Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli seemed happy at the end of his week-long visit to China, exactly a month after his trip to India. Nepal and China signed a series of agreements, from undertaking feasibility studies on railway connections to exploring oil and gas deposits in Nepal. The two sides also signed a trade and transit agreement, and are to undertake a feasibility study for a free trade agreement. Nepal also became a dialogue partner in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Both sides had avoided formalising these issues in the past as they agreed China couldn’t substitute India in Nepal, given the latter’s “India-locked status”, open border and long history of a symbiotic existence. But the five-month long blockade Nepal suffered after promulgating its constitution and India’s visible international isolation apparently contributed to Kathmandu looking the other way.
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