PRESIDENT CHIRAC was under fire in France yesterday for likening American culture to an “ecological disaster” and for alleged sycophancy towards China’s rulers while on an official visit to Beijing.

After his diatribe, delivered in Hanoi, media and opposition politicians wondered if M Chirac had been suffering from jet lag on his Asian tour.

The President, who is leading 50 French business leaders on a lavish trade mission to China, was at the centre of celebrations of Sino-French friendship in Beijing yesterday. However, last night he stayed away from a musical extravaganza in the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, staged by Jean-Michel Jarre, the French musician and showman. French media reports said that M Chirac was worried that Isabelle Adjani, the film star, who is involved in a romantic break-up with M Jarre, could cause a public incident.

M Chirac, using unusually blunt language, told Vietnamese students on Wednesday that the United States was trying to impose “a generalised underculture in the world”. Pleading France’s case for nations to defend their languages against the “Anglo-Saxons”, he said: “Nothing would be worse for humanity if there was just a single language . . . There is a tendency towards a majority Anglo-Saxon culture which erases others. All other cultures would be stifled to the benefit of American culture . . . If there was a single language, a single culture, it would be a real ecological disaster.”

Le Monde said that M Chirac, who prides himself on his knowledge of Asian cultures, appeared to have been suffering from fatigue when he delivered his impromptu attack.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the Finance Minister and chief political rival to M Chirac, told a meeting in Paris on Friday that he and his children loved American culture and could not get enough of it.

M Chirac’s failure to speak out on subjects that might displease the Chinese leadership was also criticised yesterday. Libération said that winning trade with China was necessary, “but this does not have to be accompanied by exaggerated sycophancy”.

France Inter, the state radio network, said from Beijing that M Chirac had performed “an act of allegiance” to the Chinese leadership in return for trade because he had refused to make any public reference to their human rights record.

M Chirac has also been pressing for the end of the European Union arms embargo on China, imposed after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. Speaking alongside President Hu Jintao, he criticised the ban as lacking justification. “It is a measure motivated purely and simply by hostility towards China,” he said.

M Chirac is eager to add weapons to the goods that France supplies to China. His trip has already seen the signing of hundreds of millions of pounds of contracts.

2003: France opposes the Iraq war. Donald Rumsfeld, US Defence Secretary, calls France “Old Europe”

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