NEW DELHI, India (AP) -- Chinese President Jiang Zemin sidestepped protests by Tibetan exiles Thursday and promised a closer partnership with neighboring India.

Jiang's three-day visit, the first by a Chinese president to India, is aimed at easing tensions that linger from the two country's 1962 border war in the Himalayas.

"Though we still have some outstanding problems left over from history, I can say that our common interests far outweigh our differences," Jiang said in a speech during a dinner hosted by Indian President Shanker Dayal Sharma.

Indian officials say the two countries are likely to agree on a delineation of the cease-fire line and a further reduction of troops that began three years ago. They also expect new trade and shipping agreements.

"Both of us need a peaceful neighborhood," Sharma said during his dinner speech.

Because the Tibet issue is nearly always at the top of any agenda when China and India talk, police in riot gear kept a close watch as about 700 refugee women, children and monks in scarlet robes protested the visit.

The demonstrators were blocked near their shantytown district close to Delhi's old city, about 11 miles from the Chinese embassy. The embassy was cordoned off by police barricades. Other protests were held in Bombay and Tibetan communities throughout India.

Beijing says Tibet has been its territory for centuries, but many Tibetans say they enjoyed de facto independence.

The Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, welcomed Jiang's visit to India and expressed hopes of meeting him. But the Dalai Lama said in a statement that the prospects were unrealistic because "of the new wave of repression and the ongoing campaign to denounce me inside Tibet."

The Tibetan leader said a closer relationship between India and China would help the Tibetan cause. "I therefore welcome the visit of President Jiang Zemin to India," he said.

India is the home of the Dalai Lama, who was both the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet until he fled in 1959 to escape imminent arrest in a Chinese crackdown. India restricts his political activities as a condition for allowing him and more than 100,000 of his followers to stay as refugees.

China, however, is unhappy that the Dalai Lama, who won the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, runs a self-proclaimed government-in-exile in the Indian city of Dharmsala, from where he conducts a worldwide campaign for Tibetan autonomy.

As part of Thursday's protest, a young monk representing the Panchen Lama second in rank only to the Dalai Lama was paraded in a cage by two other demonstrators dressed as Chinese soldiers holding toy guns.

Tibetan exiles say the real Panchen Lama was abducted shortly after the Dalai Lama named him in 1995 as the reincarnation of the last Panchen Lama, who died six years earlier.

Chinese authorities then orchestrated the selection of another 6-year-old boy as the revered monk.