Room enough for China and India, Singh says

BEIJING (Reuters) - India is not seeking to contain China and peace and stability in Asia are in the common interest of both the world's fastest-growing major economies, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Tuesday.

There was room enough for the rise of both countries, which together comprise more than 20 percent of the world's population, he said.

"The primary task of our foreign policy is to create an external environment that is conducive to our rapid development," he said in a speech at Beijing's Chinese Academy of Social Science.

"Our policy seeks to widen our development choices and give us strategic autonomy in the world."

Beijing has been wary of New Delhi's burgeoning friendship with the United States, and India's navy was involved in war games last year with those of the United States, Australia, Japan and Singapore, in what some analysts saw as an emerging alliance of democracies ranged against China's military might.

But Singh, on his first visit to China as prime minister, made a point of stressing that there was room for India to develop ties around the globe.

"The independence of our foreign policy enables us to pursue mutually beneficial cooperation with all major countries of the world," he said.

"... There is enough space for both India and China to grow and prosper while strengthening our cooperative engagement."

In talks with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Monday, there was no hint of a breakthrough on a decades-old border dispute that has dogged relations and that flared into a brief war in 1962.

But Singh said the two countries had an obligation to get beyond "problems that have troubled our relations in the past" and said he believed the boundary issue could be settled on the basis of political parameters agreed when Wen was in India in 2005.

"We are confident that those principles will guide us to a mutually satisfactory solution of this issue," he said.

China and India also agreed to set up a mechanism to look at trans-boundary rivers, following concerns in New Delhi that Beijing was seeking to divert the headwaters of the Brahmaputra in Tibet toward its parched western provinces.

Both countries share domestic development as a priority, which gives then common ground in foreign policy, in their desire for regional peace and stability and on global environmental issues, Singh said.

"We need ... to address critical challenges to energy, food and water security and climate change," he said. "These are challenges that China faces as well."

He also called for increased exchanges between people in both countries to "eliminate misconceptions and prejudices".

China and Inda, Singh said, would be at the centre of the global order in this century.