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The Embassy of China in Berlin

The Ambassador

Amb. Ken Wu

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H.E. Mr. Ken Wu was born in Hunan in January 1961. He is a college graduate, and is married with one son. He became the Ambassador of China to Germany in 2019.
Wu has previously worked at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in the Department of Human Resources. After his employment at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs he studied at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, where he graduated in 1988. He later returned to work as an Attaché at the USSR and Eastern Europe department of the Chinese Foreign Ministry. After that, Wu worked at the Embassy of China in Germany as an Attaché and Secretary for three years, before he returned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a Secretary, Deputy Head and Head of the Human Resources Department. In 1998 he worked as a counselor for the Chinese Embassy in Austria.

Following that, he started working as the Deputy Head of the Human Resources Department in 2001, and the Head of the Department in 2003. In 2007 he became the Ambassador of China to Austria, whereafter he became the Ambassador in Switzerland. In 2013 he returned to China to work as the Deputy Secretary General of the Government of Guangdong Province, but returned to Europe in 2016 as the Ambassador of China to the Netherlands and Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

History

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The Federal Republic of Germany and the People’s Republic of China established diplomatic relations in 1972. Over the past 40 years, these relations have become extremely wide-ranging, remarkably close and increasingly growing in political substance. China is Germany’s most important economic partner in Asia and Germany is China’s leading trading partner in Europe. Given the growing uncertainties in the world and the repercussions of the global economic and financial crisis which are still being felt, cooperation and coordination of policy between the two strategic partners has become increasingly important. China views Germany both economically and politically as its key partner in Europe. Important elements of bilateral relations are regular high-level coordination of policy, dynamic trade relations, investment, environmental cooperation and cooperation in the cultural and scientific sectors.

With bilateral trade worth nearly 163 billion Euro in 2015, Germany remains China’s principal trading partner in the European Union (approximately 30 per cent of China’s trade is with the EU). At the same time, the Chinese government has for some years now been stepping up its efforts to spread the Chinese language and Chinese culture abroad. This job is being done by both state cultural institutions (“cultural centres”) and the Confucius Institutes (currently 15 in Germany), which mostly take the form of university cooperation arrangements.