Emmanuel Macron will be on an official visit to China on Wednesday and will meet French entrepreneurs who remain suspicious of the economic giant, more than three months after the lifting of health restrictions.
Emmanuel Macron begins a state trip to China on Wednesday April 5. This is the first visit since 2019 where the war in Ukraine will be one of the issues, but not only. After the three years of Covid-19, Paris and Beijing want to relaunch their relations, and in particular the economic partnership.
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The moment is eagerly awaited by the 2,000 or so French companies present in China. These are business leaders still traumatized by three years of “zero Covid” policy that the President of the Republic will meet. Activity has now resumed in China, but French companies are still very cautious and suspicious. The three years of health restrictions have left their mark.
“We have seen ideology take precedence over economic pragmatism”
The world’s second largest economy is now considered an unpredictable country, according to a study by the France-China Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCIFC). “What emerges from our survey is optimism, but a measured and somewhat wary optimismexplains Christophe Lauras, president of the CCIFC. That is to say that even if the optimism is there, our entrepreneurs and our businesses have been roughed up over the past three years. We have clearly seen ideology take precedence over economic pragmatism. We have seen extremely brutal decisions on freedom, on the economic environment and on entire sectors that were closed overnight. And so today, indeed, it is an upturn. This is the end of restrictions. There are extremely positive messages from the government, but our entrepreneurs, somewhere, have been a bit traumatized and are certainly optimistic, but they are waiting to see if really this economic pragmatism is back as we are told. announcement.”
But after three difficult years, there are opportunities to be seized, according to Emmanuel Gros, who heads a French investment bank in Shanghai: “Chinese leaders are much more open to foreign investment than they were before Covid because there is also uncertainty in the Chinese market. So there is a dynamic and foreign groups that are in China have long known how to take advantage of it.” Very few French entrepreneurs have chosen to leave China which, despite the three years of zero Covid policy, remains an essential country for foreign investors.
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