When Hu Jintao, China's president, visited Paris a year ago, the French government celebrated by bathing the Eiffel Tower in red light and staging a dragon parade along the Champs-Elysees. Strangely, no such celebrations featured when George Bush visited Paris a few months later. France is not the only European country bending over backwards to please the Chinese. Last month Gerhard Schroder, the German chancellor, visited Beijing with 43 German businessmen. It was further confirmation that the European Union is hell-bent on wooing China, for a mixture of strategic and economic reasons. The courtship is paying dividends. This week it emerged that the EU is now China's biggest trading partner: in 2004, trade between the two amounted to almost ?160 billion ($210 billion), an increase of 35% over 2003. And within a few months the Europeans have made clear that they will take a step that will delight the Chinese and enrage the Americans, by lifting the arms embargo that has been in place ever since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.
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