French President Emmanuel Macron closed his visit to China today with a tea ceremony and dinner with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, after a meeting with students in the southern city of Guangdong, where he reiterated his criticism of the invasion. Russian in Ukraine
The visit to Guangzhou closed the three-day state tour to China, a trip that took him to the capital, Beijing, and which aimed to reinvigorate the bond between the two nations after the coronavirus pandemic.
During the trip, the conflict in Ukraine was at the center of the agenda. Macron told Xi that he is counting on him to “bring sense to Russia” and both agreed, in a bilateral meeting behind closed doors, to call for peace talks “as soon as possible”, as well as to reject the use of atomic weapons.
During his visit to Canton, the third largest city in the country with 15 million inhabitants, Macron went to the Sun Yat-sen University campus and before a thousand students denounced the Russian war that “colonizes” Ukraine.
“It is a country that decided to colonize its neighbor, not respect the rules, deploy armies and invade,” said the president, quoted by the French news agency AFP.
After this meeting, he met Xi on the island of Shamian, in the center of the city, where they shared a tea ceremony and then had a private dinner.
Before taking the plane back to Paris, Macron had a meeting with two Chinese investors: Tang Jiexiong, president of the Wencan group, and Jiang Long, general director of XTC New Energy Materials.
The French president arrived in China on Wednesday for a three-day trip with the stated aim of dissuading the Asian giant from condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022.
The Asian giant presented a peace plan at the end of February in which it calls for “a political solution” to the war, a proposal criticized by the Western powers on the grounds that it puts “the aggressor and the victimized” on the same level.
China officially declares itself neutral, but has not condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, nor has Xi yet spoken to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Instead, he personally went to Moscow in March to meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, to whom he presented the document for a 12-point political solution to the conflict.
Despite the West’s rejection of that plan, Macron estimated on his first day in China that Beijing could play “a great role” in finding “a path to peace” in Ukraine.
Source: Ambito
