China wants to take Sino-India ties to new stage: Li

Seeking to enhance cooperation with India, China's new Premier Li Keqiang told Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that Beijing would like to promote strategic cooperation and partnership with New Delhi to a "new stage".

Hours after his endorsement as Premier yesterday, Li told Singh over phone that enhanced bilateral cooperation would contribute to enlarging the two countries' space for development and common interests.

China will, as always, "attach great importance to its ties with India, and would like to work with it to promote their relations of strategic cooperation and partnership to a new stage," state-run Xinhua news agency quoted him as saying.

Li, an English-speaking bureaucrat and a reformist leader, was yesterday as elected as the Premier of the world's second largest economy by about 3,000 deputies of the NationalPeople's Congress, known as the rubber stamp Parliament.

Thanking Singh for congratulating him, Li said China and India are the two largest Asian powers and developing nations, which are also two ancient civilizations and emerging economies.

Li said by enhancing their cooperation, the two countries can expand their space for development, and increase common interests so as to facilitate a sustainable economic and social development and help the world order and system advance in a just and reasonable direction.

"This will promote better livelihood of more than two billion people in the two countries, which bears a great significance for the whole world," he told Singh.

Singh said that bilateral ties over the past few years have seen a comprehensive development and continuous progress in cooperation and exchanges in various fields, Xinhua reported.