China–France relations

Based on Wikipedia: China–France relations

The Angel That Protected Two Emperors

In the late seventeenth century, French Jesuits returning from the court of China's Kangxi Emperor made an extraordinary claim: the Chinese ruler and Louis XIV of France were protected by the same guardian angel. The evidence they cited was surprisingly specific. Both men had survived the same childhood illness. Both had ascended to power as children and would reign for decades. Both commanded vast territories—France as the dominant power in Europe, China as the supreme force in East Asia. Both styled themselves as servants of God with divine mandates to rule.

This curious theological observation captures something essential about the relationship between France and China: from the very beginning, these two nations have seen reflections of themselves in each other, sometimes flattering, sometimes distorted, but always fascinating.

Before the Embassies: Medieval Encounters

The story begins earlier than most people realize. In the thirteenth century, long before formal diplomatic ties, individual travelers forged the first connections. Rabban Bar Sauma, a Turkic Christian monk who had traveled from China, arrived at the French court and met King Philip IV. Around the same time, the Flemish Franciscan friar William of Rubruck journeyed in the opposite direction, reaching the Mongol capital of Karakorum. There, in the heart of the steppe empire, he encountered something unexpected: a French silversmith named Guillaume Bouchier, already at work crafting objects for the Mongol khans.

These encounters were flukes of history, chance meetings enabled by the Mongol Empire's vast territorial expanse, which briefly created corridors of travel across Eurasia. They produced no lasting diplomatic framework. But they planted seeds of curiosity.

The Jesuit Connection

The real transformation came with the Jesuits.

In 1698, France launched its first formal embassy to China by sea—a journey that took nearly two years. But individual French Jesuits had already been active in China for decades, part of a remarkable missionary effort that would span two centuries. These weren't simple evangelists. They were scientists, cartographers, artists, and diplomats who occupied positions of extraordinary influence at the Chinese imperial court.

The names form a roster of forgotten luminaries: Nicolas Trigault, who published influential accounts of China in Europe; Jean-Baptiste Régis, who helped survey and map the entire Qing Empire; Jean Denis Attiret, who became the personal painter of the Qianlong Emperor; Michel Benoist, who collaborated with the Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione to build European-style palaces in the Old Summer Palace, satisfying the emperor's taste for exotic Western architecture.

Louis XIV dispatched his own team of Jesuits with a specific geopolitical agenda: counterbalancing the influence of the Ottoman Empire in Europe by building ties with the world's other great empire. The five missionaries he sent—Jean de Fontaney, Joachim Bouvet, Jean-François Gerbillon, Louis Le Comte, and Claude de Visdelou—became the king's eyes and ears in Beijing.

A Two-Way Exchange

The flow of ideas wasn't one-directional. While French Jesuits brought European astronomy and mathematics to China, they sent back something equally transformative: Chinese aesthetics.

Chinoiserie—the European artistic movement that imitated and reimagined Chinese styles—swept through French aristocratic culture. Louis XIV commissioned the Trianon de Porcelaine, a pavilion built in Chinese style at Versailles in 1670. France became the European hub for Chinese porcelains, silks, and lacquers, and for European imitations of these luxury goods. The fascination was genuine, if often superficial.

Chinese visitors began appearing in France as well. Michel Sin arrived at Versailles in 1684 before continuing to England. More significantly, Arcadio Huang crossed France in 1702 and eventually settled in Paris as the "Chinese interpreter of the King." Before his death in 1716, Huang began compiling what would have been the first Chinese-French dictionary and grammar—tools desperately needed by European scholars attempting to understand Chinese texts. He died before finishing, leaving his work incomplete.

The most significant intellectual product of this era was the Description de la Chine et de la Tartarie Chinoise, edited by Jean-Baptiste Du Halde and published in 1736. This massive work synthesized reports from Jesuit teams traveling across the Qing Empire, accompanied by maps created by the cartographer Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville. It represented the most comprehensive European knowledge of China assembled to that date.

The Century of Humiliation Begins

The friendly cultural exchange of the eighteenth century gave way to something much darker in the nineteenth.

In 1844, following Britain's victory in the First Opium War, France secured its own treaty with China—the Treaty of Whampoa—demanding the same trading privileges the British had extracted. This marked France's entry into the "unequal treaty" system that would progressively strip China of sovereignty over the coming decades.

