Indonesian President Prabowo to visit China on first foreign trip

By Riyaz ul Khaliq

ISTANBUL (AA) – Newly-inaugurated Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto will pay his first overseas trip to China later this week, an official statement said on Tuesday.

At the invitation of President Xi Jinping, Prabowo will pay a state visit to China from Friday to Sunday, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said in a statement.

This will be the first overseas trip by Prabowo, 73, since being inaugurated as president last month.

Indonesia and China are maritime neighbors with two sharing huge bilateral trade of around $150 billion.

China has consistently been Indonesia's largest trading partner for over a decade now.

Jakarta and Beijing, however, have also seen competing claims in the disputed South China Sea.

Last month, Jakarta said it drove away a Chinese coast guard (CCG) ship away three times in just a few days in waters off Indonesia.

The CCG ship is said to have disrupted a survey by a vessel contracted by Indonesia’s state energy firm Pertamina.

After his trip to China, Prabowo is expected to fly to the US and then Peru for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. He will later travel to Brazil for the G20 summit.

Indonesia is the only representative country for Southeast Asia in the forum.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said Italian President Sergio Mattarella will pay a week-long state visit to China from Thursday.

The annual trade between the two distant nations has reached around $80 billion.

Italy was the only G7 nation to have joined China’s multi-trillion-dollar global infrastructure projects under Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which it exited last December.

However, earlier this year, Chinese leader Xi told visiting Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni that Beijing and Moscow need to “expand common ground.”

Meloni paid an official trip to China in July, the first in-person meeting between the two since Rome withdrew from the BRI.