BEIJING (AP) ― German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrived Thursday in China for talks aimed at reassuring anxious Chinese leaders Europe is resolving its debt crisis.
Merkel was due to deliver a speech Thursday at a government think tank and meet with Chinese leaders.
German officials say Merkel’s goals include reassuring Chinese leaders about the stability of the 17-nation euro area. They said she would brief them on this week’s meeting of European leaders, who agreed on a treaty to impose new spending controls.
Merkel also is expected to press Beijing to help Western governments pressure Iran to give up a possible nuclear weapons program by buying less Iranian oil. China gets more than 10 percent of its oil imports from Iran and Beijing has rejected an embargo.
Europe is China’s biggest trading partner and Beijing’s stake in its financial health is growing as Chinese companies expand there. China’s biggest producer of construction equipment announced this week it was buying Germany’s Putzmeister, a maker of concrete pumps.
“China’s top concern is the stability of the European banking system, which will have a direct impact on China’s trade,” said Zhang Bin, a finance specialist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think tank.
Merkel will hold talks with Premier Wen Jiabao on Thursday, and met President Hu Jintao on Friday before flying to Guangzhou in southern China to attend a forum for Chinese and German businessmen with Wen.
European leaders want China, with $3.2 trillion in foreign reserves, and other global investors to contribute to expanding the continent’s bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility.
The fund’s chief executive, Klaus Regling, said during an October visit to Beijing that China and other Asian investors had bought about 40 percent of the bonds issued by the EFSF since it was created in May 2010.
Chinese leaders including Premier Wen Jiabao have expressed sympathy for Europe but have refrained from committing to financial aid. Chinese analysts argue that Europe has adequate financial resources.
Merkel is the first of several European leaders to visit China this month for talks expected largely to focus on the economic crisis. A commentary in the China Daily, a state-run English-language newspaper, suggested a tit-for-tat: Chinese economic assistance in return for Europe’s lifting of an arms embargo that was imposed after the Chinese military crushed the Tiananmen democracy movement in 1989.
“As a Chinese saying goes, one does not visit the temple for nothing,” said the commentary by Ouyang Shi, described as a Beijing-based scholar of international relations. It later said: “If European demands for China are mostly in economic terms, Chinese hopes of Europe are mainly political, namely mutual respect and treating each other as equals.”
