Chinese diplomacy at the Quirinale: Wang Yi meets Mattarella and Tajani

This morning the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella received the head of Beijing’s diplomacy at the Quirinale Wang Yi. He also attended the meeting Antonio Tajani, who had already had a bilateral agreement with Yi yesterday evening in the same hours in which the American president Joe Biden told reporters that he will not apologize to China for the shooting down of the Chinese spy balloon. “He spoke words of peace,” Tajani said in a radio broadcast after the meeting. The reference is to the war in Ukraine, one of the topics covered by the conversation. “President Xi Jinping will make a peace speech on the occasion of the first year of the war”, said the head of the Foreign Ministry: “I hope it puts real pressure on Russia because Beijing has great influence on Moscow.”

Yi, a former foreign minister, is in Italy as part of a European tour that has already taken him to Paris, where he met President Emmanuel Macron. The next stops will be in Germany (the occasion is the Munich security conference), in Hungary and finally in Russia: for some, the signal of a Western message to bring to Putin, for others, only the demonstration of Sino-Russian relations who continue at full speed, despite the war.

As we wrote in the Foglio, Yi’s diplomatic mission in Italy is also an attempt to convince the Meloni government – which has shown a strong anti-Chinese attitude since the beginning – to do not leave the Silk Road by the end of 2023. And in fact, according to the Xinhua news agency, in the meeting with Tajani the diplomat underlined the importance of the agreement, which he said “raised the strategic level of bilateral relations” between the two villages.

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Tajani had spoken of relations with China only a few days ago, in contravention of the silence of the government, which in recent months has rarely spoken explicitly about Beijing. “I want to be very clear: Taipei must remain as it is,” said the foreign minister referring to Chinese claims on Taiwan. “China is a strategic partner,” she said. But “the situation in the Indo-Pacific is not so distant from what is happening in Ukraine: there must be no temptation to do in other countries what the Russian Federation has done towards Ukraine”.