Mr. Macron Goes to China

Welcome back to World Brief, FP’s revamped flagship daily newsletter. Today, the leaders of France and China prepare to meet, Israel raids Al-Aqsa Mosque, and COP28’s Emirati oil tycoon stirs controversy.

The French are not ready to cut off China—yet. On Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron flew to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The three-day visit is expected to cover trade, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and other issues.

The European Union’s relationship with China has been at an all-time low. But that hasn’t stopped Paris from seeking high-level economic engagement with the world’s second-largest economy. Since being elected president in 2017, Macron has visited China numerous times and signed agreements on green finance, intellectual property rights, and foreign investment. This week’s trip aims to bolster these economic ties—60 French business leaders are traveling with Macron, including the heads of Airbus and energy giant Électricité de France—while also preventing the Europe-China relationship from sinking any further.

“It doesn’t really strike me as a visit that moves the goal posts so much as it tries to maintain a certain degree of definitely economic but also diplomatic equilibrium,” said Rui Zhong, a program associate at the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States.

But trade is only one side of Macron’s China visit. Beijing has refused to spurn Russia over Ukraine despite growing Western calls for Xi to do so. In February, Xi went so far as to propose a 12-point Russia-Ukraine peace plan, one that China experts such as Jo Inge Bekkevold argue had less to do with presenting a viable road map to peace and more to do with China’s intensifying diplomatic rivalry with the United States.

Macron will seek to persuade Xi to more forcefully leverage his country’s close ties with Moscow to try to end the war in Ukraine—or, at the very least, to convince Beijing not to provide military aid to Russia’s war effort.

Macron’s visit is not the first major China trip by a Western leader in recent months. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and European Council President Charles Michel flew to Beijing in late 2022, and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez traveled to Beijing after Xi lifted China’s zero-COVID restrictions. This week, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is also heading to Beijing to meet with Xi and Macron, where she is expected to present a tougher message than Macron on issues such as the need to de-risk the EU’s economic dependence on Beijing.

• Get Out of Russia by Natalia Antonova

• Why India Downplays China’s Border Threat by Happymon Jacob

• Why Neutrality Is Obsolete in the 21st Century by Franz-Stefan Gady

Israeli police raid holy site. Tensions between Israelis and Palestinians flared on Wednesday after Israeli police conducted an overnight raid on Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam, located in a complex known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as Temple Mount.

The raid occurred during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and on the eve of the Jewish Passover holiday. Reports say Palestinians, some spurred by rumors that Jewish extremists were planning to sacrifice a goat in the complex, had been staying overnight at the mosque since Ramadan began on March 22. The current rules allow Muslims to do so only during the last 10 days of Ramadan.

Israeli police have visited the site daily to evict the worshippers. When they arrived to do so on Tuesday, multiple worshippers refused to leave, prompting police to storm the compound. At least 12 Palestinians were injured in the clash by rubber-tipped bullets and beatings, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society, which is part of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.

In response, Palestinian militants in Gaza launched missile strikes into Israel on Wednesday morning, followed by the Israel Defense Forces targeting multiple sites in Gaza with airstrikes. In 2021, Israeli restrictions on the Al-Aqsa compound triggered violence that ended with an 11-day Israeli offensive in Gaza that killed 261 Palestinians.

Now, with Israel’s most far-right government in history currently in power, fears are high that this latest episode could easily spark a bigger conflict this time, too.

Taliban officials target the U.N. The United Nations has ordered its more than 3,000 employees across Afghanistan to stay home for several days after learning that the Taliban planned to bar female U.N. staffers from working in the country. Female employees were initially prevented from going to work in Nangarhar province and have since learned that the Taliban plan on implementing these restrictions across the country.

This ban is just the latest in a series of Taliban efforts to discriminate against women since the group came to power in August 2021. These include banning women from attending universities and working for nongovernmental organizations, annulling divorces against abusive husbands, and conducting extrajudicial killings of women’s rights activists, among other human rights violations. Last month, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan accused the Taliban of pursuing “gender apartheid.”

 One of the world’s biggest polluters is now the face for fighting climate change. Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. (ADNOC), will oversee the 2023 U.N. Climate Change Conference, or COP28, in late 2023, with nearly 200 countries in attendance. But having the meeting run by an oil tycoon under an autocratic government has many climate activists worried.

According to new data from the Guardian, al-Jaber is expanding oil and gas production to 7.5 billion barrels. To meet net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, goals established by the International Energy Agency, 90 percent of that oil would have to remain in the ground. ADNOC also began development of the second-largest offshore oil field in the world in Upper Zakum, northwest of Abu Dhabi.

The U.N. secretary-general has called on the oil company to cease all licensing and funding of oil immediately. And climate activists such as Tasneem Essop of Climate Action Network International have campaigned for the sultan to resign from his leading role at COP28.

The latest threat facing Italy is apparently the English language. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s latest nationalist push is to ban the use of English and other foreign words in official documents. If the legislation is passed, politicians who continue to use English could be fined.

Meloni’s history with far-right nationalism has veered into fascism, stemming from her party’s ties to former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, journalist Michele Barbero highlighted in an FP review of Mussolini’s Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy.

In the meantime, Italian bureaucrats may have to start practicing using Italian expressions such as “dispensatore di liquido igienizzante per le mani” instead of “dispenser” to describe the thing that holds hand soap in the bathroom. Facile.

Correction, April 6, 2023: An earlier version of this article misstated Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber’s title.

Update, April 6, 2023: This article has been updated to clarify the Palestine Red Crescent Society’s affiliation.