Chinese president to visit Brussels this month

Date of visit by Xi Jinping is confirmed as 31 March, five days after EU-US summit.

China’s President Xi Jinping will visit Brussels on 31 March, the European Commission has confirmed.

The possibility of a trip has been on the cards for some time, as Xi will be making a tour of Europe, but the timing of his stopover in Brussels had been uncertain.

The visit will not be a full-blown summit, with but will instead feature a number of small meetings, chiefly with the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, and Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, the body that brings together the European Union’s 28 member states.

The next EU-China summit will be held in the autumn.

Xi will also meet Belgian leaders and, on 1 April, will speak at the College of Europe, a partially EU-funded postgraduate college that has historically given an education to many future EU officials.

Xi’s visit will be one of three top-level meetings in Brussels in the space of a week.

US President Barack Obama will be in Brussels on 26 March and, on 3-4 April, national delegations from around 80 European and African countries will gather for an EU-Africa summit, the largest summit ever hosted by the EU.