Six decades of rocky relations between France and China
This week marks 60 years since Paris established diplomatic ties with the People's Republic of China, a move that made France the first major Western country to formally recognise the communist regime. But while France was early to acknowledge Beijing, the relationship was never very stable.
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France's move preceded by eight years US President Richard Nixon's groundbreaking 1972 trip that changed the face of global diplomacy.
"It was important for France and for China to develop a more independent foreign policy in the context of the Sino-Soviet rift which started in 1959," Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a senior research fellow with the Paris-based Asia Centre, told RFI.
But more importantly, Paris wanted to show the United States that it wasn't ready to fall in with its self-appointed role as the world's post-WWII policeman.
French recognition came on 27 January 1964, 15 years after the Chinese Communist Party had won a bloody civil war against the Nationalist Kuomintang, remnants of which had fled to Taiwan.
At the time, most countries saw Taipei as the sole legitimate representative of what was called "The Republic of China".
Only Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries and Finland recognised communist Beijing.
Unhappy America
That remained the state of play until 1964, when French President Charles de Gaulle decided it was time for a global diplomatic change.
Washington hated it. The US administration under President Lyndon Johnson was "very unhappy" with the decision to normalise relations with Beijing, according to Cabestan.
Ties deteriorated further when Paris decided to quit NATO and kick out all US bases from its territory.
"In both France and China, there was a willingness to move away from the two blocs which dominated international relations at the time," said Cabestan.
But the party didn't last long. Soon after Beijing and Paris tied the diplomatic knot, China's leader Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, plunging the country into chaos.
Symbols over substance
Most of the French embassy personnel and all the French students who had started studies in China at the time had to leave.
Beijing did praise France for having recognised China earlier than other countries such as Germany, Canada and Austria, which normalised relations with China in 1972. But ultimately there was very little benefit for France because China decided to bring to a halt its interaction with the outside world.
"Until 1972, the France-China relationship lacked substance," according to Cabestan. "There was no relationship whatsoever."
Yet French intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, took a strong interest in Mao's version of communism.
For the wrong reasons, thinks Cabestan: "The Cultural Revolution gave the impression that Mao was inclined to allow more democracy, more freedom of speech and freedom of criticism of the leadership; but in fact, the Red Guards [communist student paramilitaries] were brainwashed by the Maoists to attack Mao's enemies in the party, they were not reborn democrats."
Profits versus human rights
Everything changed when Mao died and his successor Deng Xiaoping decided to open China to foreign investment, toning down the hardline communism that had characterised the decades before.
Foreign investors queued up for a piece of the potentially lucrative, billion-strong consumer market – including some of France’s biggest brands such as Citroen, Danone and the big wine and luxury houses, which all formed joint ventures.
From the 1980s onwards, Paris tried to walk the fine line between getting a share of the Chinese market and criticising China's human rights record.
After the Tiananmen Square crackdown on 4 June 1989, relations sobered considerably – especially when France’s diplomats involved themselves in operations rescuing Chinese dissidents from potential arrest, and Paris briefly became the hub for exiled opponents of the regime.
But that didn't last long. "Many of those refugees didn't stay in France, but moved to the United States after a few months of residing in France," says Cabestan.
Yet Paris was quick to jump on the opportunity to sell six Lafayette-class frigates and 60 Mirage 2000 jets to Taiwan in the early 1990s.
The relationship with Beijing deteriorated considerably and the window quickly closed when China started a boycott of French companies.
In 1992, Deng relaunched the Chinese economy, which had come to a standstill after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, turning it into a free-for-all capitalist jungle.
Deng feared China's Communist Party was facing the same fate as its stagnating Soviet counterpart, which was dissolved in 1991 after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact.
"The French government, as other European governments, decided to give priority to developing economic and trade relations with China and to the detriment of human rights issues," according to Cabestan.
Military sales to Taiwan were suspended under right-wing Prime Minister Édouard Balladur, allowing French companies to get back into the Chinese market again.
Meanwhile human rights were only mentioned discreetly during official meetings, just to placate public opinion.
'Systemic rival'?
Things changed again after Xi Jinping took power in 2012 and reined in China's freewheeling economy.
The European Union declared China a "systemic rival", foreign investors started to leave the country, and French public opinion, inflamed by increasingly hard-hitting human rights reports on Beijing's treatment of its minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang, its squeeze on freedoms in Hong Kong and its increasingly belligerent rhetoric towards Taiwan, turned against China.
"If you look at the opinion polls the image of China is very negative – it has really gone down," says Cabestan.
And China is not unaware of it. "Beijing feels the need to reconnect," Cabestan believes, especially after three years of isolation resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic.
A flurry of recent visits by Chinese and Western leaders also shows "China's willingness to reach out the West and particularly Europeans" and to "resume some kind of channel of communication with the US", he says, but "the environment is much, much more difficult" than before 2019.
Yet China's relations with France have improved, says Cabestan, and can now be called "pretty good and positive" – particularly after French President Emmanuel Macron's visit to China last year.
- Macron says EU must follow its own course, avoid getting caught up in Taiwan issue
- Chinese premier in France for charm offensive targeting businesses, politicians
But while the Chinese embassy in Paris, in a lengthy article on its website, says it hopes to "continue the momentum of the past to build even brighter Sino-French relations over the next 60 years", there are no big ceremonies planned to commemorate this week's 60th anniversary.
Macron instead went to India, another "systemic rival" of China, where he was received with pomp and circumstance – a sign of where France is placing its diplomatic hopes for the future.
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