Xi Jinping to visit France, Hungary and Serbia amid EU trade tariff row

Xi and Macron’s personal rapport was burnished last year when the Chinese president took his French counterpart on a rare personal trip to Guangzhou, a city in southern China. Next week, Macron will return the favour with a visit to Hautes-Pyrénées, a mountainous region of France. But despite Xi and Macron’s personal chemistry, “Chinese Communist party leaders don’t have friends. They have interests,” says Charles Parton, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and a former British diplomat in China. “It’s a way of ruthlessly pushing forward your own interests.” “Wherever China sees benefit from dealing with Europe as a whole, then it does. When it sees the benefit of dealing with individuals, sometimes because it undermines the whole, then it deals with individuals,” Parton says.