The violence escalated. In 1860, British and French troops jointly sacked the Old Summer Palace in Beijing—the same palace where French Jesuits had once helped design European-style buildings for the Qianlong Emperor. Countless artifacts were looted and carried back to European museums, where many remain to this day. The destruction was deliberate and symbolic, intended to humiliate the Qing court.

France Carves Out Its Share

For centuries, the kingdoms of the Indochinese peninsula—what is now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—had maintained tributary relationships with China, acknowledging Chinese suzerainty while governing themselves. France systematically dismantled this arrangement through a series of invasions, transforming the region into French Indochina.

The conflict came to a head in 1884-85, when France and China fought an undeclared war over control of Annam, the central region of Vietnam. The military outcome was inconclusive—a stalemate. But politically, France won. China was forced to acknowledge French control over Indochina, ending the tributary relationship that had lasted centuries.

The war had curious political consequences on both sides. In China, it paradoxically strengthened the power of the Empress Dowager Cixi, who used the crisis to block military modernization programs that might have threatened her control. In France, the war was deeply unpopular and brought down the government of Prime Minister Jules Ferry. As the historian Lloyd Eastman later observed, France gained a colony while both countries weakened themselves internally.

In 1897, France seized Guangzhouwan as a treaty port—a ninety-nine-year lease, meant to counter the commercial power of British Hong Kong. The territory was administered from Hanoi under the Governor General of French Indochina. France also participated enthusiastically in the Eight-Nation Alliance that invaded China in 1900 to suppress the Boxer Rebellion, an anti-foreign uprising that had killed Chinese Christians and besieged foreign legations in Beijing.

Students and Revolutionaries

Amid all this exploitation, a different kind of France-China connection was forming—one that would shape the twentieth century in ways no one could have predicted.

In the early 1900s, Chinese students began traveling to France in significant numbers. A group of anarchists—Li Shizeng, Zhang Renjie, Wu Zhihui, and Cai Yuanpei—organized what became known as the Diligent Work-Frugal Study Movement, encouraging Chinese youth to work in French factories while pursuing education.

After World War I, the French government actively recruited Chinese workers for its factories. Li Shizeng and his colleagues formalized the student-worker exchange by creating the Société Franco-Chinoise d'Education in 1916. Thousands of young Chinese came to France in the years that followed.

Many of these worker-students would become leaders of the Chinese Communist Party.

Zhou Enlai, who would serve as Premier of the People's Republic of China for twenty-six years, spent time in France as a young man. So did Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader who would later open China to market economics. These future revolutionaries absorbed Marxist ideas, organized among fellow Chinese students, and developed the political skills they would later deploy at home. The Institut Franco-Chinois de Lyon, operating from 1921 to 1951, continued promoting cultural exchanges even as political upheaval transformed both countries.

World War and Civil War

The Second World War created bizarre diplomatic contortions. After Germany conquered France in 1940, the collaborationist Vichy government technically became a German ally. Yet Vichy France continued to recognize Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government—which had retreated to Chongqing after the fall of Nanjing in 1937—rather than the Japanese-sponsored puppet government under Wang Jingwei. French diplomats in China remained accredited to Chongqing throughout the war.

Meanwhile, Free France under Charles de Gaulle fought alongside China as allied powers against the Axis.

The territorial aftermath was complex. On August 18, 1945, with Japanese troops still occupying Guangzhouwan, French and Chinese officials signed an agreement returning the leased territory to China. The French flag came down for the last time on November 20, 1945. But disputes over islands in the South China Sea—the Paracels and Spratlys—were already brewing, with China progressively expanding its territorial claims in the years after the war.

The Cold War Divide

When the Chinese Communist Party won the civil war and established the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949, France faced a choice. The French Fourth Republic declined to recognize the new government, maintaining diplomatic relations instead with the Nationalist government that had fled to Taiwan.

During the Korean War, French troops fought under the United Nations Command against Chinese forces. In Indochina, communist insurgents based in China repeatedly attacked French positions. The climax came in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, where Vietnamese communist forces inflicted a decisive defeat on the French military. France withdrew, ceding North Vietnam to communist rule.

By exiting Southeast Asia, France avoided further direct confrontation with China. But the relationship remained frigid. The Cultural Revolution that began in 1966 sparked violence against French diplomats in China. The powerful French Communist Party, which might have served as a bridge, largely sided with the Soviet Union in the Sino-Soviet split, leaving China with almost no base of support in France beyond some militant students.

De Gaulle's Recognition

The thaw came from an unlikely source: Charles de Gaulle, the conservative general who led Free France during the war and now presided over the Fifth Republic.

