Bradley Perrett | Emmanuel Macron happy to throw Taiwan to the wolves visits Xi Jinping in China

Along similar lines, France thinks in terms of gloire - glory.

French President Emmanuel Macron cannot have doubted his gloire when he arrived in China a week ago. As he stepped off his aircraft, there was the foreign minister, Qin Gang, to welcome him personally.

A truly magnificent array of soldiers was assembled in the grandeur of Tiananmen Square to honour Macron. (China does that stuff really well.) Then, in case his sense of self-importance needed further heightening, there was a glorious state banquet.

And he had a four-hour audience with the emperor, President Xi Jinping.

Fully glorified, Macron was pleased on his way home to suggest that Europe - by which he meant the European Union under France's leadership - should not help the US in resisting Chinese attempts to subjugate Taiwan.

Europe ran a risk of getting "caught up in crises that are not ours, which prevents it from building its strategic autonomy," he told the Politico news service. "The paradox would be that, overcome with panic, we believe we are just America's followers."

What he said came down to this: just to show that it could go its own way (meaning France's way), the EU should throw Taiwan to the wolves.

Glorious, eh?

The Chinese Communist Party's media were, of course, delighted.

Macron is pushing the intrinsically anti-American view that what's really going on is mere rivalry between superpowers - an idea that somehow persists in a lot of millimetre-deep commentary in Australia.

The implications are that other countries don't have much to lose if China overcomes the US and that the two sides are morally equal.

So, for example, US-loathers here demean themselves by defending China's aggression and oppression and by telling us the "rivalry" between Beijing and Washington has nothing to do with Australia.

In fact, there's a lot more at stake for us than for the Americans, who could, if they chose, pull back to the eastern Pacific and let China run everything from South Korea to New Zealand.

Luckily, Macron won't have much influence. China has managed to set up a strong political trend against it among leaders in Europe who are less vain than he is, which is probably all of them. On average, they are at around the level of awareness of Beijing's aggression that Australia reached in 2018.

If Macron is setting himself up as Europe's chief accommodator of China, the most prominent resister is perhaps Ingrida Simonyte. She is the prime minister of Lithuania, population 2.8 million, which in 2021 had the audacity to breach a symbolic rule enforced by China.

The little Baltic country let Taiwan set up a representative office, a de facto embassy, under the name "Taiwan" instead of the usual "Taipei".

Since China claims to own Taiwan, regardless of what 24 million Taiwanese think, it chucks a wobbly over anything that suggests the island is itself a country.

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So China reacted promptly by blocking imports from Lithuania and making companies fearful of investing there.

Yet that did not force Simonyte's government to pull its head in. Instead, Lithuania stepped up its engagement with Taiwan last year by opening a reciprocal representative office on the island.

In August, a Lithuanian deputy minister visited Taiwan, to China's annoyance, then three months ago members of the Lithuanian parliament also went there.

China "tried to break our will, they tried to change our decision, they tried to harass investors and they tried to make economic sanctions ... but we survived," said one of them, Laurynas Kasciunas. "We are now resilient and stronger, and we can be a role model for other EU countries."

Another MP in the delegation, Dovile Sakaliene, had a message that Macron might consider. "There cannot be any ambivalence," Reuters quoted her as saying. "You are either with the aggressor or you are with the victim." German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius responded to Macron's remarks by saying they had been "unfortunate". He added that, contrary to another view expressed by the French president, European countries had never been in danger of becoming US vassals.

An international group of MPs who are sceptical of ties with China said: "It should be emphasised that the president's words are severely out of step with the feeling across Europe's legislatures and beyond."

Macron's statements had been "absolutely disgraceful and wrong," said the chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Czech lower house of parliament, Marek Zenisek.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock pretty clearly smacked down the French president on Wednesday when she issued a statement ahead of her own visit to Beijing. She said she would "underline the common European conviction that a unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait, and especially military escalation, would be unacceptable."

In saying so, Baerbock, a Green, was echoing a line frequently heard from Washington.

Another German Green, Member of the European Parliament Reinhard Butikofer, said Macron's visit to China had been a complete disaster.

The Europeans are quite used to decades and decades of French pretensions to speak for all of them. They also know that Paris likes to imagine the EU as a sort of mighty extension of France, which thereby becomes something like an equal to the US. There's plenty of gloire in that, you see.

So, while we recall that our word "glory" comes from French, our European friends would point out that so, too, does "poseur".