“LARGE MARKET”
The China trip has taken Scholz to big cities such as southwestern Chongqing, where he visited German auto supplier Bosch’s hydrogen fuel cell plant.
He was joined by senior German executives, such as Ola Kallenius, chairman of Mercedes-Benz, and Oliver Zipse, chief executive of BMW, underlining the importance of the Chinese market to Europe’s largest economy.
Sino-German economic ties should not only be cultivated but expanded, Kallenius told German broadcaster ARD in Beijing on Tuesday.
“Withdrawing from such a large market is not an alternative, but rather strengthening our position,” he said about the company’s strategy in China.
BMW’s Zipse expressed a similar view on China, Germany’s biggest trading partner.
“We actually see more opportunities than risks,” he told the ARD news programme Tagesschau.
China and Germany have “huge potential” for co-operation in both traditional fields such as machinery manufacturing and automobiles and emerging fields including green transformation and digital artificial intelligence, Xi told Scholz.
On the Ukraine crisis, Xi called for all parties to work together to restore peace as soon as possible and keep the conflict from spiralling out of control.
China supports all efforts towards peaceful resolution, as well as holding an international peace conference recognised by both Russia and Ukraine with equal participation by all parties, Xi told Scholz.
