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Ahmedabad, India • Chinese President Xi Jinping landed in the Indian prime minister's home state of Gujarat on Wednesday for a three-day visit expected to focus on India's need to improve worn out infrastructure and reduce its trade deficit.
Xi was greeted on the tarmac by a throng of news photographers and state officials carrying fringed umbrellas to guard him from the sun in Gujarat's main financial city of Ahmedabad.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to court Chinese business and seek investment to upgrade creaky infrastructure, banking on China's track record at building highways, railways, and industrial zones. India is also eager to address the imbalance in their annual trade, which now totals around $65 billion but is skewed toward China electrical equipment and parts.
Modi and the Gujarat government are staging a lavish welcome for Xi, with billboards across Ahmedabad showing a smiling Modi and Xi and a banquet dinner planned Wednesday night on the banks of the Sabarmati River in Ahmedabad. Modi was also celebrating his 64th birthday.
Xi has been equally effusive in expressing excitement for the visit.
"China-India relations have become one of the most dynamic and promising bilateral relations in the 21st century," Xi wrote in a letter published Wednesday in The Hindu newspaper.
The choice of Gujarat as Xi's first stop in India, rather than the capital New Delhi, marked a departure from protocol that some saw as a sign of warming relations between China and India, which have been tested by a decades-old border dispute and fears of China's growing military and economic might.
Earlier this week, Xi visited Sri Lanka and Maldives, both traditional allies of India who have unnerved New Delhi by growing closer to Beijing.