Cooperation between China and Europe dominates meetings’ agenda
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Cooperation is the mainstream in China-Europe relations, and even if there are differences and competition, it is benign competition, Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Tuesday during a visit to Paris.
France, Germany and the European Commission pushed Chinese president Xi Jinping to open his country’s protected domestic market to foreign business, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel insisting on “a certain amount of reciprocity” from Beijing to seal a future EU-China investment agreement.
French President Emmanuel Macron invited Ms Merkel and Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the European Commission, to join him at the end of a bilateral summit with Mr Xi in Paris, in an attempt to underscore EU unity and Europe’s role as a commercial superpower on a par with the US and China.
Mr Macron said Europe’s openness had aided the spectacular transformation of the Chinese economy and helped lift 700m people out of poverty but also generated “deep tensions which lead to the need for legitimate protection” — an apparent reference to recent restrictions placed by some EU member states on Chinese acquisitions of high-tech companies. Mr Macron and other EU states have complained in particular about the near-impossibility of foreign companies winning public procurement contracts in China, for example in railways or other transport infrastructure.
In his public statement, Mr Xi made no specific commitments on reciprocity, but said China would “continue to push forward with reform and opening up because China has been pursuing reform and opening up for the past four decades” in its high-speed modernisation and industrialisation since the 1970s. The Chinese leader also issued a warning against mutual distrust in the China-EU relationship.
Meanwhile Presidents Emmanuel Macron of France and Xi Jinping of China signed a series of business and bilateral agreements on Monday, seeking to bolster their trade relationship as Paris presses Beijing to open the Chinese economy to more trade and investment.
While U.S. President Donald Trump is pushing for a trade deal to slash his country’s yawning deficit with China, it was his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron who landed a €30 billion aviation contract with Beijing on Monday.
China concluded a deal to buy 300 aircraft from Airbus during President Xi Jinping’s state visit to France.
Macron on Monday stressed the “colossal progress” needed to rebalance trade between the two countries — the EU ran a trade in goods deficit with China of some €177 billion in 2017 — while also hailing a slew of deals done in the health, infrastructure, transport, renewable energy and financial sectors.
“In the aeronautic sector, the conclusion today of a big contract in terms of A320s and big transporters, A350s, is an important advance and an excellent signal in the current context,” Macron said during a joint press conference with his Chinese counterpart at the Elysée Palace.
