China on Thursday said Army chief General Bipin Rawat’s statement that Beijing was testing India’s limits went against the views expressed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping during their meeting in Xiamen this week.
On Wednesday, General Rawat said China was “salami slicing” its way into Indian territory gradually. He also said the country needs to be prepared for a two-front war, referring to Pakistan.
“We have noted the statement by relevant people in India, also we noticed some Indian press remarked that the reports are shocking,” PTI quoted Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang as saying. “We do not know whether he was authorised to speak those words or it was just his spontaneous words or whether his words represented the position of the Indian government,” he said.
The Army chief made the statement at a seminar organised by defence think-tank Centre for Land Warfare Studies, about a week after India and China withdrew their troops from the Sikkim sector’s Doklam area to end one of their worst military standoffs.
In their first meeting after the standoff, Xi told Modi that since India and China are each other’s major neighbours, and are two emerging countries, “a healthy and stable China-India relationship serves the interests of people in both countries.”
“We hope this military official would see this trend and contribute to the development of China and India relations and see something more in that regard,” Shuang said.
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