France bends like Germany to gift good optics & heft to China
Photo credit Twitter Chinese embassy in Sri Lanka
By Manish Anand
New Delhi, April 6: French President Emmanuel Macron rushed to Beijing with a planeload of business executives. The sideshow of Macron’s Beijing visit was his predictable urge to his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to lean on Vladimir Putin of Russia to call off the Ukraine War. The principal aim of Macron was clearly to partake the China reopening story and find a way out of recession for France.
The world was flooded with pictures of the French people taking to arsons to protest the pension reform bill of Macron for the past few days. That was set up after months of runaway inflation, which jolted the French like their English counterparts out of the comforts of luxurious life to face sharp spike in the cost of life.
Macron is in fact late in the day to go to Beijing with a phony narrative of searching for peace in Ukraine. Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, had shown extraordinary zeal to fly to Beijing at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic for a less than 24-hour trip to fete Xi for taking the third term as the aka of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Scholz’s rush to Beijing was an act of desperation to ride Chinese economy to come out of recession.
China being a middle income country is a large market for Europe. Beijing’s reopening after the ‘Zero Covid Policy’ is also crucial for Europe to deal with the supply side constraints. With France and Germany giving an extraordinary optics to Xi to drum up his alternative global leadership stake against US President Joe Biden, China is clearly seeking a pivot to overwhelm attempts to pin the country down with the Indo Pacific maneuvering by Washington.
“The visit provides President Xi Jinping with the right optics after his no limits friendship with Russia and demonstrates to his domestic audience that China is sought after by Western powers, in spite of US attempts to isolate China,” wrote former diplomat Mohan Kumar in a blog, adding that “China can take comfort from the fact that President Macron implored Xi to help mediate a political solution to the war in Ukraine”.
However, the strategic affairs experts note that China is least interested in finding peace in the Ukraine War, for Xi’s visit to Moscow was also predominantly for commercial interests to secure oil, gas and coal to fire the reopening of the economy. The same seems going for Macron’s visit to Beijing.
“I am convinced that China has a major role to play in building peace. This is what I have come to discuss, to move forward on. With President XI Jinping, we will also talk about our businesses, the climate and biodiversity, and food security,” said Macron on his China visit.
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