From
Jan Diesteldorf, Brussels
Before it gets down to business, Ursula von der Leyen speaks a few introductory words on Thursday, she has rummaged in her memories. When she was young, she tells the new Chinese Prime Minister Li Qiang, her father told her about his trips to China. Ernst Albrecht, then Prime Minister of Lower Saxony, concluded the first cooperation agreement between a German federal state and a Chinese province in the 1980s. Von der Leyen emphasized the agreement between Lower Saxony and Anhui as “one of the many impetus for the very deep and wide-ranging relations that China and the EU have created in the meantime”.