00:00Well, the Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, is on a visit to Bulgaria as he continues his visit to several
00:05European countries.
00:07Wang met with the Bulgarian Prime Minister, Ruben Georgiev Radeff, in Sofia,
00:12where the two shared views on how to deepen mutual political trust and pursue more tangible joint projects.
00:20China and Bulgaria established a strategic partnership in 2019 during Radeff's visit to China as the then Bulgarian president.
00:30Well, Christian Ivanov-Vigenin is the former Bulgarian Minister of Foreign Affairs.
00:35China is trying to place a stronger role in creating stronger ties to EU member states,
00:41and especially with the countries in the region, some member states, some candidate countries to join the EU.
00:49I think that these ways China is trying to establish itself as a player in the region,
00:56and I suppose that this is the main message from the visit of the Foreign Minister.
01:03On the other hand, this is an important confirmation about the important role that China-Bulgarian relations play.
01:11We are one of the countries which established a long time ago the diplomatic relations with China already in 1949,
01:21and throughout all this period we maintained good cooperation which was not current even around the changes at the end
01:32of the last century
01:33which actually brought a lot of turmoil in international relations but still kept our relations alive.
01:40Now, you served as Bulgaria's foreign minister, and you have considerable experience in international diplomacy.
01:48How then would you assess the evolution of China-Bulgaria relations over the years?
01:55Well, I think that we try to be more pragmatic because on one hand we have this long-term excellent
02:06diplomatic and political relations,
02:10strong relations in the area of culture, science, education.
02:15At the same time, today's world is becoming more and more driven by economy, trade,
02:24and from that point of view we could do much more with regard to common trade, investments, economic relations in
02:36general.
02:37So I think that at that level we are laying behind because there are countries in the region which were
02:43able to establish much stronger relations at that level.
02:49And on the other hand, the fact that we were not able to really strengthen those relations the way we
03:00wanted so far gives new opportunities.
03:03And I believe that Bulgaria, as a member state of the European Union, is one of the countries that can
03:10play a constructive role in that area,
03:13also on behalf of the European Union, because we see that recently there were some not so positive messages coming
03:25from Brussels, from the European Parliament.
03:28I think that there is a lot of room for improvement of common trust and only based on trust we
03:37can try to also tackle the challenges between us.
