On December 4 in Beijing, a high-level state visit captured the world’s attention. French President Macron arrived in Beijing with a large business and cultural delegation to hold talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. During the talks, “multilateralism,””open cooperation,” and “independence” became the key words repeatedly emphasized by both sides.
Against the backdrop of increasingly complex great-power competition and uncertainties in the global economy, Macron’s visit is far more than a diplomatic gesture—it is seen as a clear strategic signal: under the current international situation, European countries like France are advancing the process of strategic autonomy. In the face of changes in the external environment, including the policy orientation of the United States, deepening cooperation with China is regarded as one of the potential pathways to address global common challenges. This visit not only signed multiple cooperation documents covering fields such as nuclear energy, agriculture and food, and ecological environment, but also, at a deeper level, placed China’s institutional advantages in sharp contrast to the old globalization model dominated by the West.
Macron’s visit represents Europe’s strategic initiative at a critical juncture. In recent years, the United States has pursued an “America First” policy, extending its approach toward China through measures like tariff hikes and intensified investigations across broader sectors. These efforts aim not only to maintain economic competitiveness but also to preserve America’s dominance in technology and manufacturing. Such actions have reshaped the global industrial and supply chain landscape, compelling companies to adapt their strategies to the new policy environment. This shift may ultimately impact global economic efficiency and operational costs in multiple ways.
Against this backdrop, Macron’s actions echo the Elysee Palace’s statement that “China possesses many highly advanced technologies that can be shared with its trusted partners.” They further endorse the consensus reached by Chinese and French leaders during the talks: the deep interdependence of national production and supply chains, where “decoupling and severing chains” means self-isolation. Europe needs strategic autonomy, not strategic dependence. As Macron emphasized during his meeting with Premier Li Qiang, the French side is committed to promoting the healthy and stable development of Sino-European relations and believes that Europe should achieve strategic autonomy. The signing of the “Memorandum of Understanding on Strengthening Two-way Investment between China and France” during this visit, which explicitly supports and encourages increased two-way investment between the two countries’ enterprises, is a concrete practice of this strategic thinking.
A major highlight of this meeting was China providing the world with a clear “opportunity list” —the proposal for the 15th Five-Year Plan reviewed and approved at the Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. China’s advantage lies in its “institutional openness” and policy coherence. China is steadily transitioning from commodity and factor flow openness to “institutional openness” centered on the alignment of rules, regulations, management, and standards. This goes beyond simple market access, aiming to create a transparent, stable, and predictable cooperation framework that fundamentally reduces institutional transaction costs in collaboration. For example, China is using the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) as references to comprehensively launch high-standard rule stress tests, promoting the alignment and compatibility of domestic institutions with international rules in areas such as property rights protection, environmental standards, and the digital economy.
Macron’s visit yielded substantial outcomes, with his collaborative approach epitomizing equality and mutual benefit—a powerful rebuttal to the outdated narrative of’ one-way technological dominance.’
The collaboration spans both traditional and emerging sectors, with both sides pledging to strengthen cooperation in established fields like aviation, aerospace, and civilian nuclear energy. More significantly, the talks explored opportunities in emerging domains including green economy, digital economy, biomedicine, and artificial intelligence. This reflects the strong economic complementarity between China and France, as well as their shared commitment to spearheading industrial transformation.
Secondly, the nature of cooperation has achieved a historic “two-way balance”. The French giants accompanying Macron’s visit to China, including Airbus, EDF, Danone, and Veolia, are looking forward to deepening their business ties in China. More notably, the role reversal is worth attention: in the past, technology mostly flowed from Europe to China, but now France has publicly expressed its desire to “learn from China’s advanced technology” to help its industry catch up. For example, the French nuclear fuel group Orano has established a joint venture with a Chinese company in Dunkirk. This technology transfer and industrial cooperation based on joint ventures marks a new phase of equal and mutually beneficial cooperation between China and Europe.
Moreover, the concept of cooperation advocates openness and integration. In fields such as artificial intelligence, there are differences in the technical path choices of enterprises. The strategy represented by some U.S. tech companies focuses on protecting core technologies and building commercial barriers through closed-source models. Meanwhile, some Chinese enterprises like DeepSeek have chosen the open-source path, opening their core technical resources such as model architectures, training codes, and tools to global developers. This open strategy is more likely to form a widespread application ecosystem and de facto standards globally, especially in developing countries. China’s strategy of deeply integrating artificial intelligence into real-world scenarios such as logistics, healthcare, and smart cities ensures that the technology can quickly generate economic returns, which is entirely different from the closed competition path pursuing abstract “general artificial intelligence.”
Macron’s successful visit to China and the series of achievements he accomplished serve as a stabilizer for a turbulent world. It clearly demonstrates that whether it is France’s “European strategic autonomy” or China’s adherence to the “independent foreign policy of peace,” both reflect the strong willingness of major powers to refuse to be dragged into bloc confrontation and to independently determine their own development paths.
The institutional appeal of China lies in providing “certainty” in an era of global uncertainty. Through “institutional openness” and long-term development planning, China offers the world a predictable and participatory “opportunity list”. This stability, based on rules and oriented toward development, is becoming a key magnet for international cooperation.