Chinese President Xi Jinping will travel to New Delhi for the 18th BRICS Summit on September 12-13, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed on Thursday, ending days of uncertainty over Beijing’s representation at the gathering. The foreign ministry said Xi is attending at the invitation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the trip marks his first visit to India in almost seven years. He last came in 2019 for an informal summit with Modi in Mamallapuram, near Chennai. Before that, he visited in 2016 for the BRICS summit in Goa and made his first trip in September 2014 during both leaders’ first terms in office.
Beijing had held off confirming the visit until Thursday, even though preparations were reportedly already underway and the trip had been widely expected. As late as Wednesday, foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning had declined to give details when pressed on China’s representation, saying information would come in due course. Reports last month suggested Xi would bring a delegation of roughly 400 officials, more than double the size of his 2019 delegation.
The visit comes as the latest stop on an especially busy run of summitry for Xi, who traveled first to Kyrgyzstan for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit and then to Egypt last week for his first state visit there in a decade.
Attention in New Delhi is now turning to whether Modi and Xi will hold a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of BRICS. Diplomatic sources suggest the two could meet on September 12, the summit’s opening day, though this hasn’t been formally confirmed on the Chinese side. Any such meeting would be closely watched as a signal of how far the ongoing India-China diplomatic thaw has progressed, with trade and economic engagement likely on the table alongside long-standing border and security disputes between the two countries.
Xi joins a lineup of world leaders converging on New Delhi for the summit, including Putin, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, and others, as India hosts the meeting under its 2026 BRICS chairship with the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.”
