BEIJING — Chinese President Xi Jinping and French President Emmanuel Macron agreed Thursday to 12 cooperation deals during high-stakes talks focused on Ukraine and tense EU-China trade relations, as the French leader began a three-day state visit to China. The Xi-Macron meeting drew a large French business delegation and a Chinese leadership seeking both investment and relief from rising tariffs, Dec. 4, 2025.
Xi Macron talks spotlight trade rifts and Ukraine.
In both closed-door sessions and a public joint appearance, their discussions ranged from Europe’s growing trade deficit with China to the war in Ukraine. Macron urged Beijing to work “more closely” with Western efforts to secure at least a temporary halt to strikes on critical infrastructure, according to Reuters and the Associated Press.
The exchange highlighted Europe’s dilemma: seeking China’s leverage with Moscow on Ukraine even as the European Union deepens anti-subsidy probes into Chinese electric vehicles and prepares fresh economic-security rules to curb dependency on Chinese supply chains. EU leaders worry that China’s heavily subsidized exports, coupled with Beijing’s retaliatory investigations into European brandy, pork, and dairy products, are widening a trade imbalance that already accounts for nearly half of France’s overall deficit with China alone.
Business-heavy Beijing diplomacy seeks balance, not rupture.
Behind the diplomatic choreography, the Xi-Macron visit was anchored by a Franco-Chinese business forum featuring executives from Airbus, BNP Paribas, Schneider Electric, and Alstom, underscoring the Chinese market’s continued importance to French aerospace, finance, and industrial champions. Xi encouraged deeper cooperation in aerospace, nuclear energy, artificial intelligence, the green economy, and biopharmaceuticals, while signaling that Beijing wants to ease frictions with the 27-member EU bloc without making major concessions on industrial policy.
The 12 agreements signed after the talks include initiatives on aging populations, higher-education exchanges, bilateral investment, nuclear energy, and a new phase of panda conservation, according to official readouts. At the same time, long-running disputes over EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and China’s retaliatory investigations into European brandy, pork, and dairy imports — which hit France’s key cognac and farm sectors — remain unresolved, leaving the economic gains from the Beijing summit modest for now.
Longer arc of Xi-Macron engagement shapes EU-China strategy.
The Xi-Macron relationship has been built over multiple encounters that mixed lofty rhetoric with uneven results. During Macron’s November 2019 state visit, the two leaders oversaw about $15 billion in energy, agriculture, and aviation contracts that expanded French food exports and Airbus cooperation, as detailed in contemporary coverage, yet those headline deals did little to prevent today’s surge in Europe’s trade deficit with China.
Macron’s April 2023 trip to Beijing, and his subsequent remarks urging Europe to avoid becoming a “vassal” in U.S.-China rivalry, sparked intense debate over “strategic autonomy” within the EU and drew criticism from some allies who feared Paris was edging too close to Beijing’s positions. That visit, and the commentary it prompted in a Wilson Center analysis and other forums, framed Xi-Macron diplomacy as a test case of whether Europe can simultaneously defend its security interests, uphold support for Ukraine, and maintain a pragmatic economic partnership with China.
As this week’s Xi-Macron summit continues with planned stops in Sichuan and further outreach to Chinese students and business leaders, both governments are keen to present the visit as proof that dialogue can temper rivalry and avert a damaging trade war. For Paris and Brussels alike, the true measure of success will be whether Beijing adjusts its trade practices and uses its clout in Moscow to nudge Russia toward serious negotiations in Ukraine — outcomes that, after another carefully choreographed day in Beijing, remain uncertain.
