BEIJING, April 19, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- A report from
People's Daily: On the morning of April
16, Chinese President Xi Jinping met with German
Chancellor Olaf Scholz in
Beijing. This is Scholz's second
visit to China since he took
office, and Scholz is the first leader of a major Western country
to visit China this year. The two
leaders exchanged views on bilateral relations and international
and regional issues of mutual interest.
Xi called on the two countries need to view and develop
bilateral relations from a long-term and strategic perspective, and
work together to inject greater stability and certainty into the
world. His remarks have charted the course for the two countries to
further advance bilateral relations and to jointly contribute more
to world peace and prosperity under new circumstances.
Over the past 50-plus years since the establishment of
diplomatic ties, China and
Germany have enjoyed robust
bilateral relations. The two countries have had close exchanges at
all levels and in all fields.
China's policy toward
Germany is highly stable and
consistent. China always views
Germany as its important partner
of mutually beneficial cooperation and supports Germany in playing a more important role in
Europe and the wider world.
The two sides successfully held the intergovernmental
consultation and high-level dialogues on strategic and financial
issues, and will hold a dialogue on climate change and green
transition. As long as the two sides uphold mutual respect, seek
common ground while reserving differences, enhance exchanges and
mutual learning, and pursue win-win cooperation, China-Germany
relations will continue to enjoy solid and sustained progress.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the
all-round strategic partnership between China and Germany. Over the past 10 years, despite
tremendous changes in the international landscape, China-Germany
relations have maintained steady growth, and bilateral cooperation
has been strengthened and deepened across the board, providing
impetus for the development of both countries.
Both history and reality have proved that the all-round
strategic partnership is an inevitable choice and the optimal
solution for China-Germany relations.
The more instability in the world, the greater the need for the
two sides to strengthen the resilience and vitality of their
relations, Xi said, calling for joint efforts to keep to the
overall direction of cooperation and development in growing
bilateral ties, and stick to the characterization of all-round
strategic partnership.
Scholz said that going forward, the German side will work with
the Chinese side to strengthen bilateral ties, deepen dialogue and
cooperation in all fields, and promote people-to-people exchanges
in such areas as education and culture.
Enhancing mutual understanding and trust, and strengthening
dialogue and communication will contribute to the healthy and
stable development of the all-round strategic partnership between
the two countries.
Both China and Germany have deeply engaged in and benefited
from each other's development, with pragmatic cooperation always
being the defining feature of China-Germany
relations.
China and Germany are important trading partners for
each other. Germany has been
China's largest trading partner in
Europe for 49 consecutive years,
while China has been Germany's largest trading partner for eight
consecutive years.
According to a report by German Economic Institute (IW), in
2023, German direct investment in China increased by 4.3 percent year on year to
a record high of 11.9 billion euros
($12.7 billion).
In the face of weak global economic recovery and rising
protectionism, German investment in China has remained strong. Thousands of German
companies and institutions are actively engaged in the Chinese
market, which once again demonstrates that mutually beneficial
cooperation between China and
Germany is not a "risk," but the
guarantee for a stable bilateral relationship and an opportunity
for the future.
There is huge potential to be tapped for pursuing win-win
cooperation in both traditional sectors such as machinery and
automobile, and new areas such as green transition, digitization
and artificial intelligence.
This time, Scholz visited Chongqing and Shanghai together with representatives of the
German business community, and witnessed the great economic
progress China made over recent
years. He said that Germany
opposes protectionism and supports free trade.
It is important for the two countries to adopt an objective and
dialectical view on the issue of production capacity through a
market and global perspective and based on the laws of economics,
and devote more efforts to the discussion on cooperation, which
will bring bilateral economic and trade cooperation to a new level
and inject continuous impetus into global economic recovery.
As China and Germany are respectively the second and third
largest economies in the world, the consolidation and development
of their relations carries significance that goes beyond the
bilateral scope, and has a major impact on the Eurasian continent
and the entire world.
China and Germany share a lot in common on the issue of
world multipolarity. Both of them support globalization and
international cooperation.
Xi pointed out that a multipolar world is, in essence, one where
countries with different civilizations, systems and paths respect
each other and coexist in peace. China and Germany need to independently carry out
collaboration on multilateral fronts, push the international
community to take real actions to better address global challenges
such as climate change, unbalanced development and regional
conflicts, and make greater contribution to the balance and
stability of the world.
Xi and Scholz reached consensus on the Ukraine crisis, Palestinian-Israeli conflict
and other issues, which will inject greater stability and certainty
into a turbulent and intertwined world.
China and Germany do not have clashing fundamental
interests between them and pose no security threat to each other.
Cooperation between the two countries benefits not just the two
sides but also the world at large.
Both sides should cherish and inherit the valuable experience of
the development of bilateral relations, constantly enhance mutual
understanding and trust, and deepen practical cooperation, so as to
inject new impetus into the all-round strategic partnership between
China and Germany, and make greater contributions to
world peace, stability, and growth.
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