Macron in China: is this about reading lectures to his Chinese hosts or about promoting French business deals?
If you picked up yesterday’s leading French newspapers Le Monde or Figaro, you might be excused for thinking that the sole purpose of President Emmanuel Macron’s three day visit to Beijing in the company of EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is to lecture the Chinese leadership on its obligations as a permanent member of the UN Security Council to denounce the Russian military operation in Ukraine and to end all support for the Kremlin. There was no hint that Macron brought with him 50 CEOs of France’s leading corporations who were looking forward to signing business contracts that were prepared ahead of the visit.
Last night’s digest of news sent to subscribers by The Financial Times summed this up nicely: “French president Emmanuel Macron has gone to Beijing in the latest attempt by a European leader to urge China’s Xi Jinping to withdraw support for Russian president Vladimir Putin.”
Of course, this interpretation of the meaning of the trip comes from those who fail to comprehend the stature of today’s Chinese leadership and its ability to enforce the millennial traditions of the country when dealing with the barbarians beyond its borders. China would never have agreed to receive Macron or von der Leyen if it perceived that their purpose was to deliver demeaning lectures about what Beijing should or should not do with respect to Russia. No, Xi, like Macron, had expectations of major new contracts with Airbus, to spite America’s Boeing, and with other French concerns which are desperate not to lose their privileged access to the Chinese market and to Chinese manufacturing capacities.
In my interview with Press TV of Iran’s evening program of news analysis yesterday, I was given the opportunity to explain why the trip has been misrepresented to Western audiences, and how any business deals that result from it will not be featured in our newspapers or state television channels, as would normally be the case in good times.
At the conclusion of my time on air, I brought up another major event of the past month which also was blacked out by our broadcasters, namely the destruction of an underground bunker near the Western Ukraine city of Liviv by a Russian hypersonic missile Kinzhal, which cost the lives of more than 200 NATO generals and other high military officers, including about 20 Americans. That event, which first was announced very discreetly on Russian news tickers immediately following its execution, was again quietly and briefly mentioned on the Yandex ticker yesterday with respect to the “shipment in crates” of the recovered remains of those officers killed to their home countries in the West.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
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