China’s president arrives as EU anti-subsidy investigations and tensions over espionage, Ukraine and Taiwan continue

China’s president, Xi Jinping, is to visit Europe next week for the first time in five years, in a tour that will take in the unlikely trifecta of France, Hungary and Serbia.

The visit comes as China pushes to avoid a trade war with the EU, while attitudes towards Beijing in the bloc are hardening after multiple spying scandals and China’s ongoing support for Russia in the war in Ukraine.

But despite Xi and Macron’s personal chemistry, “Chinese Communist party leaders don’t have friends. They have interests,” says Charles Parton, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and a former British diplomat in China. “It’s a way of ruthlessly pushing forward your own interests.”

“Wherever China sees benefit from dealing with Europe as a whole, then it does. When it sees the benefit of dealing with individuals, sometimes because it undermines the whole, then it deals with individuals,” Parton says.

  • boredtortoise@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    Mentioned this elsewhere; With the upcoming European trip including Hungary, China keeps finding right wing partners, and unusually often from the ultra/alt/anti-EU reactionary sects. Wonder why they don’t collaborate with left

    And after the news about what’s going on in Africa, their imperialism seems to have racial/racist/xenophobic subjucative motives as well