China, India to hold new round of border talks

BEIJING, Jan 16 (Reuters) China and India will hold a new round of talks to resolve a long-running Himalayan border dispute tomorrow in New Delhi, the Chinese foreign ministry said.

The two-day talks will be led on the Chinese side by Deputy Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo, foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told a regular news briefing.

''We think this is an extremely important meeting and is a concrete step towards putting into effect the consensus reached by our two leaders to, as soon as possible, push the border talks forward,'' Liu said.

''We hope these talks can continue to progress,'' he added.

India and China had frosty ties for decades after fighting a brief, but brutal, border war in 1962. Relations have warmed considerably since the early 1990s on the back of a boom in bilateral trade.

The neighbours have, however, made little progress over resolving the dispute over their 3,500-km Himalayan frontier despite several rounds of talks over the past decade.

India disputes Chinese rule of 38,000 square km of barren, icy and uninhabited land on the Tibetan plateau seized by Chinese troops in the 1962 war.

Beijing, for its part, does not recognise the remote and sparsely populated state of Arunachal Pradesh as part of India and claims the state's mountainous Tawang district once belonged to Tibet.

REUTERS SP BS1450