Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday, Reuters reported citing two sources familiar with the matter. According to the report, it will be the meeting of both characters since the closure of Chinese borders due to the pandemic. Gates has already confirmed that he has arrived in Asian territory.
The media points out an important detail: possibly this meeting is “one on one” with reasons that may not be revealed. On Wednesday, Gates posted on his social networks that he had landed in Beijing “for the first time since 2019” and that he would meet with partners in the fight against global health and development challenges of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
As it is remembered, Bill Gates ceased to be an executive of Microsoft in 2008, but it would not be until 2020 when he would formally leave his position on the board of the company. At the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, she works primarily on vaccine development, but also focuses on education and climate change.
The last time Jinping and Gates met was in 2015, at the Boao forum in Hainan province. On that occasion, they discussed points of view for the improvement of the public health service and the reduction of poverty.
However, the Chinese president is close to the tycoon, to whom he wrote a letter thanking him for his foundation’s support in the fight against COVID-19. The institution pledged assistance for China, including $5 million.
China usually maintains a series of domestic Internet businesses that avoid the presence of Americans like Google in its cyberspace. One of the exceptions is Microsoft, a company that has been in the market since 1992. Today, it is the company’s largest subsidiary outside the U.S. and has approximately 6,000 employees.
In addition to providing the most widely used operating system in the country, Windows, it also maintains its second largest research and development center in this territory.