Have a “critical mind”: this is the message launched Friday by Emmanuel Macron to a crowd of Chinese students who came to listen to him in Canton, in the face of which the French president denounced the Russian war which “colonizes” Ukraine.
Welcomed as a true rock star, Emmanuel Macron, who is concluding a three-day state visit to China, enjoyed a long crowd bath, shaking hands and accepting selfies from the Chinese who came to welcome him on his arrival at the Sun Yat-sen University in this southern Chinese city.
A warm atmosphere that contrasts with the strong social tensions of recent months in France around the pension reform and its resulting growing unpopularity.
In the gymnasium of this university, one of the most prestigious in the country, several hundred students were waiting for “Makelong”, as it is called in Chinese, for a speech and then a question and answer session.
The Head of State, who made the conflict in Ukraine the main subject of his visit to China, mentioned it from the first minutes: “This war is a manifest violation of our international law”, said- he launched.
“It’s a country that decides to colonize its neighbour, not to respect the rules, to redeploy arms, to invade it,” he insisted, about Russia.
Thursday in a bilateral meeting with Xi Jinping, the French president had rightly called on China to “bring Russia to reason” vis-à-vis Ukraine.
“This international order is now weakened and we have a responsibility, China and France, to preserve it and at the same time to reinvent it in the light of the realities of the 21st century,” he assured the students on Friday. .
Three students were then able to ask questions, in almost perfect French, enough to impress Mr. Macron: “I would be unable to do the same,” he reacted, making the audience laugh.
No questions about politics or the conflict in Ukraine, but rather questions about the qualities to expect in a good student, artificial intelligence and the challenges in terms of public health.
In response, President Macron took the opportunity to stress the importance of having a critical mind.
“The critical spirit (…) it is not a spirit to criticize others, it is not negative, but it is to question you about yourself or about the nature of the knowledge that you are given. conveys,” he pleaded.
“It’s what gives you a form of independence and what makes you able to judge and sometimes distinguish the true from the false, to put things in their context and to take some distance from the things that are transmitted,” added the Head of State.
And this is what makes it possible to become “free, rational individuals”, he insisted.
In China, all the media belong to the State and many citizens or Internet users are afraid to express any criticism, for fear of censorship or reprisals.
But “a mind that would only have knowledge without a critical mind is not totally free”, said Mr. Macron on Friday, because “he would not really know what to do with it or he would simply be the object of propaganda or a project that is not his”.
At the end of this meeting, the French president was to meet his Chinese counterpart for a dinner, before a meeting with Chinese investors in the evening.
04/07/2023 11:52:50 – Canton (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
