Chinese Ambassador Hou Yanqi met with Nepal’s President Bidya Devi Bhandari on Tuesday night at the Shital Niwas presidential palace, people familiar with the matter said. The hour-long meeting comes two days after the president approved Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli’s recommendation to dissolve parliament, a precursor to the split in the Communist Party of Nepal that the Chinese leadership had been trying to avoid.
The Communist Party of Nepal was formed less than three years ago with the merger of the Communist Party of Nepal (Marxist-Leninist Unified) led by Prime Minister Oli and his rival Pushpa Kamal Dahal, also known as the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist Center. of Prachanda. The power struggle between Prime Minister Oli and Prachanda intensified in recent months after Prachanda accused the prime minister of violating his power-sharing pact.
Chinese envoy Hou had been able to convince the two sides to fix up earlier this year, but has been unsuccessful in recent months, particularly after Beijing indicated it was not averse to a change of prime minister if it remains. . the communist party intact.
There was no official news of the Chinese envoy’s discussions with the president on Tuesday. One version that was swirled in Kathmandu political circles was that Tuesday’s meeting was to discuss the supply of Covid vaccines. But this version is viewed with suspicion.
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When a controversy erupted in July this year around Ambassador Hou Yanqi’s meetings with President Bhandari and other political leaders, including Prime Minister Oli and his rivals, Chinese embassy spokesman Zhang Si told the Kathmandu Post that China did not want to see the Communist Party of Nepal in trouble and wanted the leaders to resolve their differences and stick together. “The embassy maintains good relations with the Nepalese leaders and is ready to exchange views on issues of common interest at any convenient time,” Zhang said.
Tuesday’s meeting coincided with Prime Minister Oli and the rival faction led by former Prime Ministers Prachanda, Madhav Kumar Nepal and Jhala Nath Khanal struggling to consolidate their grip on the communist party.
The Prachanda-led faction, which has majority support in most of the party’s key organs such as the standing committee and the central committee, announced that the party had decided to replace Prime Minister Oli as co-chair of the CPN with Madhav Nepal. .
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Prime Minister Oli, on the other hand, insisted that party meetings called without his approval were illegitimate. In a meeting he had called a few hours earlier, Prime Minister Oli had included his loyalists on the communist party’s central committee to shore up his support within the crucial body.
It is unclear whether Ambassador Hou will also meet Prime Minister Oli. But their last meeting in November did not go very well after it became clear that Beijing was indifferent to his continuation in government.
Prime Minister Oli is believed to have indicated to Ambassador Hou that he is capable of handling challenges within his party without the help of other countries. This approach also fitted in well with Prime Minister Oli’s efforts to regain the nationalist agenda that was the mainstay of his campaign that led to the PNC’s victory in 2018.
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