CHINA'S RELATIONS WITH AUSTRIA AND GERMANY

Irene Giner-Reichl in conversation with Feng Xiaohu

CHINA'S RELATIONS WITH AUSTRIA AND GERMANY
Current opportunities and challenges of economic and cultural cooperation

With a bilateral trade volume of around EUR 17.9 billion (2021), China is by far Austria's most important trading partner in Asia and the third most important worldwide. Cultural and scientific exchange with the aim of creating deeper mutual understanding is also intensive. In view of international crises and global challenges, cooperation and coordination between the EU and its member states and China is of great political importance. Feng Xiaohu, a university professor in Beijing, has been studying China's relations with Austria and Germany for many years. Irene Giner-Reichl talks to him about the current opportunities and challenges of co-operation.

Prof FENG Xiaohu holds the Chair of German Studies at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE) in Beijing and is Dean of the UIBE Research Academy in Chengdu. He has been a visiting professor at universities in the USA, Japan, France, Brazil and Germany. With close ties to Humboldt University in Berlin, where he completed his post-doctoral studies, he founded the Beijing Humboldt Forum in 2013, which organises annual conferences in Beijing and other Chinese cities to promote economic and cultural exchange, particularly with Germany and Austria.

Irene Giner-Reichl, diplomat, was Austrian ambassador to China from 2012 to 2017 and then to Brazil until 2021. She teaches at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna and has curated the BKF event series „China in Focus“ since 2018.
„According to the curator, “China in Focus" attempts to bring mutual perceptions into dialogue with each other in a loose series of events and to build a new understanding of international relations in the 21st century, which China is playing a key role in shaping and profoundly changing.