Berlin, November 15 – A planned visit to China in December by German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck will not go ahead because his Chinese counterpart cannot find the time, the German Finance Ministry said on Thursday.
“What was decisive was the new Chinese finance minister’s very tight schedule which prevented any agreement from being reached on a fixed appointment in December,” Steinbrueck’s spokesman Torsten Albig said in a statement.
Germany is China’s biggest trading partner in Europe, but diplomatic relations between the two countries this year have occasionally revealed tensions below the surface.
The Finance Ministry said Steinbrueck now planned to make a visit to China in the second quarter of next year.
In September Chancellor Angela Merkel came under fire from China for hosting Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama for talks in Berlin. Beijing later cancelled talks scheduled between its foreign minister and his German counterpart.
At a meeting of the Group of Seven leading industrial nations in Essen in February, Chinese officials invited to the talks moved out of the official hotel where other delegations were staying, complaining it was not up to their standards.
(Reporting by Gernot Heller; writing by Dave Graham; editing by Ian Jones)
