French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday sought China's support to help advance reform of world commodity and financial markets, while his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao warned Sarkozy against overstepping U.N. authority in the Libya crisis.
Sarkozy and Hu made the remarks in Beijing, where the French president has been visiting before flying to Nanjing, the city in east China that will host a seminar of the Group of 20 wealthy and developing economies on Thursday.
"France, as president of the G20, needs China's participation to make progress on all the big issues," Sarkozy told an audience of diplomats and company executives when he opened a new French embassy building in the Chinese capital.
"In its G20 presidency, France needs China's participation in order to make progress on all the big issues that concern us, from commodity prices, to limiting speculation, to monetary instability that risks setting back progress in improving competitiveness, and to peace in the world," said Sarkozy, at the event before his meeting with China's president.
The Nanjing seminar was supposed to highlight Sino-French cooperation in promoting more regulation of commodity markets and exploring reform of the global monetary system, but Beijing has not exuded enthusiasm for the seminar or for Sarkozy's broad plans during his government's presidency of the G20.
In Hu Jintao's published remarks from his talks with Sarkozy, the Chinese leader said only that his government was willing to "strengthen communication and coordination" with France about the G20 summit later this year.
Instead, Hu dwelt on the Western air campaign against the forces of embattled Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and gave the highest-level expression yet to China's criticisms.
China abstained from the United Nations Security Council vote that authorised a no-fly zone in Libya and military action against Gaddafi's forces. But since then Beijing has accused Western countries of overreaching in their campaign.
"We believe that the resolution passed by the Security Council was intended to stop violence and protect civilians," Hu told Sarkozy, according to a report from China's official Xinhua news agency.
"If the military action harms innocent civilians and creates an even bigger humanitarian crisis, that would violate the intentions of the Security Council resolution."
Beijing has rarely used its veto as a permanent Security Council member to outright block resolutions, but it has sought to dilute Western demands and is generally opposed to military intervention in other nations, especially over internal conflicts.
"History repeatedly proves that armed force doesn't solve problems," Hu told Sarkozy, according to Xinhua. "Giving peace a chance suits the common interests of all sides."
NANJING SEMINAR
The Chinese government has distanced itself from the Nanjing meeting, emphasising that France is the organiser and China simply the venue. It has insisted that a small think tank headed by a retired vice-premier is responsible for the Chinese side of the planning.
Sarkozy nonetheless made clear he wanted the support of China, the world's second-biggest economy.
China has the world's biggest pile of foreign reserves and about two-thirds are estimated to be held in dollar-denominated assets. Any sign that Beijing is disenchanted with the dollar would send shivers through world markets.
In November, Sarkozy received Hu with military honours during his state visit to France. Sarkozy said then that Hu backed France's hopes to reform the global monetary system and would cooperate closely during Paris's G20 presidency. [ID:nLDE6A31GV]
But since then, China's ardour has cooled.
Sarkozy had promoted the expanded use of the special drawing right (SDR), the International Monetary Fund's unit of account, as a global reserve currency that could eventually displace the dollar. China's top central banker, Zhou Xiaochuan, initially floated that idea in an essay.
But a series of Chinese officials have said Zhou's essay was an academic exercise, and Zhou himself has said he put the proposal forward to deflect criticism of China's own currency, which many other governments say is artificially cheap.
