will meet next April in China with the president of this country, Xi Jinping, within a tour of Asia that will also include a stop in Vietnam, as Bloomberg has advanced this Thursday and has been able to confirm this newspaper. The trip is expected to be held from April 8 to 12.
Sánchez is one of the European leaders who has worked most the relationship with China, one of the countries that has visited the most times. The last one was very recent, in September 2024. The Spanish president always looks for Chinese XI in the summits, where they usually have bilateral always in good terms. The last trip began with an important tension, given the threat of China of a retaliation to Spain, vetoing the entry of pig meat if the European Union kept the tariffs on Chinese electric cars.
Sanchez made a defense on those tariffs. Finally, Spain changed the initial vote that had in this issue and went from yes to tariffs to an abstention, a decision that was enough for China to change its attitude with Madrid and raise the threat on the Spanish pig. Sanchez is insisting a lot on the idea that, given the US attitude to close more and more and multiply tariffs, the European Union must look for alternatives as it is making its ties with Mercosur, with Chile, with Mexico, with Canada and with India. China, and also Vietnam, another part of the trip, is also among those countries with which Sánchez wants to strengthen relations to find alternatives to the US, although it is always a delicate issue for the huge commercial deficit that the Asian giant has with the European Union.
On his last trip, Sánchez has already asked China to open the market of this country to Europeans as they open it to the Chinese, something that does not happen today. But the gesture of preparing a new trip clearly shows that Sánchez wants to strengthen ties with a giant with which there are many commercial tensions and that it also has a completely different model from the European in basic issues of democracy and human rights, but that at the same time bets on multilateralism, unlike Trump. The US president considers Beijing his main rival, almost an enemy, and, therefore, this journey of Sánchez also involves an indirect departure from the Trump administration.
