“Old friends”: Says Chinese President Xi Jinping after meeting Bill Gates
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Amid mounting tensions with the USA on various issues, including the pandemic and Taiwan, when few global celebrities or businesspersons care to meet him, President Xi Jinping on Friday described the visiting Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates as an “old friend.”
The state-controlled Chinese media reported that he told the American billionaire and philanthropist that he was “the first American friend” he had met in Beijing this year.
Gates is the latest high-profile American business leader to visit China since it reopened its borders, post-pandemic. The last Xi-Gates meeting took place in 2015.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is also scheduled to visit China this weekend. However, expectations are low that any serious headway will be made on the growing list of disputes between the US and China.
“I often say that the foundation of Sino-US relations is among the people, and we always look to the American people and hope that the two peoples will continue to be friendly,” Xi was reported to have told Gates.
It was President Xi’s first meeting with a foreign business figure in recent years.
The Chinese leader stopped traveling abroad in 2020 when China shut its borders during the pandemic.
This year, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, and Apple’s Tim Cook have all traveled to China. But they met only with senior Chinese officials, not the President.
Gates is visiting China in his capacity as the co-chairman of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a not-for-profit organization he started with his former wife.
In 2020, Gates stepped down from Microsoft’s board to focus on the foundation, which focuses on global health, education, and climate change.
He had quit his full-time executive role at the technology giant 12 years earlier.
