DM Monitoring
Bejing: China on Tuesday kicked off a major trade expo aimed at boosting trade with Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) with widespread participation by heads of state and businesses from the region, shrugging off recent disruptions and noise instigated by the US in Europe that has cast some uncertainty over massive China-Europe economic and trade ties.
Underscoring China’s commitment to advancing win-win cooperation with European nations, Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter to the opening of the second China-CEECs Expo and International Consumer Goods Fair in Ningbo, East China’s Zhejiang Province, expressing hope that all parties can take this opportunity to tap the potential of cooperation and broaden space for cooperation.
At the opening, where major business deals in a wide range of areas including agriculture and e-commerce are expected, leaders from the CEECs, including President Milos Zeman of the Czech Republic and President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia, struck a cooperative tone in their remarks, in stark contrast to recently rising anti-China voices on the continent as Washington seeks to drive an ideological and geopolitical wedge between China and Europe at the G7 meetings and US-EU meetings.
The US, under President Joe Biden, may further step up its political maneuvers to pit Europe against China, but given the enormous shared economic and trade interests between China and European countries, short-term distractions and disruptions will unlikely derail long-standing pragmatic cooperation between China and Europe, according to Chinese and European leaders, businesses and analysts.
The opposite diplomatic approaches adopted by the US, which is sowing political discord in Europe in a series of recent and upcoming meetings, and China, which increasingly opens its market to European businesses, was on display at the expo on Tuesday.
Inside Ningbo’s 200,000-square-meter exhibition hall, 425 exporters from CEECs are displaying their products–from wines and food to machinery equipment such as yacht and light planes–to 7,000 professional buyers and looking for closing deals.
“This is the first in-person expo after the pandemic, and we knew that the buyers would come,” said Leon Meredyk, manager of business development of Polish trading firm Vici Group, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
