Emmanuel Macron's visit to China should have aimed to re-establish contact with the authorities in Beijing and to underline, in the presence of Ursula von der Leyen, the unity of Europeans in the face of the multiplication of health, energy, food, migration, financial, strategic.
Indeed, since his last visit to Shanghai in 2018, everything has changed.
The world has swung into a new era with the Covid pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia: a great confrontation has opened up between authoritarian empires and democracies while globalization has burst into blocks.
But by setting himself the central objective of convincing Xi Jinping to play a mediating role in the Ukrainian conflict, the President of the Republic has doomed his trip to failure.
As expected, he met with a dry dismissal, amplified by the resumption of maneuvers around Taiwan on the occasion of the meeting between President Tsai Ing-wen and President…
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