Chinese President Xi Jinping to attend SCO summit, will visit Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan

China on Monday officially announced that President Xi Jinping will travel for the first time out of the country in over two years this week to visit Kazakhstan and attend the SCO summit being held at Samarkand in Uzbekistan.

China on Monday officially announced that President Xi Jinping will travel for the first time out of the country in over two years this week to visit Kazakhstan and attend the SCO summit being held at Samarkand in Uzbekistan. Xi will attend the 22nd meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in the city of Samarkand, and pay state visits to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan from Sepember 14 to 16, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying announced here in a brief statement.

He would first visit Kazakhstan on September 14, which will be his first visit abroad since Jan 2020. Myanmar was the last country Xi visited on January 17-18, 2020.

Just days after his return, China had announced a massive outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan, which later spiralled into a global pandemic resulting in millions of deaths around the world.

Since then, Xi, 69, has not ventured out of China and attended global events virtually.

From Kazakhstan, he would travel to the neighbouring Uzbekistan where the SCO summit is scheduled to be held on September 15-16.

The Beijing-headquartered, SCO is an eight-member economic and security bloc consisting of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India and Pakistan.

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