Following Cook and Musk, Bill Gates First Visits China since 2019

BEIJING, June 14 (TiPost)— Another Silicon Valley titan came to China. The latest one is Microsoft Corp’s co-founder Bill Gates.

Source: Visual China

“I’ve just landed in Beijing for the first visit since 2019. I’m very glad to meet with Chinese partners as the (Bill & Melinda) Gates Foundation has been working with them to address global health and development challenges for more than 15 years,” according to a post by Gates at China’s Twitter-like social media Weibo in Chinese, after the billionaire tweeted the similar development at Twitter in English on Wednesday. While not specifying his schedule in China, Gates signaled his focuses on climate and world heath and disclosed the next stop.

“The world was making huge progress in reducing child deaths and poverty, but the global crisis set us back. African countries are particularly vulnerable, with high food prices, crushing debt and increasing incidence rates of tuberculosis and malaria. That’s why I’m heading to West Africa next,” Gates wrote at Weibo. “Solving problems like climate change, health inequities, and food security requires innovation, and China has extensive experience in that, ranging from developing malarial drugs to investment in climate adaptation. We need to unlock that kind of progress for more people around the world.”

Gates will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday in his visit, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The sources didn’t reveal details including what the two might discuss. Gates and his foundation didn’t respond to the report.

Gates joins other U.S. tech leaders’ trip to China recently. The chief executives in the West underlined the importance of maintaining ties with China.

Apple CEO Tim Cook praised the rapid high-tech development in his speech made in late March at the China Development Forum 2023, a state-organized event featuring the attendance of international executives of giants like Aramco, Mercedes-Benz, Samsung, Shell and Johnson & Johnson. Speech at that forum was one of Cook’s highlight moments in his first visit in China since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

Though not directly responding to Apple’s much-concerned pivot trend from China, Cook at the forum stressed the inextricable links between his company and the top smartphone market. Apple and China grow together and both sides enjoy the symbiotic relationship, said Cook, adding that there are billions of developers and very powerful supply chain in the country. 

The United States and China share intertwined and inseparable interests, and Tesla opposes decoupling, Tesla CEO Elon Musk told Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Qin Gang in late May during his first travel in China in three years. The executive said Tesla is willing to continue to expand its business in China, and share the country’s development opportunities.

Talking with the Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao, Musk agreed that the relationship between the United States and China is not a zero-sum game. He appreciated Beijing’s support and guarantee for Tesla’s Shanghai factory during the Covid-19 pandemic, and praised the vitality and potential of China’s development. He expressed full of confidence on Chinese market and willingness to continue deepening mutually beneficial cooperation.

Coinciding with Musk’s visit, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon advocated for derisking instead of decoupling from China at his bank’s annual Global China Summit in Shanghai. As the top executive at JPMorgan since 2005, Dimon asserts disputes between the two leading economies over security and free and fair trade all “resolvable”. “When we do business in a country” like China, he said, “we’re there hopefully through good times and bad times.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was reported to arrive in mainland China in the beginning of this month after Musk and Dimon, but the executive later returned the United States, skipping the planned trip after wrapping up his travel to Taiwan. Huang said he sees the potential for “enormous damage” to U.S. companies if the chip war with China escalates in an interview in May. Later that month, Huang cautioned not to underrate China’s ability to catch up in chips as the country will cultivate its own chip firms in response with tensions with U.S.

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