COL TOURMALET: Chinese President Xi Jinping showed little sign of being ready to offer big concessions on trade or foreign policy as he wrapped up a two-day visit to France, during which President Emmanuel Macron pressed him on market access and Ukraine.

Macron and his wife Brigitte greeted Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan at the airport in France’s southwestern Pyrenees region on Tuesday, and took them to lunch in the mountains after a day of talks and state pomp in Paris on Monday.

Advisers to the French president described the Pyrenees trip as breaking with protocol to provide a chance for one-on-one chats with Xi in mountains dear to Macron as the birthplace of his maternal grandmother.

Macron hoped to convince Xi to reduce the trade imbalance between Europe and China, with better access for European firms in China and fewer subsidies for Chinese exporters. The two couples travelled on separate flights from Paris and took separate cars to the mountains, where thick fog meant they missed out on the view.

The two leaders meet in French mountains to talk Ukraine, trade

After watching traditional dancers perform under the snowy peaks, they ate locally grown ham, lamb, cheese and blueberry pie. Xi said he would give the ham some publicity and praised the cheese.

Macron gave Xi a woollen blanket made in the Pyrenees, a Tour de France cycling jersey and armagnac from the nearby southwestern region — a brandy at risk of Chinese trade sanctions.

Macron has a history of trying to establish personal relationships outside of protocol in not always successful attempts to obtain more from other leaders. Xi has said he would welcome more high-level talks on trade frictions but denied there was a Chinese “overcapacity problem”, casting doubts on what progress can be achieved.

Offal deal

French and Chinese companies concluded some agreements on Monday ranging from energy, finance and transport, but most were agreements to cooperate or renewed commitments to work together.

“Xi was consistent in signalling goodwill to (his) French interlocutors but did not come with tangible concessions on the issues that matter the most,” said Mathieu Duchatel of the Institut Montaigne think-tank.

In a sign of some progress on agriculture, China will allow imports of pig origin protein feed as well as pork offal from France with immediate effect. French pork producers said the offal deal should boost pork exports by 10 per cent.

European hopes of an Airbus plane order to coincide with Xi’s visit appear to have been dashed, with the two sides agreeing only to expand cooperation.

A European diplomat said Xi was the “winner” of the visit, having “cemented his image as the ‘ruler of the world’ where Westerners are begging him to solve European problems in Ukraine”.

Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, director of the Brussels-based ECIPE think tank, said the visit was possibly less about making concrete progress on trade than creating some policy space they might need if Donald Trump returns to the White House after November’s US election.

Published in Dawn, May 8th, 2024