Harbin (China), October 25: China on Thursday for the first time publicly said “mutual concessions and adjustments” were a must to reach an early deal on the vexed boundary issue with India for which the two governments have set up a Working Group to prepare a framework agreement.

China would make joint efforts with India under relevant political guiding principles and it hoped the two countries could understand each other, “make mutual concessions and adjustments” so as to strive for an early agreement on a framework which would be fair, rational and acceptable for both sides on resolving the border issue, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee here.

Yang said China would firmly support the Chinese and Indian Special Representatives’ work on resolving the bilateral border issue, the official Xinhua news agency reported, carrying the Chinese version of the meeting.

He said thanks to the concerted efforts by both sides, bilateral ties had maintained healthy development.

Earlier, Mukherjee told reporters after his 50-minute meeting with Yang that India and China had established a Working Group to prepare a framework for the settlement of their boundary issue.

The 11th round of talks between Special Representatives of India and China held in Beijing was successful and they had decided to set up a Working Group to prepare a framework for the resolution of the boundary issue, Mukherjee said.

“Let us wait for the recommendations of the Working Group,” Mukherjee, who was here to attend the third standalone trilateral meeting of Foreign Ministers of India, China and Russia, said in his brief comments.

The Special Representatives of the two countries—National Security Adviser M K Narayanan and Chinese Vice-Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo—held “useful and positive” discussions on the framework for the settlement of the India-China boundary question, the Indian side had said in a positive evaluation of the talks last month.

The unresolved Sino-India boundary issue has hampered the normal development of bilateral ties, with frequent reports of incursions, hurting the overall relations. For example, on Tuesday, Director General of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police General V K Joshi said over 140 incursions had been reported along the Sino-India border stretching from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh over the past year.

India says China is illegally occupying 43,180 sq kms of Jammu and Kashmir, including 5,180 sq km illegally ceded to it by Pakistan under the Sino-Pak boundary agreement in 1963. On the other hand, China accuses India of possessing some 90,000 sq km of its territory, mostly in Arunachal Pradesh.