New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Chinese President Xi Jinping on Sunday that the India-China border had remained peaceful for the past year, while Xi said the global landscape was “chaotic” and called it “the right choice” for the two countries to be friends.The two leaders met in Tianjin on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, with talks lasting about an hour on Sunday morning. The meeting marked Modi’s first visit to China in seven years and the first bilateral visit by the leaders to each other’s country since 2018. They had last met in October 2024 in Kazan, just days after the India-China border standoff was formally brought to an end.In his opening remarks, Modi recalled that their discussions in Kazan had given “a positive direction” to ties. “After the disengagement on the border, an atmosphere of peace and stability has been created,” he said, noting that the frontier had remained quiet for the past year.He pointed out that the Special Representatives of both sides had reached an understanding on border management and added that the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra had resumed, while direct flights between India and China were restarting“The interests of 2.8 billion people of both countries are linked to our cooperation. This will also pave the way for the welfare of the entire humanity. We are committed to taking our relations forward on the basis of mutual trust, respect and sensitivity,” Modi said.Xi described their meeting in Kazan last year as a “reset” in ties and said that the two sides had since made new progress in exchanges and cooperation following important consensus reached at that time.Since the Kazan meeting, there have been frequent meetings at various levels, with the last one being of the Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi to India earlier this month.Unlike Modi, Xi did not mention the border, instead casting the relationship in broader terms.“The world today is swept by once-in-a-century transformations. The international situation is both fluid and chaotic,” he said.While the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have cast a shadow, the greater disruption has come from the global economy being shaken by US tariffs on all its trading partners.India and Brazil now face the highest US tariff rate of 50%, after Washington doubled its earlier ‘reciprocal tariffs’ as a penalty for buying Russian oil. China, which once faced a peak rate of 145%, saw it reduced to a mutual 30% under a May agreement, though negotiations remain ongoing.The Chinese President called China and India “two ancient civilisations in the East” and “the world’s two most populous countries,” noting that both are also members of the global South. The two countries, he said, “shoulder the historical responsibility of improving the well-being of our two peoples, promoting the solidarity and rejuvenation of developing countries, and promoting the progress of human society.”Xi added that “it is the right choice for both of us to be friends, to have good neighbourly and amicable ties, partners who enable each other’s success, and to have the dragon and the elephant dance together.