On the morning of March 20, Yin Li, Secretary of the CPC Beijing Municipal Committee, met with a delegation of entrepreneurs from the Republic of Korea (ROK). Shang Fulin, Specially Invited Vice-President of China International Council for the Promotion of Multinational Corporations (CICPMC), also attended the meeting.

Yin stated that China and the ROK are close neighbors that cannot be moved away and partners that cannot be separated. In 2022, President Xi Jinping and President Yoon Suk Yeol reached an important consensus on promoting the China-ROK strategic cooperative partnership, which set the direction for the two countries’ business communities to enhance their cooperation. Beijing boasts a wide pool of educational and technological talent, huge market potential, and seamless connectivity between domestic and international markets. As a result, it is rapidly evolving into an international innovation center and a model city for the global digital economy, and is striving to foster new quality productive forces. This provides vast opportunities for further economic and trade cooperation between our two sides. Companies in the ROK are encouraged to scale up their investment in Beijing and enhance cooperation in cutting-edge fields such as artificial intelligence and new energy to tap into new growth drivers, including intelligent connected vehicles. It is also hoped that they can utilize Beijing’s big market to offer more high-quality products and services. Furthermore, they could exert their social influence to forge closer ties between Beijing and ROK cities, so as to bring about more dynamic people-to-people exchanges in the fields of culture, education, tourism, science and technology, and youth. We will continue to improve the business environment by making it more market-oriented, law-based, convenient, and up to international standards. This will create better conditions for businesses to flourish in Beijing.

Sohn Kyung Shik, President of the Korea Employers Federation and Chairman of CJ Group, along with other entrepreneurs from the ROK, expressed their commitment to the Chinese market and their intention to seize the opportunities presented by Beijing’s development and expand cooperation in high-tech fields such as artificial intelligence and big data, so as to jointly explore the drivers of future growth and contribute to Beijing’s high-quality development.

Xia Linmao and Sima Hong, leaders of the municipal government, Liu Jin,  President of the Bank of China, and other corporate heads representing China-ROK cooperation, also attended the meeting.