Singh urges stronger ties(2)

"Premier Li Keqiang accompanied Singh on a visit to the Forbidden City yesterday (Wednesday), and the Indian prime minister delivered his speech at the Party school this morning. From these arrangements, we can see the Chinese government attaches great importance to Singh's trip," Sun said.

"It's clear that Beijing wants to strengthen the bilateral relationship and enhance mutual trust through these events."

Because the Party school gathers many government officials from all over China, Singh's ideas on the two countries' relations will have a far-reaching effect, Sun added.

Hu Shisheng, director of the Institute of South and Southeast Asian and Oceanian Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said cooperation in infrastructure could be a fundamental contributor to India's economy.

"Infrastructure is one of the major challenges that India's economy is facing. Because of its less-developed public facilities, most foreign direct investment to India poured into the Indian stock market, instead of industrial sectors," Hu said.

India is one of the largest international markets for Chinese overseas construction projects, he added.

Although Singh said that maintaining peace and stability on the two countries' border is still a major challenge to Sino-Indian relations, he stressed that cooperation between them far outweighs their differences.

"The stability in our relationship has created the basic conditions for our two countries to exploit the opportunities created by our economic growth and opening," Singh said.

"India and China cannot be contained, and our recent history is testimony to this. Nor should we seek to contain others," Singh said. The world is large enough to accommodate the development aspirations of both India and China, he added.