China & France

The French are cosying up to China.

President Chirac staged a lavish welcome yesterday for President Hu Jintao of China, as the French leader sought to enshrine Paris as Beijing’s favoured European partner and “counterbalance” to the United States.

Paris put aside qualms about the Chinese in order to shower honours on Mr Hu. To mark 40 years since President de Gaulle opened relations with the People’s Republic, France has declared 2004 the Year of China. In Franco-Chinese celebrations for the Chinese New Year at the weekend, the Eiffel Tower was floodlit in red, and 200,000 people, including Wang Qishan, the Mayor of Beijing, attended a parade down the Champs Elysées.

Perhaps the fact that there’s a gap in the order book after Saddam’s fall helped to dispel those French qualms.

Since Tiananmen in 1989 the EU has maintained a ban on exporting arms to China, but the French are applying pressure to change this. The NY Times points out that this push by the French comes at a time when China’s relations with Taiwan are getting particularly delicate:

There is some concern that lifting the embargo now would add a destabilizing note to Beijing’s relations with Taiwan, already strained by a plan put forth by Taiwan’s president, Chen Shui-bian, to hold a national referendum in March on whether to demand that China remove missiles facing the island and renounce the use of force.

China maintains that Taiwan is a province under its sovereignty and that the island’s political separation from the mainland is a historical anomaly left over from the country’s 1949 civil war. Beijing demands fealty to that position by all countries with which it maintains relations. President Jacques Chirac dutifully repeated his country’s commitment within hours of Mr. Hu’s arrival in Paris on Monday.

“France is attached to the principle of there being one China,” Mr. Chirac said when Mr. Hu raised the issue at the start of a four-day state visit, according to the French president’s spokeswoman.

President Hu Jintao was “Secretary of the Party Committee of Tibet Autonomous Region” from 1988 to 1992, and made his reputation with the ruthless way in which he dealt with separatist demonstrations.