Croatian Prime Minister Plenković will meet with Chinese and European colleagues.
Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković will visit the Latvian capital Riga on Saturday, where he will attend the 5th meeting of heads of governments of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and China, announced the government on Friday.
During his stay in Riga, Plenković will meet with Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang and will also have a number of other bilateral meetings. The Prime Minister will be accompanied by Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy Martina Dalić.
Plenković and Chinese Prime Minister will sign the memorandum of understanding on cooperation in the field of ports and industrial parks at ports, according to information from the government. With the memorandum of understanding, the two countries will agree to promote cooperation between companies in the areas of investment, construction, modernization and management of ports, as well as the development, construction and management of industrial parks at ports. Investment in other projects, construction of railways, highways, logistics and storage facilities related to ports will also be discussed.
The 16+1 format is a Chinese initiative which Beijing proposed in order to improve cooperation with 16 countries of Central and Eastern Europe, of which eleven are member states of the European Union and five are other countries of Southeast Europe (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Macedonia), in the fields of investment, transport, finance, science, education and culture. According to the Latvian Foreign Ministry, China has defined three priority areas for cooperation with these countries: infrastructure, advanced technologies and green technologies.
The first summit of this initiative took place in Poland in 2012. There the Chinese Prime Minister presented the initiative “Twelve Chinese measures to promote friendly cooperation with countries in Central and Eastern Europe”, which is the basic document of the 16+1 format. Next meetings were held in Bucharest in 2013, in Belgrade in 2014, and in the Chinese city of Suzhou in 2015.
The summit in Riga will adopt a document titled the Riga Guidelines. It is expected that a series of bilateral agreements with China will be signed, while on the margins of the summit a business forum and a meeting of leading sinologists of Central and Eastern Europe will also take place.
