NEW DELHI: Just weeks after a tense border standoff, China’s new premier headed to India on Sunday for his first foreign trip as the neighboring giants look to speed up efforts to settle a decades-old boundary dispute and boost economic ties.

China says Premier Li Keqiang’s choice of India for his first trip abroad since taking office in March shows the importance Beijing attaches to improving relations with New Delhi.

“We think very highly of this gesture because it is our view that high-level political exchanges between our two countries are an important aspect and vehicle for our expanded cooperation,” said India’s external affairs ministry spokesman, Syed Akbaruddin.

Jasjit Singh, a defense analyst and director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in New Delhi, said last month’s border standoff was unlikely to overshadow Li’s three-day visit to India, which kicks off a foreign tour that will also see Li visiting Pakistan, Switzerland and Germany.

Singh said Indian and Chinese leaders were likely to review border talks that have failed to produce a breakthrough in the past 10 years despite 15 rounds of discussions. The two sides also will probably discuss working together in Afghanistan after next year’s U.S. pullout and cooperating with Southeast Asian countries, he said.

But tensions run high between the two nations. China already sees itself as Asia’s great power, while India hopes its increasing economic and military might — though still far below its neighbor’s — will eventually put it in the same league.

While China has worked to shore up relationships with Nepal and Sri Lanka in India’s traditional South Asian sphere of influence, India has been venturing into partnerships with Southeast Asian nations.

Other irritants remain in the bilateral relationship. China is a longtime ally and weapons supplier to Pakistan, India’s bitter rival. Also, the presence in India of the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and the self-declared Tibetan government-in-exile is a source of tension. China accuses the Dalai Lama of wanting to split Tibet off from the rest of China, but he says he seeks real autonomy for Tibetans, not independence.

Unresolved border issues between the two nations have flared as well.

In last month’s incident, India claimed that Chinese troops crossed the countries’ de facto border April 15 and pitched camp in the Depsang valley in the Ladakh region of eastern Kashmir. New Delhi responded with diplomatic protests, then moved its soldiers just 300 meters (yards) from the Chinese position.

The two sides negotiated a peaceful end to the standoff by withdrawing troops to their original positions in the Ladakh area.

Gautam Bambawale, a senior Indian external affairs ministry official, said India and China were negotiating a Border Defense Cooperation Agreement, but declined to give details. Indian media reports said the agreement proposes a freezing of troop levels of the two countries in the disputed border region as they make efforts to settle the issue.

Bambawale also said Indian and Chinese officials recently held talks in Beijing on the future of Afghanistan. China, India and Russia have trilaterally discussed the matter with the idea of giving full support to Afghanistan’s government as it makes the transition following the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2014.

Shortly after his arrival in the Indian capital of New Delhi late Sunday afternoon, Li is scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who will host a dinner for him. Delegation-level talks between the two sides are scheduled for Monday. Li will attend a business summit in Mumbai, India’s financial capital, among other activities.

The border spat last month saw the Indian opposition and the media put pressure on the government to take on China and call off Li’s visit. The government, however, chose to go ahead with the trip, highlighting its policy of trying to widen areas of cooperation with China while attempting to resolve key differences.

China has become India’s biggest trading partner, with two-way trade jumping from $5 billion in 2002 to nearly $75 billion in 2011, although that figure declined to $61.5 billion last year because of the global economic downturn. Trade remains heavily skewed in China’s favor, another source of concern for India.

“After Depsang, the loudest voices have warned of evils to come,” K.S. Bajpai, a retired diplomat, wrote in an article in the Indian Express daily. “Whether commonalities on global issues like the WTO (World Trade Organization), or climate change, or even greater economic ties, can bind us in amity, or at least prevent the worst, remain debatable, but the attempt would certainly serve our interests, provided we also gear ourselves up.”

Asian giants with more than 1 billion people each, India and China have had chilly relations since they fought a brief but bloody border war in 1962.

India says China is occupying 38,000 square kilometers (15,000 square miles) of territory in the Aksai Chin plateau in the western Himalayas, while China claims around 90,000 square kilometers (35,000 square miles) in India’s northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh. Fifteen rounds of talks have failed to resolve the dispute.

Li will leave India on Wednesday morning and head to close Chinese ally Pakistan before traveling to Switzerland and Germany on visits tightly focused on economic ties.

BEIJING: China’s legislature elected Li Keqiang as premier on Friday, installing an English-speaking bureaucrat as the man in charge of the economy, the world’s second-largest, and its aim of reviving growth through consumer-led expansion.

The largely rubber-stamp National People’s Congress, as expected, chose Li, 57, to replace Wen Jiabao.

Nearly 3,000 delegates gathered in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People to vote on Li’s appointment, putting the final stamp of approval on a generational transition of power.

Li drew only three no votes and six abstentions from the carefully selected parliament.

Li rose and shook hands with Xi Jinping, who was elected president by the legislature on Thursday, as legislators applauded. A beaming Wen walked over to Li, shook his hand and exchanged words.

While Xi is the country’s top leader, Li heads China’s State Council, or cabinet, and is charged with executing government policy and overseeing the economy.

As premier, Li is faced with one of the world’s widest gaps between rich and poor, an economy over-reliant on investment spending and a persistently frothy housing market that has stoked resentment among the middle class.

More than any other Chinese party leader until now, Li was immersed in the intellectual and political ferment of the decade of reform under Deng Xiaoping, which ended in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests that were crushed by troops.

As a student at Peking University, Li befriended ardent pro-democracy advocates, some of whom later became outright challengers to party control. His friends included activists who went into exile after the June 1989 crackdown.

Li, who has a degree in law and a doctorate in economics, will take the reins of an economy whose growth slowed in 2012 to a 13-year low, albeit at a 7.8 percent rate that is the envy of other major economies.

Analysts have described the Wen years as a lost decade during which economic reforms slowed and state-backed industries tightened their grip on the economy.

Both Xi and Li will need to deliver a blueprint to stabilize the real estate market. They need to do this quickly to calm a market in which real estate prices have soared 10-fold in major cities during the last decade.

Across China, people are resentful of the widening income inequality gap. China has 2.7 million U.S. dollar millionaires and 251 billionaires, according to the Hurun Report, but 13 percent of its people live on less than $1.25 per day, according to United Nations data. The average annual urban disposable income is just 21,810 yuan ($3,500).

Failure to close this gap or deflate a dangerous property bubble could create a backlash that could even break the Communist Party’s grip on power.

BALANCING GROWTH

The new administration must also try to turn legions of cheap, assembly-line exporters into world-beating product-makers, while expanding domestic consumption, the economy’s prime focus to ensure growth is more balanced.

Since he was elevated to the No.2 spot in the ruling party hierarchy last November — a departure from the time of Wen, who was third-ranked — Li has embarked on an urbanisation drive.

That project aims to bring 400 million people to cities over the next decade with the hope of turning China into a wealthy world power with economic growth generated by an affluent consumer class.

On the environment, an issue which is causing much anger across the country, Li added his voice to appeals to curb the toxic haze blanketing Beijing in January, but offered few specifics and said there was no quick fix.

In late November, Li promised to let non-governmental groups play a bigger role in fighting HIV/AIDS.