China’s foreign ministers, trade ministers and industry ministers were waiting for Musk. In turn, despite the tense atmosphere between the USA and China, he had a lot of admiration for the country.
China gave American tech billionaire Elon Musk an unusually large welcome on his first visit in three years. Finally, Musk paid a late-evening visit to the Tesla plant in Shanghai before the Tesla and Twitter boss’s private jet flew back to the United States today.
The 51-year-old billionaire was received in China not only by Foreign Minister Qin Gang, but also by Commerce Minister Wang Wentao and Industry Minister Jin Zhuanglong.
“A very worthwhile day,” Tesla spokeswoman Grace Tao wrote of photos of Musk with employees visiting the Tesla factory, which contributes to more than half of the US company’s global electric car production.
Twitter ban and electric cars in China
Musk praised the plant built in 2019 as “one of the most productive factories in the world”, as quoted by the Chinese online service Sina. Musk, who otherwise tweets frequently, did not comment on his short message service during his two-day visit, which is blocked by state censorship in China anyway.
Whether the Twitter ban was a topic of his talks remained open. In any case, it was about the tense relations between China and the United States and the production of electric cars, according to Chinese reports.
Accordingly, Musk expressed admiration for China’s development, praised the Chinese as “hardworking and wise” and warned against a decoupling of the two largest economies. Musk was quoted as saying he wants to expand his business in China. The largest car market in the world, which relies heavily on electric cars, recently contributed to a fifth of Tesla’s global sales.
Chinese netizens hailed the controversial billionaire, who also runs space company SpaceX but has little luck with Twitter, as a “hard-working entrepreneur”, “charismatic personality” and also as “big brother Ma” because of his Chinese name “Ma Sike”. “Ma” is the sign of horse.
Source: Stern
