Gates primed for Xi reunion after China aid pledge

Bill Gates, Microsoft's co-founder, is set to meet President Xi Jinping today during his visit to China, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

The meeting will mark Xi's first meeting with a foreign private entrepreneur in recent years.

Gates tweeted on Wednesday that he had landed in Beijing for the first time since 2019 and that he would meet with partners who had been working on global health and development challenges with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Gates stepped down from Microsoft's board in 2020 to focus on philanthropic works related to global health, education and climate change. He quit his full-time executive role at Microsoft in 2008.

The last reported meeting between Xi and Gates was in 2015, when they met on the sidelines of the Boao forum in Hainan province.

In early 2020, Xi wrote a letter to Gates thanking him, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for pledging assistance to China, including US$5 million (HK$39.13 million) for the country's fight against Covid.

The meeting would mark the end of a long hiatus by Xi in recent years from meeting foreign private entrepreneurs and business leaders, since the pandemic.

Several foreign CEOs have visited China since it reopened early this year. Premier Li Qiang met a group of foreign CEOs, including Apple's Tim Cook in March and a source said that Tesla's Elon Musk met vice-premier Ding Xuexiang last month.

The mood of the foreign business community towards China, however, has turned cautious as Sino-US tensions intensify and Xi increases the country's focus on national security.

Gates' visit also comes ahead of a long-delayed visit by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to China set to take place on Sunday and Monday, which is aimed at stabilizing relations between the world's two largest economies and strategic rivals.

The US played down expectations of any breakthrough from the trip after a tense call with China's foreign minister Qin Gang ahead of Blinken's visit. Qin urged the United States to stop meddling in its affairs and that it should respect China's core concerns to arrest declining relations between the superpowers.

"We're coming to Beijing with a realistic, confident approach and a sincere desire to manage our competition," said Daniel Kritenbrink, the State Department's top diplomat for East Asia.

Kritenbrink said he expects Blinken would "reiterate America's abiding interest in the maintenance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait" and also discuss the situation in Ukraine.