China's Xi says watching Kashmir, supports Pakistan's core interests

Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Wednesday he was watching the situation in disputed Kashmir and would support Pakistan in issues related to its core interests, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Xi told visiting Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan during a meeting in Beijing that the right and wrong of the situation was clear, Xinhua said. 

Xi added that the parties [Pakistan and India] should resolve the dispute through peaceful dialogue.

Tensions over the disputed region of Kashmir have risen sharply since August 5 when New Delhi revoked the limited autonomy of India-administered Kashmir, triggering protests and unprecedented lockdown of the highly-militarised region.

Pakistan calls it an "illegal annexation" of the Himalayan territory where it awaits a UN-promised plebiscite. 

Majority in Kashmir say India's move is aimed to alter the Muslim demographics of the region by settling Hindu outsiders.

Political leaders and thousands of civilians have been arrested, with allegations of torture and abuse levelled at authorities –– which deny them –– and protests have since raged.

Anti-India sentiment runs deep in Kashmir's mostly Muslim population and most people support the rebels' cause of independence or merger with Pakistan. Nearly 100,000 people have been killed in the uprising and the ensuing Indian military crackdown since 1989. 

Modi-Xi meeting

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will host President Xi for an "informal summit", India and China confirmed at short notice on Wednesday as growing differences dog the two Asian giants' historically prickly relations.

These include Chinese anger at India's August move in Kashmir and at Indian military exercises in Arunachal Pradesh state, part of which Beijing claims. 

China's foreign ministry had thundered in August after the Kashmir decision, which will see the Ladakh region of India-administered become a separate Indian administrative territory, that India had "continued to undermine China's territorial sovereignty by unilaterally changing its domestic law".

Beijing claims parts of Buddhist-dominated Ladakh, perched on a steep Himalayan border with China's restive Xinjiang to its north and Tibet to the east. India too says that part of Ladakh that is under Chinese control is its.

'Scuffle' in Ladakh

Last month Indian and Chinese troops engaged in what Indian media called a "scuffle" in Ladakh on the banks of the Pangong Tso lake, two-thirds of which is controlled by China, and where soldiers threw stones at each other in August 2017.

That incident coincided with a much more serious face-off in the Doklam plateau in the Himalayas claimed by both China and Bhutan when Chinese soldiers started building a road and India sent its forces to halt the process.

The Doklam face-off between the nuclear-armed Asian nations, who fought a war in 1962, lasted two months until both sides pulled back.

India recently upgraded its participation in the Quad –– a grouping with the US, Australia, and Japan that Washington hopes will counter China in the Asia-Pacific region.