Unusually for a visiting politician, Peeters was welcomed on his arrival in the Zhongnanhai, the seat of the Communist Party and the very centre of power in the country. He was also greeted by vice-premier Liu Yandong; previous Flemish leaders have always been received at the vice-minister level.

China’s rapid economic growth was something to be jealous of, said Peeters, though he pointed out that “the political regime in China is of course very different. We pay the price for democracy, which slows everything down.”

As well as inaugurating a new agreement for the export of Flemish saddle horses to China, the mission also recorded success in several other areas.

• The University of Antwerp will co-operate with Chongqing University on an educational exchange in transport and logistics. Antwerp will send professors to lecture in Chongqing, while students will also travel from China to Antwerp for lessons. Chongqing is a growing metropolis in the west of the country, which already has links with the port authority and the provincial administration.

• Students at Southwest Jiaotong University will be able to travel to Ghent University, to study under a co-operation agreement signed by the two institutions during the mission; at the same time, the Free University of Brussels (VUB) will co-operate with several Chinese universities on exchanges for students studying contemporary art.

• Chinese and Flemish authorities continued talks on the introduction of a regular freight rail service linking Antwerp and China, according to Luc Broos of Antwerp’s provincial development agency. There is already a cargo service on the rail link that travels through Germany, Poland, the Ukraine, Russia and Mongolia before ending in Chongqing, but the plan is to extend the service to reach Chongqing on a daily basis. “The trip could be done in 14 days, compared to 40 days by ship,” said Broos.

• The delegation also visited a factory run by Bekaert, the West Flemish steel wire producer, which has been present in China since 2008 in Shuangqiao, near Chongqing. The factory manufactures wires for use in car and truck tyres.

• EcoNation, the Ghent-based manufacturer of specially designed skylights, signed its biggest-ever contract during the visit. The company will install its LightCatcher skylight, which uses mirrors to allow the maximum entry and optimal distribution of sunlight, in up to 1.4 million square metres of premises over the course of the €4.5 million contract. In the first phase of the project, EcoNation will install 2,349 skylights in a 200,000 square-metre factory operated by leather goods manufacturer Kuka.