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The Chinese leader has painstakingly selected three countries – France, Serbia and Hungary – that support Beijing’s efforts for a new world order to varying degrees.
By Roger Cohen and Chris Buckley
Reporting from Paris and Taipei, Taiwan
On his first stop in Europe in five years, Chinese President Xi Jinping appears to have decided to seize opportunities to loosen the continent’s ties with the United States and forge a global liberation from American domination.
The Chinese leader has chosen to make a stopover in three countries – France, Serbia and Hungary – that, to a greater or lesser extent, see the post-war global order imposed through the United States, see China as an obligatory counterweight and are willing to make an economic stopover. Ties.
At a time of tensions with much of Europe, over China’s “unfettered” club towards Russia despite the war in Ukraine, its surveillance state and its obvious espionage activities that led to the recent arrest in Germany of four more people. Xi, who arrived in France on Sunday, needs to demonstrate China’s growing influence on the continent and seek a pragmatic rapprochement.
For Europe, the stopover in China will test its delicate balance between China and the United States and will no doubt be perceived in Washington as a not-so-subtle attempt by Xi to divide Western allies. China-France relations “have set a style for the external network of nonviolent coexistence and win-win cooperation between countries with other social systems,” Xi said in a statement issued shortly after arriving in Paris.
He timed his arrival at his second stop, Serbia, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of NATO’s fatal bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war. The May 7, 1999, botched attack, for which the White House apologized, killed three Chinese people. journalists and sparked angry protests around the U. S. embassy in Beijing.
“For Xi, being in Belgrade is a very economical way to ask whether the U. S. is serious about foreign law,” said Janka Oertel, director of the Asia program at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, “and say what about NATO’s overreach that may simply be a challenge to other countries?
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