Key quotes from China's Premier Li on COVID-19, the economy and US relations

China's Premier Li Keqiang shared his thoughts with business leaders during a virtual World Economic Forum Special Dialogue, at a critical time for a world economy battered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Addressing China's efforts to shore up its domestic economy as well as the future of trade, cooperation and Sino-US relations, Premier Li's comments included the following:

“No country will be fully safe until and unless the virus is fully contained globally. We need global cooperation more than ever.”

“We must each live up to our responsibility to support multilateralism and to bring a message of hope and confidence to people around the world. We hope that we can all work to promote trade and investment liberalisation and facilitation, which have already been severely affected by COVID-19.”

“I have confidence that… the Chinese economy is expected to achieve positive growth for the whole year, and this will be enabled by efforts from the government, the business community and households.”

“We will continue to implement reform in china, including of government functions, by delegating review and authority, to further stimulate the vitality of market entities. When market vitality is brought into full play the Chinese economy will have a brighter future.”

“In my view we need to abandon such a notion (of a new Cold War). The world today is drastically different from the time of Cold War. We need to stabilise China-US relations and advance cooperation between the two countries.”

“We will open our market wider to (European) companies in China, and we would love to see a more open European market that would buy more from China.”

“I believe we need to continue to uphold the multilateral role of the WHO, the WTO and other governance systems that are supported by a global consensus. For this system to work more effectively it naturally needs to go through improvements.”