FILE- French President Emmanuel Macron, left, shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping after meeting the press at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Thursday, April 6, 2023. Xi will start his Europe tour in Paris on May 6-7, 2024, meeting with Macron, who has been stressing the idea of European strategic autonomy from the U.S. FILE - A worker rests between billboards that read: ''Construction of the Serbian-Hungarian railway’’ in Belgrade, Serbia, Friday, Sept. 4, 2020.
The Chinese leader will arrive in France just as Paris is putting the finishing touches on its preparations for hosting the Summer Olympics, an event in which China invests huge amount of national prestige.About 4 in 10 Americans see China as an enemy, a Pew report shows. That’s a five-year highFrance sees Xi’s visit, which officially marks 60 years of French-Chinese diplomatic relations, as an important diplomatic moment, and wants to focus on China’s broader relations with the EU.
Hungary is the first EU member to participate in Xi’s signature Belt and Road Initiative that seeks to build billions of dollars of roads, ports, power plants and other infrastructure across Asia, Africa and beyond. The two countries have a long history of friendship, particularly since 1999, when NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese nationals, during the air war to end Serbia’s brutal crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo.