Plane fault cancels Swiss foreign minister’s trip to China

Cassis, pictured right shaking hands with Wang Yi at a meeting in Bern in 2019, will be unable to renew discussions with the Chinese foreign minister this weekend. Keystone / Alessandro Della Valle

Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis has been forced to cancel a meeting with his Chinese counterpart in China following a technical fault on his government jet.

Cassis was forced to divert to Moscow en route to the eastern Zhejiand province of China and later tweeted that his meeting with Wang Yi would no longer take place on Saturday. “We will look for a new date as soon as possible,” read his tweet.

Instead, the foreign ministers had a conversation over the phone, according to a tweet by Cassis on Saturday.  

They discussed multilateralism, a resumption of a dialogue about human rights and China’s role as a host of the Olympic Winter Games next February, it said.  

The planned meeting between the two foreign ministers was scheduled to includeExternal link bilateral relations in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, recent international developments and human rights.

Cassis was also due to present Switzerland’s new China Strategy, which was adopted by the government in March. Speaking to the media earlier this month, Cassis said that Switzerland was unlikely to rush into joining European Union sanctions against China. Instead, he spoke of developing a “special path”.

“It’s a balancing act. On the one hand, we have difficult discussions with China about human rights, but on the other hand, the country is an important partner in economic and other issues,” Cassis told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper.

But Cassis also made clear that, despite Switzerland withdrawing support for a UN statement condemning crimes in Xinjiang, he would not shy away from bringing up human rights issues with China.

In 1950 Switzerland was one of the first Western countries to recognise Communist China. Since 2010 China has been its biggest trading partner in Asia and its third-largest partner globally after the European Union and the United States. A bilateral free-trade agreement took effect in July 2014.

Switzerland recently hosted top American and Chinese diplomats for talks aimed at smoothing tensions between the two powers.