Germany, China hold meeting amid tensions over trade, Ukraine
Al JazeeraTrade, climate change and the war in Ukraine are on the agenda as Scholz meets Li on his first official foreign trip. Scholz has said he wants to avoid overreliance on Chinese trade and diversify Germany’s supply of key goods – an approach he called “derisking” – while rejecting the idea of “decoupling” from China. “We should not artificially exaggerate ‘dependence’, or even simply equate interdependence with insecurity,” he told Germany’s top corporate brass, according to the official Xinhua news agency. Climate change Germany has acknowledged that major global problems such as climate change can only be resolved together with China, and the official motto of Tuesday’s meeting is “Acting sustainably together”. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said last week that the choice of Germany as Li’s first stop “fully reflects the high importance China attaches to China-Germany relations”.