The China-US trade dispute has escalated recently and CGTN Senior Correspondent Tian Wei sat down with Former French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin at the Boao Forum to ask him about his thoughts on the last round of disputes and what stance countries in Europe should take with the ongoing US-China trade friction.

"It's a bad thing and we think that protectionism is not a good way. In such a dangerous world, we need to have an agreement, we need to have a dialogue and we don't like that one country take alone decision against another. We think we need to have multilateral dialogue," Raffarin said. He added that President Macron and President Xi spoke about this during their meeting, and they agreed that we need to have multilateral dialogue to discuss this situation.

People said European countries can be quite tricky in a way, because if heavy tariffs are being leveled on Chinese goods and the Europeans are being exempted by the Americans from the heavy tariffs, will European countries just watch and never say a word?

"We can't let Mr. Trump decide alone what happens with world trade," answered the former prime minister. "We need to have cooperation, we need to discuss. we want to discuss in multilateral sides, not only bilateral discussions."

Even though the Trump administration gave the French an exemption from heavy tariffs, Mr. Raffarin said they would still proceed with a multilateral platform.

"We need a world agreement so we can have discussion. We can have national decisions, but [to] foster a good trade in the world. We need to have a multilateral discussion."