The doomsayers who announce that China has begun its descent are finally right. After six months in orbit, the astronauts of the Shenzhou-17 mission have just returned to Earth and President Xi Jinping has landed on European soil for the first time in five years. “For us,” his Foreign Minister Wang Yi points out with frustration, “Europe is like a traffic light that is simultaneously green, amber and red.”
So that there is no doubt about how difficult relations between China and the West have become, Xi Jinping and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, will ascend to the Tourmalet pass. Literally. The hardest Pyrenean stage of the Tour is the excursion prepared by the Elysée for Tuesday, although this Monday there will be an official lunch in Paris.
After dinner, there will be no shortage of cognac, a liquor that could be retaliated with new tariffs in China, if Brussels chooses to do the same with its electric vehicles. Without forgetting the raid a few days ago against the offices in Poland and Holland of Nuctech, a technology company linked to the son of the previous Chinese president, Hu Jintao.
But the hot topic is the electric car, which several Chinese companies offer at suspiciously competitive prices, in the eyes of the EU. So China’s response is beginning to resemble that of Japan in the 1980s. Manufacture on site. The announcement last month of the production of Chinese cars in the Barcelona Free Trade Zone goes along those lines. France seems more focused on capturing for Airbus the largest possible percentage of the more than 8,000 passenger planes that Chinese airlines will need until 2041.
Although Macron aims to attract Chinese automobile investors, he is also the promoter of the EU investigation into Beijing government subsidies for its electric car brands. Likewise, Macron met last week with the president of the self-proclaimed “Tibetan Parliament in Exile.”
Signals as contradictory as those issued by Giorgia Meloni, who after removing Italy from the New Silk Roads, has for the moment been left without the Chinese electric car factory to which she aspired.
Quite the opposite of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, the third and final stage of Xi Jinping’s European itinerary. Budapest, which this month marks the 20th anniversary of its entry into the EU, could celebrate Europe Day, May 9, with the announcement of new contracts with China, which has already signed the largest investment in the country’s history, with a battery factory for green vehicles.
China could also replace Russia in financing the freight railway line that must link Ukraine with Austria through Hungarian territory, without passing through Budapest. One more example that Chinese financing is key in Orbán’s battles with Brussels – headquarters of the EU and NATO – especially to overcome the freezing of cohesion funds. Hungary will also preside over the EU in the next semester.
Much more advanced, although also with reluctance on the European side, is the Budapest-Belgrade high-speed line, built by China. An infrastructure attached to the New Silk Roads, Xi’s signature program, who last fall brought together Vladimir Putin with Orbán and the Serbian president, Aleksandar Vucic, in Beijing under the same roof.
Serbia is, in fact, the second leg of this tour. Xi will arrive in Belgrade on the 25th anniversary of the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, which killed three Chinese journalists. Beijing does not forget and today, in that place, a modern Chinese cultural center stands, as well as a monument. Moving from words to deeds, China has also supplied anti-aircraft batteries to Serbia. Since 2022, it has also become the first investor in the country – with an emphasis on renewables – and the first high-speed section, between Belgrade and Novi Sad, has been operating since then.
As can be seen, Chinese diplomacy has not chosen its destinations at random. In the case of France, the sixty years of the establishment of diplomatic relations are celebrated, at the hands of General De Gaulle, who made his move fifteen years in advance with respect to Washington. Beijing thus allows itself to remind Macron that there was a France that, in addition to proclaiming “the strategic autonomy” that he himself claims, even exercised it.
But the invasion of Ukraine has not only turned Europe’s relations with Russia upside down, but also with Beijing, which boasts of its “unlimited alliance” with Moscow. In fact, Xi Jinping’s European tour coincides with the new inauguration of his friend Vladimir Putin, who will fly to China this May, for the second time in just over six months.
Xi, in turn, returns the visit that Macron himself paid him a year ago, marked by the presence of Ursula von der Leyen. Today Macron has once again invited the president of the European Commission, of unwavering Atlanticism. However, he already did it five years ago, although in the company of the German chancellor at the time, Angela Markel. This time, Olaf Scholz’s presence is excused by his visit last month to China, a country that brings Volkswagen half of its profits. But it does not seem to be the result of chance that Scholz and his wife were “on vacation in Paris” last Thursday, a circumstance they took advantage of to have a private dinner with the Macrons.
The fact is that different interests and sensitivities coexist in Europe and only some capitals east of Prague share the hard line marked by Washington and London, of containment of the People’s Republic of China. The majority tendency leaves room for negotiation, diplomacy and mutual benefit, no matter how much China is defined, with impeccable realism, as a “trading partner, economic competitor and systemic rival.” The green, the amber and the red, flashing at the same time.
So the skillful Macron is the first to put one candle to God and another to the devil. Drums of deterrence in Ukraine, but winks to China. At the gates of the summit, the second “France-China Forum on Global Governance” has been organized in Paris, where former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius – who awarded the Legion of Honor to the founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma – current President of the Council French Constitutional Court has said that “multilateralism is the most effective way to solve most of the problems of our multipolar world.” Heavenly music for the Chinese delegations.
