At least there was no six metre-long table in Beijing separating Emmanuel Macron from Xi Jinping. But their meeting was about as fruitless as the French president’s socially distanced chat with Xi’s ‘best friend’ Vladimir Putin in Moscow last year, shortly before the Russian leader sent his tanks into Ukraine.
There was something very retro about the Macron’s visit to China. It led to a scene almost from centuries ago when foreign plenipotentiaries would trail to the Middle Kingdom bearing gifts and seeking favours from the emperor. It was also a throwback to the more recent times when it was still possible to talk about reform in China while keeping a straight face.
Xi’s China is now a dark and repressive place. His growing international aggression, economic coercion and support for Putin have provoked dismay from much of the western world, forcing them to reassess relations with Beijing. Though on the evidence of his three days in China, this seems to have largely passed Macron by.
The French president said he wanted to ‘relaunch a strategic and global partnership with China’ and spoke about ‘shared responsibility for peace and international stability’. He rejected a policy of economic decoupling from China, overlooking the fact that this is a long standing policy of Beijing, and not something cooked up in Washington. ‘I do not believe, and do not want to believe in this scenario,’ he said.
Macron was trailed by a 50-strong entourage of business leaders, film makers and musicians. Among the gifts he brought for his Chinese counterpart were a French photographer’s pictures of mid-20th-century China and a blue Sèvres porcelain vase decorated with golden fish.
The main reason for the visit was supposedly to urge Xi to put pressure on Russia to end the war in Ukraine.
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