China's President Xi to meet Bill Gates in Beijing

China's President Xi Jinping will meet with Bill Gates in Beijing on Friday, Chinese state media CCTV reported.

The meeting will be Xi's first with a foreign entrepreneur in recent years. He had stopped travelling abroad for nearly three years as China shut its borders during the pandemic.

The Microsoft co-founder tweeted on Wednesday that he had landed in Beijing for the first time since 2019 and that he would meet with partners who had been working on global health and development challenges with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Gates stepped down from Microsoft's board in 2020 to focus on philanthropic works related to global health, education and climate change. He quit his full-time executive role at Microsoft in 2008.

The last reported meeting between Xi and Gates was in 2015, when they met on the sidelines of the Boao forum in Hainan province. In early 2020, Xi wrote a letter to Gates thanking him, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for pledging assistance to China including $5 million for the country's fight against COVID-19.

A number of foreign CEOs have visited China since it reopened early this year but most have mainly met with government ministers.