Portuguese Foreign Minister Paulo Rangel will end his four-day official visit to China with a tour of Macau and Hong Kong today, Portugal’s Consulate-General in Macau, which is also accredited in Hong Kong, announced in a statement earlier this week.
According to the statement, Rangel’s Macau and Hong Kong leg of his China visit starts at 9 a.m. today with a working breakfast with the members of the consular jurisdiction’s Consultative Council at the consul-general’s Bela Vista Residence on Penha Hill, where he stayed overnight.
Rangel arrived last night from his participation in the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) in Hainan, where he met with Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang on Wednesday, after meeting with Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing on Tuesday.
Meeting with Rangel, Ding said China is dedicated to mutual respect and trust with Portugal and is ready to expand mutually beneficial cooperation and deepen opening-up and exchanges between the two sides, Xinhua reported.
Rangel said Portugal thinks highly of Macau’s prosperity and steady development since it returned to China, pledging efforts to further deepen practical cooperation with China, Xinhua added.
Rangel’s visit to the Portuguese School is slated to begin at 10:15 a.m., followed by a meeting with Chief Executive Sam Hou Fai at Government Headquarters, scheduled to start at 11:30 a.m.
Rangel will attend a reception hosted in his honour by Portuguese Consul-General Alexandre Leitão at Clube Militar between 12:30 p.m. and 2 p.m. Afterwards, Rangel will visit the Portuguese Consulate-General for meetings with consular officials as well as Portuguese trade and culture promotion (AICEP and IPOR) officials and representatives of the Portuguese community in China.
Later in the afternoon, Rangel is scheduled to travel to Hong Kong where he will visit an exhibition on the Portuguese community at the Hong Kong Museum of History and also visit Club Lusitano, which was set up in December 1866 as the prime representative body of Hong Kong’s Portuguese community.
His is scheduled to fly out of Hong Kong tonight, ending his official visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Portuguese president’s visit to Macau early June in doubt
Meanwhile, Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s planned visit to Macau in early June to commemorate Portugal’s national day “may not happen”, public broadcaster TDM reported last night, citing unnamed sources in Lisbon.
The sources told TDM they believed that due to the political situation in Portugal, “Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s trip may not happen.”
This year’s Portuguese national day celebrations, officially known as Portugal, Camões*, and Portuguese Communities Day, are slated to be held in southern Portugal’s city of Lagos on June 10. According to previous Portuguese media reports, Rebelo de Sousa had planned to visit Macau a few days before June 10 to mark Portugal’s national day here.
However, the fall of the Portuguese government on March 11, after losing a confidence vote in parliament, and Rebelo de Sousa’s decision to call snap elections for May 18 rendered the original timing of the president’s trip to Macau practically untenable, the sources indicated. While acknowledging that the cancellation of the Macau trip had still to be confirmed, “it would be difficult for it to happen around June 10.”
TDM pointed out that the swearing-in of Portugal’s new government should take place in the first week of June.
*Luís de Camões (born around 1524 in Lisbon, where he died on June 10,1580) was a Portuguese poet, widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in the Portuguese language. His 1572 masterpiece, Os Lusíadas, is an epic poem about Portugal’s Age of Exploration and the voyages of Vasco da Gama.
Portugal’s Minister of State and Foreign Affairs Paulo Rangel speaks at a high-level dialogue themed on “Building Trust in the Shifting Global Landscape” during the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) Annual Conference 2025 in Boao, Hainan Province, on Wednesday. – Xinhua
