When Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Antonio Tajani arrived in China yesterday, he was focused on balancing two competing interests: laying the ground for Italy’s exit from a controversial investment pact with Beijing, while also trying to avoid a rupture with the world’s second-largest economy.
During the three-day trip, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s deputy is to meet with Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) and other officials to discuss the possibility of leaving the Belt and Road Initiative, an investment pact designed to deepen economic ties with allies.
Just before boarding a plane to China on Saturday, Tajani said that the 2019 agreement had fallen short of expectations.
Photo: AP
“Belt and Road was a decision made in the past,” Tajani told Francine Lacqua in a Bloomberg Television interview at the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
Regardless of what Italy decides regarding the pact, “it will not be a message against China,” he said.
Bloomberg reported earlier that Italy was signaling to allies that it intended to pull out of the initiative, but delivering on such a scenario would require a significant diplomatic effort.
Meloni has said she will visit China in the coming months as part of the outreach started by Tajani. The issue is sensitive, particularly since the Chinese ambassador to Italy has warned there would be “negative consequences” for Rome if it withdraws from the agreement.
Italy’s membership in the initiative has turned into a dilemma for the government after making it an outlier among the G7 countries. It raised questions about Rome’s foreign alliances at a time of an increasingly fraught rivalry between China and a US suspicious of Beijing’s ambitions.
The impact of Italy’s controversial pact with China on trade has been twofold, Bloomberg calculations based on Eurostat data showed.
While imports from China accelerated from 2020 and last year, following the signing of the Belt and Road memorandum, the trend has been more volatile for exports. After growing almost 20 percent in 2021, they only rose 5 percent last year, lagging behind the pace of inflation.
Meloni’s government must decide by the end of the year whether to renew its involvement in the program that was once the backbone of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) efforts to deepen economic ties across the world.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) removed former minister of foreign affairs Qin Gang (秦剛) from his post after an investigation concluded that he had conducted an affair and fathered a child while serving as ambassador to the US, the Wall Street Journal reported. Top officials were told in August that a CCP inquiry into Qin uncovered “lifestyle issues,” the newspaper reported yesterday, citing people familiar with the situation that it did not describe. That phrase usually means sexual misbehavior of some type in the parlance of Chinese officialdom. Two of the people said the affair led to the birth of a child in
GUNNED DOWN: The Canadian PM said there were credible allegations that India was connected to the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey on June 18 India yesterday dismissed allegations that its government was linked to the killing of a Sikh activist in Canada as “absurd,” expelling a senior Canadian diplomat and accusing Canada of interfering in India’s internal affairs. It came a day after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described what he called credible allegations that India was connected to the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, an advocate of Sikh independence from India who was gunned down on June 18 outside a Sikh cultural center in Surrey, British Columbia, and Canada expelled a top Indian diplomat. “Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a
LOST BATTLE: The Varroa mite, which Canberra has called the ‘most serious pest’ to face bees, would cause serious economic damage, an ecologist said Australia yesterday abandoned its fight to eradicate the destructive Varroa mite, an invasive parasite responsible for the collapse of honeybee populations across the planet. Desperate to keep Varroa out of the country, authorities have destroyed more than 14,000 infected beehives since the tiny red-brown pest was first detected north of Sydney in June last year. The government said its US$64 million eradication plan could not stop the mite from spreading, and the country’s beekeepers should now prepare to live with the incursion. “The recent spike in new detections have made it clear that the Varroa mite infestation is more widespread and has
COP28 AGENDA: Beijing’s climate envoy said that China was open to negotiating a global renewable energy target as long as it took economic conditions into account The complete phasing-out of fossil fuels is not realistic, China’s top climate official said on Thursday, adding that such fuels must continue to play a vital role in maintaining global energy security. Chinese Special Envoy on Climate Change Xie Zhenhua (解振華) was responding to comments by ambassadors at a forum in Beijing ahead of the UN’s COP28 climate meeting in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in November. Reporters obtained a copy of text of Xie’s speech and a video recording of the meeting. Countries are under pressure to make more ambitious climate pledges after a UN-led global “stocktake” said that 20 gigatonnes of additional
RSS