A new channel for mutual understanding
Thanks to President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, the CPC has placed emphasis not just on government-to-government contacts but also interactions between the CPC and the political parties of other countries.
On this front, Xi is moving ahead of several other world leaders, who focus on only government-to-government talks and justify it by claiming that the foreign participants in such talks also belong to a political party, and that is what diplomacy is all about.
However, the reality is, although many of the top office-bearers of political parties in several countries may not be privy to information relating to the government, their contact with the people is often deeper than senior ministers. And given this fact, very often those working at the organizational level in political parties have a far better understanding of the ground realities than those who occupy high-level posts in the government.