted for lunch by US President Donald Trump, a rare gesture by an American leader which raised eyebrows in India as well as in China, considering Pak-China all-weather ties.
While Xi met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and a host of other leaders, who attended the SCO summit in Tianjin, Sharif was allocated the slot on Tuesday to meet the Chinese President in Beijing. Munir was expected to join Sharif to watch the parade in which the Chinese military plans to display its most modern weapons.
The weapons systems were of big interest to the Pakistan military as over 80 per cent of its weapons acquisitions are from China — a fact flagged by India after Op Sindoor.
But there has been a realigment of relations by India with China, which were frosty for the past five years after the Galwan border clash, after Trump levied massive trade tariffs on India.
Munir-Sharif and Xi held wide-ranging talks on bilateral & regional cooperation, said Pakistan’s deputy PM and foreign minister Ishaq Dar, who was also part of the team. Xi said the two sides should accelerate building an even closer China-Pakistan community and set up a model for the broader neighbourhood, according to Dar.
China’s state-run Xinhua news agency quoted President Xi Jinping as saying that China stands ready to work with Pakistan to build upgraded versions of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and the China-Pakistan Free Trade Agreement. China hopes Pakistan will take effective measures to ensure the safety of Chinese personnel, projects and institutions in Pakistan, Xi further said, as per a PTI report.
On his part, Sharif hailed the Global Governance Initiative (GGI), proposed by Xi at the SCO summit to improve global governance, saying it is of great significance for world peace, development and stability, and Pakistan will give it full support and work actively to implement it, added the report.