Yang, completing a two-day visit to India, said China fully understood India's need for civilian nuclear technology to power its rapid economic growth.

India had suggested that China had been reluctant to support a waiver enabling India to trade with the Nuclear Suppliers' Group (NSG) without signing non-proliferation pacts.

The NSG exemption, approved Saturday, is key for energy-hungry India to buy nuclear fuel, technology and reactors.

"You are a big country. You rely on oil imports. So there is all the more urgency to make full, peaceful use of nuclear energy," Yang said.

However it was also important that "international non-proliferation regimes should be protected," he added.

Denying that the world's two most populous countries were competing with each other, Yang said in his speech that "China sees India as an important partner in Asia and beyond."

"We are partners, not rivals. There is a lot we can do together," he said.

Yang, who met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday, acknowledged differences on some issues including the demarcation of their common border -- the legacy of a brief but bitter war in 1962.

He described the border row as an "arduous and complex" issue to which India and China must seek a fair solution.

India says China occupies 38,000 square kilometres (14,700 square miles) of its Himalayan territory, while Beijing claims the whole of the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which is 90,000 square kilometres.