2025 sees the 50th anniversary of the establishment of relations between China and the European Union. There’s not much of a festive mood in Brussels or Beijing, however. Suggestions that Chinese President Xi Jinping may pay a visit to the de facto EU capital for this year’s EU-China summit to mark the occasion have been rebuffed by the Chinese government. Xi will be sending Premier Li Qiang instead, while a date still needs to be fixed for the summit. In 2024, it didn’t take place at all.
On the face of it, this is surprising. “And what about China?” is the almost reflexive geopolitical and geoeconomic question for a European continent that finds itself at the sharp end of US President Donald Trump’s deluded trade policies, gonzo imperialism, and seemingly unconditional alignment with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has been attacking Ukraine and killing civilians for close to 1,200 days now.
For its part, China continues to make positive-sounding noises about “mutually beneficial cooperation”—and leaves it at that. While some in Brussels may be tempted to try a “charm offensive,” the baseline needs to be that the EU keeps de-risking and putting economic countermeasures in place to turn the tide of a baffling €300 billion Chinese trade surplus. More worrisome still, a “China shock” looks like coming Europe’s way as Beijing’s overcapacity in electric vehicles and other products threatens to overwhelm European industry.
When Xi visited Brussels for the first and only time, in 2014, it was what now feels like another era. Then, Xi reassured the Europeans that China’s relationship with the EU was Beijing’s “priority.” Already in 2014, however, Xi declined to directly criticize Putin’s annexation of Crimea, which had taken place only weeks earlier. The Chinese president’s commitment to “non-intervention” and “territorial integrity” has since proven to be highly selective.
In this issue, Noah Barkin warns that the Europeans’ urge to reduce their dependency on an unpredictable United States under Trump should not come at the expense of greater dependency on China. Ivano di Carlo points to the fact that the EU has been outpaced by China in the countries of the so-called Global South and now needs to adjust its global approach, while Temur Umarov analyses the ever-increasing closeness of the Russia-China relationship.
Jacob Mardell assesses whether there is anything in the Chinese offer, put forward repeatedly by Foreign Minister Wang Yi, of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) cooperating with the EU’s Global Gateway initiative. And Aya Adachi shows that Chinese economic and trade practices, including flooding foreign markets with overcapacity, is strongly rejected by middle-income states in particular, which in turn creates on opening for the EU.
Thus, while calibrating its global and trade policies by paying more attention to the “China factor,” Brussels will need to learn to navigate a world structured by great power politics, with the United States, China, and Russia trying to establish spheres of influence and seeking ad-hoc accommodations, all to the detriment of Europe. This turnaround needs to happen in addition to quickly strengthening Europe’s defense. Both efforts are momentous tasks which the Europeans need to tackle now.
Henning Hoff is executive editor of INTERNATIONALE POLITIK QUARTERLY.
