China on Tuesday welcomed visits to the country by various foreign entrepreneurs, including Twitter, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who reportedly landed in Beijing this morning, Interfax reported.

“China is always glad that businessmen from various countries, including Elon Musk, visit China to better understand our country and promote mutually beneficial cooperation,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning was quoted as saying by media from Beijing.

Although the South African billionaire has not made any official statements on the matter, several Western publications have reported in recent days that Musk is planning an official visit to the country led by Xi Jinping.

With reference to an eyewitness, the Reuters agency wrote on Tuesday that Musk’s private plane landed in Beijing in the morning.

Musk is expected to hold meetings with high-ranking Chinese officials and visit Tesla’s massive Gigafactory in Shanghai, multiple sources told Reuters.

Musk is returning to China to oversee Tesla’s new investment

This is Elon Musk’s first visit to China since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic 3 years ago, a country that the US-based South African billionaire has repeatedly praised.

Tesla sees China as its growth market, but has recently faced growing competition from local electric car makers and pressure from the Communist government in Beijing, which wants to encourage domestic companies.

Chinese state media announced last month that Tesla will build a new factory in Shanghai to produce Megapack batteries.

According to state news agency Xinhua, Tesla plans for the plant to initially produce 10,000 Megapack units per year, equivalent to about 40 gigawatt-hours of energy storage, to be sold around the world.

With the new factory in Shanghai, Tesla will take advantage of China’s world-leading battery supply chain to increase production and lower costs of Megapack lithium-ion batteries to meet growing demand for energy storage worldwide as the world transitions to renewable energy. energy

Ahead of the visit, Musk again praised the communist government

As his plane headed for China, Musk tweeted about the progress of Beijing’s space program, which hopes to land a human crew on the moon by 2030.

“China’s space program is much more advanced than people think,” he noted.

SpaceX, Musk’s aerospace company, and the potential military applications of its Starlink satellite network are being viewed with interest and concern by Chinese companies and researchers after the Starlink system proved its reliability during the war in Ukraine.

Several Chinese state-owned companies want to follow SpaceX’s lead and launch their own fleet of satellites.