GIDEON RACHMAN
Who is Xi Jinping’s travel agent? If you are making your first trip to Europe in nearly five years, an itinerary that reads France, Serbia, Hungary seems a little eccentric.
But the three stops chosen by China’s leader make perfect sense viewed from Beijing. For strategic and economic reasons, China badly wants to disrupt the unity of both Nato and the EU. Each of the three countries that Xi is visiting is seen as a potential lever to prise open the cracks in the west.
On a recent visit to Beijing, I found Chinese foreign policy experts fascinated by French talk of the need for Europe to achieve “strategic autonomy” from the US. In a speech in Paris last month, Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, said that Europe must never be a “vassal of the United States” — which is language also favoured by China.
The Xi government was also delighted when Macron, on a flight back from Beijing last year, intimated that Europe had no interest in defending Taiwan from a potential Chinese invasion. Although there was some effort to explain away those remarks, the Chinese have noted, with gratitude, that France later blocked efforts to open a Nato liaison office in Tokyo. Keeping Nato countries out of Asia — and preventing America from linking up its allies in Asia and Europe — is a key goal of Chinese foreign policy.
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