The winter froze when President Joe Biden gave the order to shoot down Xi Jinping’s “spy balloon” over the American east coast. Relations between the US and China sank to a rock bottom. Xi’s spring offensive has surprised and impressed. The Chinese leader and his corps of diplomats have been visiting and receiving visitors at a sky-high pace. Not everything has gone smoothly, but Beijing has succeeded in turning itself into a new kind of global player. Three good examples: The peace agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which was signed in Beijing. The United States admitted that they could not achieve anything similar. China’s twelve-point plan for a “possible solution to the Ukraine crisis”. This shows a willingness to take a position Beijing has not previously had the confidence to attempt. Xi’s visit to Putin in Moscow. It established for the whole world that Xi is the stronger of the two. But perhaps the biggest and most unexpected gain was given to Xi Jinping almost for free by French President Emmanuel Macron. When Macron boarded the French presidential plane after a three-day visit to China at Easter, Xi had reason to be pleased. And when the plane landed in Paris, Xi had every reason to smile broadly. On board the plane, Macron had given an interview to the two newspapers Politico and Les Echos. The words he chose caused quite a stir. Interview of the year Relaxed and wearing a hoodie with the words “French Tech”, Macron said Europe must be careful not to get caught up in a conflict that is not theirs. – Is it in our interest to accelerate a Taiwan crisis … let us be governed by an American agenda and then a Chinese overreaction, the French president asked rhetorically. – If the conflict between the two superpowers heats up, we will not have the time or resources to finance our own strategic autonomy. We will then become vassals, he said. Implied: America’s vassals. “Macron urges Europe to reduce its dependence on the US,” read the headline in China’s largest newspapers. HUGE INTEREST: China’s biggest newspapers covered all stages of Macron’s visit. Photo: WANG ZHAO / AFP Xi personally invested in the visit. He took Macron to a tea ceremony at the manor his own father used when he was party chief in southern China. Xi can hardly have calculated how well he would be paid for the extra hours. ALMOST ALONE: In large parts of the conversations between Xi and Macron, only translators were present. Photo: Jacques Witt / AP The words in Macron’s interview could not have suited Xi’s agenda better if he himself had been allowed to put them in the French president’s mouth. The interview went viral on social media in China, and is a strong contender to become China’s most quoted by a Western leader in 2023. Xi’s foreign policy is ultimately about just this: breaking America’s global dominance. “Ambitions” is the key word. Xi Jinping and Emmanuel Macron are two men with a good self-image. They have a strong belief in what they themselves can accomplish. Xi will foster China’s rebirth. Macron wants to recreate a Europe as a third superpower. They see that the world is in radical change. They both want the outcome to be a balance of power that is different from the one we have today. In May 2017, as a correspondent, I stood outside the Louvre in Paris and watched as a crowd of cheering supporters welcomed their new president, Emmanuel Macron. He made his entrance to the European anthem. ELECTION WINNER: Macron is welcomed as the election’s winner outside the Louvre museum in Paris on the evening of 7 May 2017. He now has four years left in his second and final presidential term to change France and Europe. Photo: CHRISTIAN HARTMANN / Reuters “A strong France in a strong Europe”, was a slogan in Macron’s sensational political journey up to the presidential palace. “Strategic autonomy”, a Europe as an independent actor alongside the USA and China, is the slogan rewritten into the political doctrine. A mindset that has been the basis of Macron’s foreign policy ever since. To understand the dynamics during and after the tea ceremony in southern China, we must also understand the fine line between ambition and frustration. In other words, what stands in the way of Xi and Macron’s ambitions. Xi’s frustrations Xi’s frustration is twofold. The first part is military: the US is building stronger military alliances with China’s neighbors in the Pacific region. QUAD: A defense cooperation between the United States, Australia, Japan and India. China calls QUAD the NATO in Asia. South Korea, the Philippines and even Vietnam may be drawn in. AUKUS: A rearmament of the nuclear submarine fleet of Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom with an upgrade of bases in the Pacific Ocean. The second is economic: the US is gradually disconnecting itself from China economically. Blacklisting: According to the Chinese financial newspaper Caixin, the US has blacklisted 