France’s consul general in Hong Kong, Christile Drulhe, said of Macron’s position on Taiwan: “It’s important that people understand well what our president meant and that his position won’t be distorted.”
She said France continued to follow its one-China policy which allowed it to have exchanges with Taiwan. Paris opposes unilateral changes to the status quo between the island and mainland China.
“The position of France on Taiwan has always been clear and constant,” Drulhe said in the interview on April 13.
She declined to elaborate on whether France would intervene in a conflict but said “it’s in everybody’s interest to maintain peace and stability in the region, and to solve differences through dialogue”.
France had an interest in the region because it was an Indo-Pacific nation, she said.
France says it is part of the region because it has territories in the Indian and Pacific oceans. Its policy document on the region published last year said more than 90 per cent of its exclusive economic zone was in the region.
With Macron’s comments stirring debate over the European take on Taiwan, tensions over mainland China were brought to the centre of the table of the Group of Seven diplomats this week, an issue likely to top the agenda at the G7’s Hiroshima summit next month, alongside the war in Ukraine.
The European Union sought to reduce its reliance on a single source of resources. Plans to diversify suppliers were accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the supply chain disruptions caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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Taipei says it is monitoring Beijing’s planned ‘no-fly zone’ and continued military drills
Before her trip to China with Macron, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen emphasised that China supplied almost all rare earths to the EU.
Macron’s interview repeated his long-standing call for “European sovereignty” but it was criticised by US Republican lawmakers and Eastern European leaders, especially when Beijing was staging military drills around the island. On his subsequent state visit to the Netherlands, the French president said “the position of France and the Europeans on Taiwan is the same”.
Drulhe said the pursuit of strategic autonomy was not targeted at one country – including China or Russia. She said there was consensus in the EU about becoming more strategically autonomous, but the question of how to achieve it without decoupling the bloc from the rest of the world remained.
“We share a lot of values and interests with [the US] but that doesn’t mean that we agree on everything either, which is why it’s important for us, and for Europeans, to assert autonomy,” Drulhe said.
