Berlin (dpa) – Ahead of the planned government consultations, Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has called on China to engage in an honest and open dialogue about differences. “The list of our issues was already long in Beijing, and it has not become any shorter. Fair economic relations, security questions in the Indo-Pacific, but also developments in the Middle East and the question of human rights,” Baerbock said in Berlin during a joint press conference with her Chinese counterpart Qin Gang.
The meeting served as preparation for the German-Chinese government consultations that are scheduled for June and for which the new Chinese Prime Minister Li Qiang has been invited to Berlin. The German government hosts such talks with various close or strategically important partners, including France, Japan, India, Brazil and Israel. The last German-Chinese government consultations took place in 2021 – at that time in the form of a video conference due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The foreign minister appealed for contacts at civil society level. “Only when people meet face to face again will we forge contacts that will last into the future,” said Baerbock. “I hope that we will therefore conduct these talks above all in this spirit of togetherness, of contact, that we will conduct them without any predetermined conclusion, and that despite all our differences we will always find also what connects us to one another.”