President Chirac fails to land major deal during China trip

President Jacques Chirac yesterday flew back to Paris following a seven-hour stopover in Hong Kong, wrapping up a busy five-day visit to China that yielded big contracts but failed to clinch a hoped-for deal on a high-speed railway. The new contracts between French companies and Chinese partners are worth about four billion euros (S$8.3 billion), and include deals for trains from France’s Alstom SA, water and waste treatment projects, gas stations and the sale of six new passenger jets by Airbus.

But the visit has already drawn disappointment back home after failing to produce any announcement on a major high-speed railway link planned between Beijing and Shanghai.

Alstom’s TGV trains are up against Japan’s bullet train technology for that project.
Despite widespread hopes, the European consortium Airbus came away with no firm orders for its future A380 superjumbo, and the nuclear energy group Areva was also unable to push through tenders for three new atomic power stations.

Commentators back home warned that France can no longer rely on warm diplomatic contacts with a country like China to ensure trading favors.

“President Jacques Chirac’s mission to China ends with what is – for now – a modest harvest. . . He may not admit it, but what he has reaped is not up to the hopes of the Elysee,” the financial daily Les Echos said in an editorial on Monday.

Pointing out that France remains far down the list of countries doing business in China – selling only a quarter of what Germany does for example – the paper was also highly critical of Mr. Chirac’s attempts to win favors in Beijing, which it described as ineffectual.

Seeking to give French business a leg-up, Mr. Chirac went out of his way to charm his hosts, quoting Chinese poetry and echoing Beijing’s repeated calls for ‘mutual respect’ in foreign relations.

Discussion of human rights abuses has been avoided, with the French leader instead discreetly handing over a list of imprisoned dissidents – played down by French officials as a routine gesture by a visiting European leader. Even the names upon it remained a secret.

Defending his decision to push business over human rights, Mr. Chirac said yesterday that it was easier to move in a better moral direction by employing ‘dialogue as opposed to confrontation’.

According to Les Echos, the countries that are now China’s biggest suppliers – Japan, Taiwan and the United States – are also those with which it has the worst diplomatic relations.

“It is time to wake up to the fact that in China – as elsewhere – trade is no longer a state affair. Choices are made increasingly on economic criteria,” the paper said.

The conservative daily Le Figaro argued that an assumption that diplomatic friendship would swing key contracts has distracted French business leaders from the key task of selling their goods.

“France has always had a highly political view of relations between countries. It believes that good diplomatic relations mean substantial economic contracts,” it said.
‘So it should have required no more than a presidential trip to China and a shared concern for multilateralism for huge benefits to accrue.

“Clearly this is mistaken. . . the approach no longer corresponds with the new state of the world,” Le Figaro said.

Yesterday morning, Mr Chirac visited the offices of French computer game maker Ubisoft and Shanghai’s overhead light rail line, which uses Alstom trains and technology before leaving for Hong Kong.

He met Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa and members of the French business community in the territory.

The French leader also unveiled, for the first time in Asia, a huge painting by Picasso, the famed Parade, lent to the city by the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

The exhibition is being held to coincide with the announcement of the prestigious contemporary art institute’s bid to open a modern art museum in the former British colony. — AFP, AP

October 15, 2004   Posted in: China