Jean-Pierre Raffarin, former French prime-minister and somewhere between the statuses of being a political heavyweight and an elder statesman, won’t become his country’s ambassador in Beijing, he told three papers in an interview. President Nicolas Sarkozy had offered him the job, he said, but he had declined.
He preferred to stay in France and to be a voice to serve a decentralized Republic. Raffarin is a Senator for the Département de Vienne.
The current French ambassador to China is Hervé Ladsous, a graduate from l’École Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes
