President Macron has in the past pushed back on following US policies on China. He caused controversy during his trip to Beijing last year by saying Europe should not follow Washington “blindly” on Taiwan.
And while Mr Macron is one of the strongest backers of a raft of trade measures that have angered Beijing in recent weeks, he also wants Chinese companies to build their EV plants in France.
Even so, Mr Macron has proved he will be no pushover. Last week, as he was preparing to roll out the carpet for President Xi’s visit, he met Sikyong Penpa Tsering, the leader of the Tibetan government-in-exile, in Paris.
One of Mr Macron’s key priorities will also be to warn China of the danger of backing Russia in its invasion of Ukraine.
Like the United States, France and most of the EU want Beijing to stop supplying weapons components to Moscow.
“It is in our interest to get China to weigh in on the stability of the international order,” said Mr Macron in an interview with the Economist published on Thursday.
“We must, therefore, work with China to build peace,” he added.
President Xi has so far refused to do anything to stop Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In his Le Figaro opinion column he wrote that China “understands the repercussions of the Ukraine crisis on the people of Europe” and emphasised that Beijing is not “a party to or a participant in it”, adding that “China has been playing a constructive role in striving for peaceful settlement of the crisis”.
Whatever the outcomes of his visit to France, President Xi‘s visits to Hungary and Serbia will prove that China still has allies in the eastern corner of Europe.
Additional reporting by BBC Monitoring
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