Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on official visit to Sofia
Beijing's top diplomat meets Foreign Minister Velislava Petrova today. Bulgaria is the last stop of a tour of Azerbaijan and the Balkans – his first visit since 2015.
Archive image · Photo: UK Government / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (cropped and resized)
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is on an official visit to Bulgaria. At the Foreign Ministry building in Sofia he is holding talks with his Bulgarian counterpart Velislava Petrova, followed by a joint statement to the media – at 16:30, according to the BGNES agency. The agenda covers bilateral relations, ways to expand cooperation and current international issues.
Sofia is the final stop of a tour that, according to China's Foreign Ministry, takes in Azerbaijan, Croatia, Montenegro and Bulgaria from 14 to 20 October. Before the Balkans, Wang Yi attended the summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia in Baku as special representative of President Xi Jinping. He last visited Bulgaria as foreign minister in 2015, BTA recalls.
"Croatia, Montenegro and Bulgaria are important partners for China in Southeast Europe," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said. No specific agreements had been announced at the start of the visit. Bulgaria was the second country in the world to recognise the People's Republic of China, in 1949.