0
0
French President Emmanuel Macron was greeted by a huge crowd at a university in southern China on Friday on the last day of a visit in which he repeatedly pushed his counterpart Xi Jinping to help end the Ukraine conflict.
Mr. Macron, who landed in the capital Beijing on Wednesday, said he was seeking to dissuade China from supporting Russia’s invasion of its neighbour.
On Friday, he flew to the southern city of Guangzhou, where he was mobbed by hundreds of screaming students and fans desperate for a selfie or a high-five with the French leader, in stark contrast with China’s own staid political system.
Mr. Macron, whose name was chanted by some in the crowd, then spoke to students in the campus gym and answered their questions before an early dinner with Mr. Xi ahead of meetings with Chinese investors and a flight home.
Russia’s conflict with Ukraine has dominated Mr. Macron’s visit to China — his first since 2019.And he told students in Guangzhou that the war was “a manifest violation of our international law”.
Russia, he told them, was “a country that has decided to colonise its neighbour and not to respect the rules”.The international order is now weakened and we have a responsibility, China and France, to preserve it and at the same time to reinvent it in the light of the realities of the 21st century,” he said.
Mr. Macron also urged them to embrace a “critical spirit” that would allow them to become “free, rational individuals” — another stark contrast with the rigid, state-controlled education to which Chinese students are subject.In a joint statement late Friday, both sides pledged to “support all efforts to restore peace in Ukraine”.
