Tag: President of the People’s Republic of China

The politics around Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to France were far from auspicious. Beijing has several reasons to dislike the China policy of Emmanuel Macron: This, in the language of Chinese foreign policy, amounts to a lack of “strategic trust”. These commercial deals reflect mutual corporate interests but also a Chinese effort to build trust on this state visit to France. French President Emmanuel Macron has been reluctant to sign a memorandum of understanding to take part in China’s “Belt and Road Initiative”. Xi Jinping’s Paris visit showed how hard it is for China and Europe to go beyond principled statements on critical issues such as the global reduction of carbon emissions. Photo: EPA-EFE Today, the issue that dominates Europe-China political discussions is the architecture of global governance. It is unnatural for a Chinese leader to hold an exchange with the German chancellor and the president of the European Commission during a state visit to France. In sum, Xi’s state visit to France ended on a positive note despite the quasi impossibility to agree on an international agenda of cooperation. Chinese diplomacy took Europe as it is, working in Rome with a divided and weakened Italy, in Paris with a Franco-German-EU coalition, treating the latter slightly better from the perspective of commercial deals. This clearly does not solve the problem of a lack of a political engine for Europe-China cooperation, not does it solve the numerous divergences between China and Europe on political values, governance models and the state of international affairs.