India has reaffirmed its age-old and consistent policy towards Taiwan, asserting that it continues to promote and enable exchanges in fields including trade, investment, tourism, culture, education, and other people-to-people contacts.
"There is no change in our position on Taiwan. We underlined that, as in the rest of the world, India has an economic, technology and cultural relationship with Taiwan.". We plan to follow it up," a Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) source was quoted by news agency IANS less than 24 hours after Beijing announced that the Taiwan question had been discussed in a meeting between visiting Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar in New Delhi on Monday.
The Indian government also favors the legitimate employment of Indian workers abroad on mutual interests.
China insists Taiwan is an integral part of its territory and needs to be reunified with the mainland, resorting to force if the need arises. Over the last few years, Beijing has stepped up military drills in the Taiwan Strait, increasing pressure on Taipei.
On Monday, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval held the 24th round of Special Representatives (SR) dialogue on the boundary question with Wang Yi at Hyderabad House in New Delhi.
During his opening address, NSA Doval pointed out that India-China relations have been on an "upward trend," with borders peaceful since the meeting of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Kazan last year.
"There has been a rise. Borders have been calm. There has been peace and quiet. Our bilateral contacts have been more meaningful. And we are most thankful to our leaders who, in Kazan last October, were able to establish a new trend, and we have gained a lot since then," he said, noting that the atmosphere created by the Kazan talks has helped make progress in several areas of cooperation.
Being hopeful regarding the ongoing round of talks, NSA Doval added that India expects the 24th SR-level talks to be "equally successful" as the one held a year ago and will have "special significance" prior to the Prime Minister's visit to China for the SCO Summit later this month.
Thanks to this new energy and the new dynamism, thanks to your individual efforts and thanks to the maturity and sense of responsibility of our diplomatic missions, ambassadors, and also of our troops at the frontiers, we have succeeded in doing it this time," he added.
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