Leaders of Nepal’s communist parties have been frequently visiting China.

Just a few weeks ago, former President Bidya Devi Bhandari, in her capacity as a CPN-UML leader, led a 14-member delegation on a 10-day visit to China. In April, a team led by Dinanath Sharma, a secretary of the CPN (Maoist Centre), also visited China.

According to UML leaders, another delegation, led by Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Bishnu Paudel, a vice-chair of the ruling UML, is set to visit China soon.

While communist leaders have been making frequent visits to the north, on Thursday night, a 17-member delegation from the Nepali Congress is leaving for China. It is led by Bal Bahadur KC, a central committee member of the party.

KC and other Congress leaders were invited by the Chinese Communist Party’s International Liaison Department (ILD).

According to KC, some district presidents of the party and some professors will tour China for a week.

The Communist Party of China has invited the Congress for a party-to-party dialogue, KC said. “The party has entrusted me to lead the delegation.”

Before the visit, KC met party president Sher Bahadur Deuba on Thursday morning for consultation. He also discussed with General Secretary Gagan Thapa and senior leader Shekhar Koirala, who leads a dissident faction in the Congress.

Before this, Sujata Koirala in February led a 15-member delegation of Congress leaders to China.

“Every visit might not have been made public, but Congress leaders too often visit China,” said Dinesh Bhattarai, a former foreign secretary and foreign policy adviser to then-prime minister Deuba.

“The Congress and the CPC have the oldest political relations. Therefore, visits are often exchanged between the two sides.”

The first working committee meeting of the Congress, held soon after the 1950 political change, had adopted a policy to develop mutual relations with neighbouring China, according to Bhattarai.

KC, who is leading the Congress delegates this time, also said that he was a member of the party’s delegations to the north in the 1990s as well. Former prime minister Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, who was the party chair, led the delegation, KC recalls.

Although party leaders have visited China in the past in their capacity as ministers or for some programmes, KC claims that this visit comes after a long time under the party-to-party relationship.

KC and Bhattarai both emphasised that the relationship between the Congress and the CPC is longstanding. Warm ties between the two countries and their respective parties were established during the tenure of prime minister BP Koirala six decades ago.

It was under Koirala’s leadership that Nepal and China reached an agreement to settle their claims to Sagarmatha, the world’s tallest peak.

Historical documents indicate that it was on the basis of this agreement that then-king Mahendra resolved the issue with China concerning Sagarmatha.

However, recently, the relationship between the Congress and China has not been very cordial. There were times when visiting CPC representatives engaged warmly with Nepal’s communist leaders, but such interactions were noticeably lacking with the Congress.

That dynamism began to shift in 2022, when Liu Jianchao, the newly appointed head of the CPC’s International Liaison Department, visited Nepal. Liu made an effort to revive ties with the Congress by travelling to Sundarijal, where the party’s former president and Nepal’s first democratically elected prime minister, Koirala, had been imprisoned under the king’s rule.

In recent times, China has adopted a strategy of deepening its relations across the political parties in Nepal. It has hosted frequent visits by Nepali politicians.

Congress leaders say that China extended an invitation for a party-to-party visit as well—indicating that the Chinese side did not want to distance itself from Nepal’s grand-old party, the Congress.

Govinda Pokhrel, head of the Congress economic policy and planning department, said that communist leaders are not the only Nepali politicians to visit China.

Pokhrel was a part of the five-member delegation to China led by Shekhar Koirala in 2017.

On the focus of such visits, Pokhrel says he is not sure about others, but there were “extensive discussions on policy and economic matters” when he was a part of the delegation.