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Sarkozy defends 'European values' on Tibet

AFP

French President Nicolas Sarkozy — whose ties with China were strained by his recent meeting with the Dalai Lama — said on Friday that he would find ways to talk to Beijing without renouncing “European values”.

Sarkozy told journalists he aimed to find “the means to have a calm dialogue with China,” but “not at the price of renouncing our own European values.”

“Having good or bad relations with a partner is not about letting oneself being told what to do,” Sarkozy said at the end of a two-day EU summit he hosted in Brussels.

Beijing scrapped an EU-China [meeting] due to be held at the beginning of the month after Sarkozy lined up talks with the Dalai Lama in Gdansk, northern Poland.

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Published in AFP/Yahoo News