“More Equal Relations” –

A three-year action plan to “relaunch” bilateral cooperation opens a “new phase” in relations between Rome and Beijing: Giorgia Meloni re-establishes relations with China after the rift over Italy’s exit from the Silk Road and at the same time underlines the importance of “making trade relations increasingly fair and advantageous for all” and the need to play “by the rules, to ensure that all companies can operate on international markets on equal terms”. The Italian Prime Minister takes the ‘support’ of the Chinese Prime Minister, Li Qiang, who evokes precisely “the spirit” of the Belt and Road Initiative (“it would have ensured peace, cooperation and inclusiveness”) in reiterating the opportunity to bring cooperation between the two countries to “new levels”.

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The Prime Minister – on a mission in China until Wednesday – is welcomed by the Chinese Prime Minister in the great Hall of the People, an enormous monolith-palace, a labyrinth of rooms between lights and paintings, the seat of legislative and ceremonial activities a few steps from Tiananmen Square. During the meeting with the Chinese Premier, Meloni announces the signing of the 2024-2027 Action Plan for the relaunch of relations between Italy and China in strategic areas, including industrial ones, such as “electric mobility and renewables”, she explains. The range of agreements also includes trade, investments, agriculture and food safety, research and training, the environment, and the fight against organized crime.

At the opening of the seventh edition of the business forum, Meloni speaks before representatives of around a hundred companies. Her reflection is punctuated both by the importance of relaunching economic relations with the Dragon and by calls for fairness, transparency and respect for the rules. The significance of cultivating relations with China emerges even more in the face of the “complex international situation”. “I am thinking,” the Prime Minister underlines, “of Russian aggression against Ukraine, the crisis in the Middle East, tensions in the Red Sea, growing instability in Africa”. Crises that have repercussions “on global security and economic integration”. Italy “remains eager to cooperate, but it is essential that our partners,” Meloni notes, “prove themselves to be genuinely cooperative by playing by the rules, to ensure that all companies can operate on international markets on equal terms. Because if we want a free market, that market must also be fair”.

Today more than ever, “if we do not want to risk that peace and stability are irremediably compromised, we need, even in economic and commercial relations, a shared strategy, based on decisions that do not harm each other”, she observes. Among the principles to follow is “the need for proportionality, to ensure that even economic defense tools”, such as duties, “are commensurate with the real level of risk and do not produce an involuntary compression of economic and commercial freedom, including international freedom, a principle – explains the Prime Minister – which is the distinctive feature of a democracy and an open society like Italy”. There was also a reflection on generative artificial intelligence. “It would be a very serious mistake – she says – to ignore the growing risks of polarization and further verticalization of wealth, not to mention those associated with the loss of human control over the decisions that machines will make”, therefore, “facing these challenges requires constructive and transparent collaboration”. Speaking to politicians and entrepreneurs, the Prime Minister claims, in addition to Italy’s “solid economy”, also the “political stability, a fact that is quite rare but not secondary here”, because “it is a guarantee for those who invest and for those who receive the investment”. For Meloni, in conclusion, Italy and China “still have a long way to go together”, on a path to be paved together “with determination, concreteness, and mutual respect”.