Embassy of Italy in Beijing
The Italian embassy in Beijing is located at Chancery: No.2, Dong Er Jie, San Li Tun, Chaoyang District, it's purpose being to look after Italy's interests in China. The head of the embassy is the ambassador who in theory represents his government in discussions with the Chinese government, in practice this rarely happens any more. The modern embassy is more concerned with helping Italian citizens who are in China, the embassy offers them access to many of their governments services. The embassy also offers advice to Italians in China and to Chinese citizens who wish to visit or do business with Italy. In fact one of the embassies major purposes is to encourage business between the two countries. The embassy helps to promote Italy as a trading partner and a tourist destination, and helps to facilitate this trade.
Italy is located in Southern Europe where it juts into the Mediterranean Sea, separating it from the Adriatic Sea. The country is famous for it's history, being the home to ancient Rome and to the Renaissance. Unfortunately modern Italy is one of the poorer countries in the European Union. There is a large difference between the level of development between northern Italy and southern Italy and this has created a number of problems. Northern Italy is highly developed and economically the equal of other European countries. The south however still lags far behind and relies on agriculture and fishing for a big part of it's economy. There has even been some discussion in northern Italy about breaking away to become a separate country because they are unhappy about having to support Southern Italy.
The Italian economy has struggled in recent years, in large part due to the lack of development in Southern Italy. The country has also been hampered by weak governments and strong labour unions. This has resulted in a lot of laws that are designed to protect employees but have in fact increased unemployment dramatically. All of these laws significantly increase the cost of doing business in Italy and along with high taxes many companies are choosing to leave the country. The European Union makes it easy for them to do this and it has really started to hurt the Italian economy.
Relations between China and Italy are relatively good and have largely followed the same pattern as China's relations with the rest of Europe. For many years the two countries ignored each other as China
were not concerned with foreign affairs and Italy had bigger issues than China. In the last couple of decades this has changed dramatically as China has made it priority to become a player on the world stage and Italy
has sought access to the large and rapidly growing Chinese market, allowing Chinese companies to pursue business opportunities in Italy. Italy is not one of China's major trading partners and there is still room for improvement in their relations but generally they get along quite well.