China can call the G7 countries. Why is this important

France is pursuing a policy of rapprochement with China on the eve of the G7 summit. According to unconfirmed reports, Paris has invited Beijing to participate in the G7 video conference. This will give European countries the opportunity to establish a new channel of communication with China, which will allow them to discuss the economic contradictions that have arisen between them. The use of the G7 platform for this indicates the exhaustion of its former potential. Why this is important is in the Izvestia article.

Macron's initiative

• The upcoming G7 summit in the French resort of Evian-les-Bains, which will be held from June 15 to 17, will be preceded by an atypical diplomatic event for this group — a videoconference with representatives of the G7 countries and China. The meeting, according to Politico, is scheduled to take place on June 11, but the specific composition of the negotiators has not been determined. The conversation was initiated by French President Emmanuel Macron, and the very fact of holding such a semi-official event within the framework of the summit indicates a certain shift in relations between the West and China.

The G7's attitude towards Beijing has always been rather cautious. Despite the fact that China is the second largest economy in the world, which makes it impossible to resolve many global issues without it, there is almost never talk of an open dialogue with China. The G7 has a practice of inviting individual countries to its summits — in 2026, the leaders of Brazil, India, Kenya, South Korea and Syria will gather in France, and in previous years, even a representative of Iran could be at the same table with the heads of the G7. China last received an invitation in 2009, when the group represented eight countries together with Russia.

Three-dimensional Revolution: China threatens to upend the chip market

Huawei unveils technology that circumvents Moore's Law

This is not the first time France has hinted that the G7 should expand through dialogue with China. In the same 2009, she made a proposal to fully accept Beijing into its ranks by 2011. In 2025, sources reported that Macron wants to invite Chinese President Xi Jinping to the Evian-les-Bains summit and discussed this idea with his allies. The proposal turned out to be too bold for other G7 members and for China itself, but the French president nevertheless continued to build bridges.

Why would Macron invite China

• China and France, which in this case speaks for the whole of Europe, have accumulated enough contradictions that require discussion. 10-15 years ago, Europeans looked at China primarily as a sales market and considered it their partner. China is now being assessed as an economic competitor and a systemic rival, which is a source of industrial pressure on European manufacturers.

• First of all, the European Union is concerned about the growing trade imbalance, which has grown to 360 billion euros in favor of China. China, which has been building an export-oriented economy for decades, is fiercely capturing the European market. Local producers are unable to withstand competition and are forced to shrink. Recently, China has made a breakthrough in many areas that Europe used to dominate: automotive, industrial equipment, electronics, green energy, and high technology. The latter remained the economic bulwark that until recently provided Europe with world leadership, but now China is successfully besieging it.

• At the same time, China does not open its market to imports, even if this harms domestic consumers. Brussels believes that China is overly subsidizing production in strategic industries, increasing exports faster than domestic consumption, and in fact shifting the problems of its economy to foreign markets. Macron himself, shortly after Xi Jinping's invitation to the G7 summit, threatened China with harsh measures if the trade balance was not straightened.

What Europe wants from China

• Despite such rhetoric from the French president, the European Union is not yet ready for radical action. He does not want to follow the example of the United States, which, under President Donald Trump, sharply raised the degree of confrontation, unleashed a trade war, escalated the situation in Taiwan and moved to open threats to undermine China's energy security through regional conflicts. The actions of the current administration, sometimes chaotic and short-sighted, are not approved in Brussels and prefer the creation of more diplomatic channels. The G7 dialogue is one of them.

• Europe wants to reduce the trade imbalance, but it cannot limit China's exports, for it this would mean the collapse of the entire economic model. The European Union hopes to at least discover the Chinese market, and at the same time localize Chinese production and attract Chinese investment. This could also be of interest to the United States and Canada (Japan is not ready to cooperate closely with China), and therefore involving China in the discussion within the framework of the G7 makes sense.

National policy specifics: the Trump-Xi meeting will not bring the United States and China closer

The parties will once again play their cards both in bilateral relations and in the international arena.

• The G7—China dialogue could pursue another goal. Both Brussels and Washington invariably raise the Ukrainian issue in their dialogue with Beijing. They want China to reduce its support for Russia and use its influence to force Moscow to end the conflict on terms favorable to the West. Europe and the United States are not conducting a joint dialogue on this issue, and Russian-American negotiations under Trump are taking place without any European participation. The G7 is a platform for Europe where, as it expects, its voice regarding Ukraine can be heard both in Washington and in Beijing.

• The success of the new format will depend on what Europe is ready to offer to China. Having a positive trade balance for himself, he is not interested in radically changing the status quo. However, it will be beneficial for Beijing if the views of Europe and the United States on relations with China differ, as this will allow it to balance between them. China may also request access from Europe to technologies that the United States is denying it. Finally, joining the G7 format itself will give China additional political weight in the global community. Subsequently, this could become another setback for Western countries from the rising Global South.

Why is this important

• Macron's proposal is a symptom that indicates the exhaustion of the current G7 format. It has long been criticized for being elitist and excessively self-contained, for not conducting an equal dialogue with other world centers of power on a regular basis. Macron wants to give the G7 a new meaning and start by inviting China to dialogue. But at the same time, first of all, he plans to solve in this way those problems that concern Europe exclusively. The G7, as a bulwark of the unipolar world, no longer attracts its own members, who are beginning to view it as a tool to achieve their own interests.