He said efforts should be made to avoid escalating or worsening the conflict, to calm the situation and to create the conditions necessary for peace negotiations.
“China is ready to continue to play a constructive role in its own way to advance a political solution to the Ukrainian crisis,” Xi said.
According to CCTV, Xi also called for strengthened cooperation in trade, agriculture, digital economy, green industry and clean energy.
President Xi pledged to further open up the Chinese market to Polish agricultural and food products, and announced that Polish citizens would be allowed 15 days visa-free entry to China.
President Duda said the diplomatic, political and human relations between the two countries were “good” and “based on mutual respect.”
“I hope that this relationship will continue in the future,” he said, and invited Xi to visit Poland early next year.
After the meeting, the two leaders also witnessed the signing of several bilateral agreements, including on trade and agriculture.
Duda’s five-day visit, which began on Saturday, is his first to China in more than two years. He will attend a World Economic Forum meeting in the northeastern city of Dalian on Tuesday before stopping off in financial capital Shanghai.
Trade tensions between Beijing and Brussels are intensifying, geopolitical conflict with the US-led transatlantic alliance NATO is escalating, and doubts are spreading in European capitals over China’s stance on Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. Meanwhile, the 17+1 cooperation framework with Central and Eastern Europe, in which China has played a central role since its inception, has stalled since the Baltic states withdrew from the group.
Before leaving for China, President Duda said he would press China’s leadership to play a greater role in ending the Ukraine conflict.
“It’s no secret that China’s influence is certainly huge, including China’s influence over Russia,” he told reporters on Saturday. “It’s extremely important, in my view, that we convey our views on this issue to the chairman, President Xi Jinping.”
He said geopolitical turmoil was putting China’s Belt and Road Initiative and economic cooperation with Europe at risk, noting that one of the railway routes included in the strategy, which runs through Ukraine, was “clearly affected by the ongoing war.”
Duda said another rail line through Belarus was also under threat as Minsk was pushing more and more migrants to the Polish border. “I would like to present the situation to President Xi Jinping and tell him what the reality is, what we are facing,” he added.
Poland was one of the first European countries to sign an intergovernmental memorandum of understanding with Beijing on the development of the Belt and Road strategy, and around 90 percent of Belt and Road trains pass through or have their destination in Poland.
China is Poland’s second-largest trading partner after neighboring Germany, and is China’s largest trading partner in Central and Eastern Europe.
China’s imports from Poland fell 0.7% in U.S. dollar terms in the first five months of this year compared with the same period in 2023, according to Chinese customs data. But China’s exports to Poland rose 2%.
Warsaw’s trade deficit with the world’s second-largest economy widened 0.7 percent in the first five months of the year from a year earlier to $13.6 billion.
