Beijing: China's new leadership sees "stable" bilateral ties with India as vital to peace, stability and development in Asia and for the establishment of a multi-polar world, the ruling Communist Party has said.

"The new Chinese leadership attaches enormous importance to our relationship with India. We are ready to work with the Indian side to greatly strengthen our cooperation in all fields so that we will elevate to a new height our constructive partnership," the spokesman of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, Yu Hongjun said.

Yu stressed that a 'stable' Sino-Indian relationship is "conducive to Asia's regional cooperation and stability as well as for the establishment of a multi-polar world and to make full use of the benefits brought by economic globalisation."

Noting that China and India share identical or similar views over many major international issues, Yu told reporters in Beijing that there is a growing need for the two fastest-developing nations to "coordinate and cooperate" over international affairs.

"The two countries should increase coordination so as to jointly safeguard the legitimate rights and interest of the developing world in international affairs and push forward the multi-polarisation and democratisation of international relations," Yu said.

Lauding the wide-ranging consensus and agreements reached between China and India during Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's visit to Beijing in June, Yu noted that the leadership of both countries have realised that keeping stable China-India ties and forging a mutually beneficial and cooperative relationship is in the interests of economic and social development in the two countries.

"To forge a stronger good-neighbourly relationship and achieve prosperity together is the shared wish of the two peoples and it is also the trend of the times," Yu said while noting that both countries are faced with the task of developing the economy.

He pointed out that since the CPC is the ruling party in China, the party's external links constitute an important component of the world's most populous country's overall diplomacy.

The CPC, which has been in power ever since the People's Republic of China (PRC) was founded in 1949, is ready to establish and develop a new type of party-to-party relations with foreign political parties, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), he said.

"By expanding contacts and enhancing mutual trust, China and India should lay a solid foundation for long-term growth of the bilateral relationship so that China-India good-neighbourliness will be passed on from generation to generation," the CPC spokesman said.

Vajpayee, the first Indian Prime Minister to visit China in nearly a decade, had in-depth talks with his Chinese counterpart Wen Jiabao as well as the Chinese President Hu Jintao, who is also the General Secretary of the CPC.

PTI