About to celebrate 50 years of diplomatic relations, the President of the Government meets with the Chinese leader on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Bali
Spanish diplomacy had been trying to get an official visit to China for some time, but it was impossible due to its quarantine upon arrival and border restrictions due to the pandemic. For this reason, as soon as it was confirmed that Xi Jinping would attend the G-20 in Bali, one of the foreign objectives of the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, was to meet with him on the sidelines of the summit. And so it has been, although in a rather abbreviated way because he was not the only one who wanted to see Xi.
After spending more than two and a half years without traveling abroad due to the pandemic, the Chinese president has reactivated his international agenda at this G-20 summit. He first met on Monday for three hours with the President of the United States, Joe Biden, and this Tuesday he had a marathon of meetings with eight leaders, including the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, and that of France, Emmanuel Macron. .
In his interview, which lasted about 40 minutes, Sánchez appealed to the Chinese president to use his influence as a stabilizing power in order to get Putin to stop the war in Ukraine. An appeal to Beijing that was also repeated by other leaders such as Macron, who reaffirmed with Xi his frontal opposition to Putin using nuclear weapons in the contest. Trying to attract China to the Western side, which from the beginning has shown implicit support for Russia, Sánchez has joined the requests of other leaders such as Biden and the prime ministers of Australia, South Korea and the Netherlands, who have also been received by Xi Jinping. In this common front of the West to put pressure on Russia, Sánchez advocated seeking multilateral solutions to the crises that the war has unleashed, especially energy and food.
“It has been a meeting that has developed in a tone of cordiality and also frankness on both sides,” explained the Foreign Minister, José Albares, at the end of the meeting. In it, according to what he said, Sánchez “has made a request to Xi to use his good relationship, his influence to join forces and moderate the war so that peace returns as soon as possible.”
Interestingly, the meeting statement issued by the Chinese Foreign Ministry makes no mention of the Ukraine talk, which was the main topic of the meeting. As diplomatic sources pointed out, President Xi understands the requests for mediation that he receives from the West due to his friendship with Putin, but qualifies his influence over him. Apart from this detail, what he did want to make clear is that China is not helping Russia militarily and is also concerned about the duration and drift of the war, the nuclear threat of which he strongly rejects.
Anniversary
In addition, Sánchez and Xi addressed bilateral relations, which in 2023 will be fifty years old. “Both parties have talked about celebrating that date and cultural aspects have been discussed, such as the opening of a second center of the Cervantes Institute in China,” Albares detailed, a claim that Spain has been waiting for for more than a decade. For when China reopens its borders to official trips from other countries, the anniversary may be an ideal moment for Sánchez to return to Xi the visit he made to Spain in 2018 or to receive the King and Queen, whom he invited when he did. allow the pandemic. Along with the celebration of the anniversary, the minister highlighted “other commercial issues such as the sale of Airbus aircraft and the diversification of Spanish exports, so that they are not only agricultural.”
Halfway between the cultural and the commercial, the promotion of tourism is another of Spain’s objectives, but the Chinese now do not travel abroad due to the high cost of flights to leave their country, the quarantines upon return and even because the authorities are not issuing or renewing passports with the purpose of closing as much as possible in the face of the pandemic. Until Beijing withdraws its Covid 0 policy and returns to normality like other countries, Chinese tourists will not travel en masse as before and their diplomatic relations will continue to be hampered by the lack of personal meetings beyond international summits like this one in G-20.
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