National Security Adviser Ajit Doval is set to travel to Beijing on Monday, just weeks before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s expected visit to India for the BRICS leaders’ summit scheduled for September 12-13.Doval will take part in the Special Representatives (SRs) talks on the boundary issue with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Tuesday. During his visit, Doval may also call on President Xi, sources said.While Beijing has not released any official statement on Xi’s visit to New Delhi, sources said that the trip was expected to go ahead. It would be Xi’s first visit to India since October 2019, when he attended an informal summit with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Mamallapuram, Tamil Nadu. Bilateral ties subsequently came under severe strain following the military standoff along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh in April 2020.Before the BRICS summit, Modi and Xi are also expected to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, on September 1. According to the sources, a bilateral meeting on the sidelines remained a possibility.Doval and Wang, the designated Special Representatives (SRs) on the boundary issue, are scheduled to hold the 25th round of SR talks on Tuesday. The mechanism is tasked with resolving the long-pending boundary dispute between the two countries.The forthcoming meeting will be the first round of SR talks in a year. The previous round was held in New Delhi in August last year, when both sides reaffirmed the 2005 agreement, “Political Parameters and Guiding Principles for the Settlement of the India-China Boundary Question”, as a reference point to comprehensively address the boundary dispute.India and China do not have a mutually agreed and demarcated boundary. Troops from both sides remain deployed along the 3,488-km LAC stretching across the Himalayan region.Following last year’s SR talks, the two sides established an expert group to explore an “early harvest” in boundary delimitation. In its statement after the August 2025 talks, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) referred to the 2005 agreement and said both sides had agreed to work within its framework. The MEA also stressed the need to approach the issue from a broader political perspective of the bilateral relationship and seek a “fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable” framework for a boundary settlement.Also, as a measure to overcome any breaches at the LAC, the two countries in August last year announced a working group under the existing “Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India-China Border Affairs (WMCC)”. It is tasked with effective border management to maintain peace and tranquillity in border areas.