Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen have urged Chinese president Xi Jinping to use his influence over Russia’s Vladimir Putin to press him towards peace in Ukraine.
The French president and the European Commission president called for China to exert greater pressure on Russia during separate meetings in Beijing with Mr Xi.
“I know I can count on you to bring back Russia to reason and everyone back to the negotiating table,” Mr Macron said during a joint press appearance with Mr Xi.
“We need to find a lasting peace… a peace that respects internationally recognised borders and that avoids any form of escalation. And I believe that it is also an important question for China, as much as it is for France and for Europe. This peace, this stability, is what we are trying to work towards.”
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Mr Xi said China and France should work together to seek a political solution to the conflict in Ukraine. He called for the two countries to cooperate in limiting the war’s impact on food, energy, finance and transport.
“China is willing to call on the international community, along with France, to maintain rationality and restraint, and avoid taking actions that will further escalate the crisis or make it out of control,” he said.
Mr Macron and Ms von der Leyen had separate meetings with the Chinese president as well as a trilateral meeting, with Ukraine at the top of the agenda. Mr Xi, who went to Moscow last month for talks with the Russian president, has called for a peaceful resolution of the war and warned against the use of nuclear weapons. He has not condemned Russia’s invasion.
Ms Von der Leyen said China could use its decades-long relationship with Russia to put pressure on Mr Putin but she also asked Mr Xi to speak to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
“President Xi reiterated his willingness to speak when conditions and time are right. I think this is positive element,” she told reporters in Beijing.
“We all have our responsibilities, each and every one in his or her place. But China, knowing Russia well and being a permanent member of the UN Security Council, has also a very distinct responsibility to use its influence on Russia for positive development.”
Mr Macron and Mr Xi promised to deepen cooperation between China and France in aviation, aerospace and civilian nuclear energy and to cultivate new areas of cooperation such as green development and scientific and technological innovation.
The French president is being accompanied by a large group of business leaders during his three-day visit to China.
Ms Von der Leyen said she opposed economic decoupling from China but that the EU must be vigilant about creating new dependencies and be aware of the risks of exporting sensitive, emerging technologies.
[ The Irish Times view on the visit by EU leaders to Beijing: trying to nudge ChinaOpens in new window ]
“Different risks require different means to address them. We address the risk of dependencies through the diversification of our trade and investment relations. And the risk of leakage of sensitive technologies that could be used for military purposes needs to be addressed through export control or investment cleaning. But whatever the instrument we chose is, we wish to solve the current issues through dialogue,” she said. “So it’s basically derisking through diplomacy.”
She described the relationship between China and the EU as “extensive and complex” but complained that the trade relationship had become increasingly imbalanced so that the EU’s trade deficit had more than tripled in the past 10 years. She said European businesses in China faced unfair practices that impeded their access to the Chinese market.
Ms Von der Leyen said that the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI), which was negotiated between the EU and China but put on ice due to tensions in their relationship, had not come up in her meetings with Mr Xi and premier Li Qiang and she declined to say if the agreement was still alive.
“We started the negotiations around about 10 years ago and we concluded the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment about two years ago. A lot has happened since then. The whole discussion that we have tonight here mirrors that,” she said. “So we have seen also during that time the deterioration of the market access I was describing of European companies in the Chinese market.”
