The Diplomat
The Board of Trustees of the Spain China Council Foundation held its first General Meeting of 2022 on June 7, where they discussed the difficulties in relations with China due to the new outbreak of COVID-19.
The meeting took place at the new headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in the Plaza del Marqués de Salamanca in Madrid, and was attended by some twenty members, including the State Secretary for Foreign and Global Affairs, Ángeles Moreno Bau, and another ten trustees who connected by telematic means, including the Spanish Ambassador to China, Rafael Dezcallar.
During the meeting, the participants approved the annual accounts for the previous year, analyzed the current state of Spain-China bilateral relations and reviewed the Foundation’s recent and ongoing projects.
Likewise, the members of the Board of Trustees agreed on the difficulties in relations with China, especially due to the strict COVID containment policy still maintained by the Chinese government, which prevents international travel. However, both the members of the companies present and the representatives of the Administration agreed that it is likely that in the course of 2023 these measures will be relaxed and that it is necessary to be prepared to breathe new life into the ties with the world’s second largest economy.
In this sense, Ángeles Moreno Bau highlighted the importance of China for Spain, both in the private and public sectors. “We want to continue trading and working with China, because this enriches us,” she declared. For this reason, Moreno Bau called on all the members of the Board of Trustees to “continue in this joint effort, trusting that everything will pass and that the borders will open so that we can resume relations.”
The Board reviewed some of the Foundation’s recent and ongoing projects, such as the Spain China Forum meeting on sustainable digitalization held in January, the Decoding China podcast and the series of China in Depth working meetings, together with the Elcano Royal Institute. The Board of Trustees also bid farewell to the current secretary general of the Foundation, José Leandro Consarnau, who will leave his post in the coming weeks, and ratified the appointment of the new director, Mónica Vallejo.