639 Chinese companies for security reasons. The telecom giant Huawei is the most famous company. Export refusal: The US refuses China to buy advanced technology China itself is unable to produce. The smallest and fastest data chips are most important. Relocation of production: Major US companies are feeling political uncertainty due to increased tension and supply problems during the pandemic. More are moving production out of China. Apple moves production of iPhone 14 and iPods from China to India. Both of these frustrations have been triggered by the US’s attempts to contain a stronger China. Macron’s frustrations In 2017, Macron’s frustrations were about what Europe did not have: Tech giants such as American Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, or such as Chinese TikTok, WeChat, Alibaba and Huawei. Europe simply lacks an independent digital platform. Europe does not own its own data. Clouds and data storage are largely in the US or China. With the Ukraine war, Macron has had two further frustrations reinforced: Weapons: Europe’s dependence on American weapons. Currency: That the dollar is more powerful than the euro. The dollar’s position in international money transfers makes it difficult for the EU to take an independent position on US sanctions policy. Again, Macron’s and Xi’s ambitions run in parallel lines. China is working intensively to make the Chinese yuan an international means of payment. Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who visited Beijing in the days after Macron, said he often lay awake at night wondering why countries like his own had to pay in dollars. Xi’s strategy to undermine US policy has been two-pronged: First, to strengthen ties with close friends such as Russia, and non-aligned countries such as Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia. Secondly, to try to sow discord in the alliance between the US and Europe. This happens through systematic and repeated actions. Europe must follow its own interests, and not blindly follow the US into a new cold war, is the repeated message from Beijing. None of this is unknown or new, not even for Macron. Rarely unmusical Alenegangen, the absence of musicality and the lousy timing of Macron’s interview therefore surpasses almost everything that other EU leaders could have thought possible. Even from a French president. Only hours after the visit, China started a three-day military exercise in which they staged in precise movements how they could take Taiwan by force. The exercise was a punitive response to Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, having met the leader of the US Congress, Kevin McCarthy, in California. EXERCISE: A Chinese J-15 fighter jet takes off from the aircraft carrier Shandong during the exercise around Taiwan on April 9. Photo: An Ni / AP Colleague and European Simen Ekern has written well about what a sanatorium abroad can be for hard-pressed European politicians. Abroad in the form of China is not a safe haven, but Macron only realized that when he returned to his homeland. Macron came to win Xi over on the issue of the war in Ukraine. Instead, Xi gained ground on the issue of Taiwan. It does not make it any better that Macron had invited Ursula Von der Leyen with him for parts of the visit. The president of the European Commission took part in two of Macron’s total of six hours with Xi. WENT SOLO: In the talks between Xi, Macron and Von der Leyen, the two European leaders talked about Ukraine and Taiwan. Afterwards, Macron went a bit more solo. Photo: POOL / Reuters Perhaps only Von der Leyen herself knows what she now regrets the most. That she joined at all? Or that she let Macron have four hours alone with Xi? The Curse of Presence She hasn’t said much in the time since the visit. It is not without risk. Silence alone could strengthen the impression that Macron was speaking on behalf of Europe. A reprimand, on the other hand, would give Beijing good fodder to say that Europe is not united in its view of Taiwan. Instead, Von der Leyen has, rather cleverly, let Berlin do the work. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who was going to China right after Macron anyway, was quick to write about her talking points. In Beijing, she warned of a horror scenario if China uses force to take control of Taiwan. – It will have major consequences for relations with Europe, she said. And at the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting in Japan, she said the exact opposite of Macron: – Europe must not only have to defend peace in Europe. In relation to China, the EU quota for being French may have been used up for the rest of Macron’s presidency. Xi, for his part, probably still smiles every time he thinks of the tea ceremony on that warm spring day in the garden in the far south of China.
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Xi’s spring offensive – news Urix – Foreign news and documentaries