In 1964, France officially recognized the People's Republic of China, re-establishing ambassadorial-level diplomatic relations. De Gaulle's reasoning was characteristically independent-minded: he believed that maintaining diplomatic contact with Beijing could serve as a moderating influence on Chinese behavior. It was also, not coincidentally, a way of asserting French autonomy from American foreign policy.

France thus became one of the first major Western powers to recognize the PRC, years before the United States would follow suit under Nixon.

The Taiwan Problem

Recognition did not mean harmony.

During the 1990s, France repeatedly clashed with China over the Taiwan question. France sold weapons to Taiwan, infuriating Beijing. The Chinese government retaliated by temporarily closing the French Consulate-General in Guangzhou—a dramatic gesture that underscored how seriously China took the issue.

Eventually, France agreed to prohibit its companies from selling arms to Taiwan. Diplomatic relations resumed in 1994, and the following years saw a flurry of state visits and expanding bilateral trade, which reached new heights in 2000.

Cultural ties proved harder to develop. France has expanded its research facilities dealing with Chinese history, culture, and contemporary affairs, but the institutional connections remain thinner than the economic ones. Organizations linked to the International Liaison Department of the Chinese Communist Party maintain relationships with French parliamentarians. More controversially, the PRC operates over seventy "talent recruitment work stations" in France—programs that critics describe as vehicles for technology transfer.

The Olympic Torch and the Dalai Lama

2008 brought the relationship to a new low.

As the Olympic torch relay passed through Paris before the Beijing Summer Olympics, protesters fighting for Tibetan independence and human rights repeatedly attempted to disrupt the procession. The images of chaotic confrontations broadcast around the world embarrassed the Chinese government, which had hoped the relay would be a triumphant prelude to its Olympic moment.

Chinese protesters organized boycotts of Carrefour, the French-owned retail chain, in major Chinese cities including Kunming, Hefei, and Wuhan. Hundreds joined anti-French rallies. The Chinese government hinted that "Sino-French friendship could be affected." President Nicolas Sarkozy wrote a conciliatory letter to Jin Jing, a Chinese athlete who had carried the torch through Paris, and Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao sent a special envoy to help repair the relationship.

But then, in 2009, Sarkozy met with the Dalai Lama in Poland.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao pointedly omitted France from his European tour. An assistant foreign minister delivered a message that blended proverb with threat: "The one who tied the knot should be the one who unties it." French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, seeking to calm tensions, was quoted in Le Monde saying France had no intention of "encouraging Tibetan separatism."

Espionage and Secret Police

Recent years have brought new sources of friction, centered on Chinese intelligence activities in France.

In March 2024, the head of the Paris office of China's Ministry of State Security and other Chinese officials were filmed at Charles de Gaulle Airport in what appeared to be a failed attempt to forcibly repatriate a Chinese dissident named Ling Huazhan. French authorities subsequently expelled the intelligence officer and another Chinese official.

In May 2024, several French lawmakers—all members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, a group of legislators from democratic countries who coordinate on China-related issues—revealed they had been targeted by APT31, a hacking group associated with Chinese state intelligence. By June 2025, French authorities had suspended the deportation of a Chinese businessman whom the General Directorate for Internal Security suspected of operating a secret police station from within a Fujian hometown association—part of a broader pattern of extralegal Chinese police operations that have been uncovered across multiple Western countries.

Where It Stands Today

France and China remain connected by history, commerce, and geopolitics, even as fundamental disagreements persist.

Both are regional powers—France within the European Union, China in Asia. Both hold permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council, a legacy of the post-World War II order. Both are recognized nuclear-weapon states. Both belong to the G20.

But they diverge sharply on questions of trade, democracy, and human rights. France, like other European nations, has grown increasingly concerned about Chinese economic practices, technology acquisition, and the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. China bristles at what it considers interference in its internal affairs.

When Emmanuel Macron meets Xi Jinping—as he did in Beijing in recent months, followed by informal discussions in Chengdu (and, of course, a visit to see the pandas)—both leaders speak of "seizing opportunities" and "expanding the scope" of cooperation. The diplomatic language is warm.

But beneath the surface, the relationship remains what it has always been: two ancient civilizations, each convinced of its own centrality, circling each other with a mixture of admiration, suspicion, and self-interest. The Jesuit missionaries who once saw the same guardian angel protecting Louis XIV and the Kangxi Emperor might recognize the dynamic. The angel, if it exists, has its work cut out for it.