Chinese President Xi Jinping to attend virtual BRICS summit chaired by Modi

Chinese President Xi Jinping will attend the 13th BRICS summit, which is chaired by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

New Delhi, Sep 08: Chinese President Xi Jinping will attend the 13th BRICS summit to be held on Thursday via a video link, China's Foreign Ministry announced. The virtual meeting will be chaired by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in which the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will participate.

Global leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi and President Xi will be discussing the COVID-19 pandemic and other global issues, a release from the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) said on Tuesday.

The theme of the summit would be "Intra-BRICS cooperation for continuity, consolidation and consensus." India had outlined four priority areas. They are: reforming the multilateral system, counter-terrorism, using digital and technological tools for achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs) and enhancing people to people exchanges.

Apart from these topics, the leaders will be discussing the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, current and regional issues.

BRICS is the abbreviation of five countries- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa and it is annually held since 2009, to build better global economic ties among all five nations.

All five BRICS nations are also the members of G-20.

The first BRIC summit, representing 41 per cent of the global population and 24 per cent of the global GDP, was held in Yekaterinburg, Russia on 16 June, 2009 with all five leaders- Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Dmitry Medvedev, Manmohan Singh, and Hu Jintao attending the event.