Analyst
MERICS (Mercator Institute for China Studies), Brussels office (German think tank)
Brussels, Belgium
grzegorz.stec@merics.de
https://www.merics.org/en/team/grzegorz-stec
Twitter: @grzestec
Beijing seems to be reopening channels of communication and changing its tune towards the EU. Late last year, European and Chinese leaders met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali while Chancellor Olaf Scholz and EUCO President Charles Michel visited Beijing with similar trips by President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni set to follow. After almost a year of remaining vacant, Beijing filled the position of Ambassador to the EU in appointing Fu Cong, who came to the city with a message of resuming dialogue. All the while, Chinese foreign policy analysts also call for boosting exchanges, partially to leverage the tensions between the EU and the US over European concerns about the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and economic costs linked to fallout of the Russian invasion.
While resumption of exchanges at this geopolitically turbulent time is welcomed, the change of diplomatic tune does not warrant a strategic adjustment on China’s side. The EU should therefore retain a safe dose of skepticism towards this reopening (as argued already in August) as it recalibrates its China strategy – highlighted by the October Foreign Affairs Council. It is therefore the right time to ask a question about what Beijing’s key guiding objectives in its relationship with the EU are.
Piece of a puzzle
The EU is not the partner of key concern for China. Beijing primarily regards the relationship through a lens of strategic competition with the United States. And as outlined by President Xi Jinping during the 20th CCP Congress, a major foreign policy concern is now to bolster the security of the CCP’s regime by preventing US-led containment in an international situation increasingly characterized as posing “risks and challenges”.
For China, the relationship with the EU is but one piece of a larger puzzle with geopolitical competition with the US at its core. That competition has clearly defined the foreign policy of the PRC especially over the past years. Beijing seeks to keep the EU invested enough in the relationship to prevent full transatlantic alignment on China, preferably at a limited cost. By referring to the supposed non-occurrence of a “fundamental divergence of interests” and to the 2003 definition of the relationship as a “comprehensive strategic partnership”, both a staple of Beijing’s rhetorical playbook, China aims to maintain the unbalanced relationship that has characterized EU-China relations in the past decades with unequal market access and promise fatigue driving the EU’s gradual adjustments of its China policy.
What China wants
The wider geopolitical picture explains why China wants to maintain that status quo and struggles to propose an attractive and concrete agenda to the EU. Its objectives are primarily defined in negative terms with preventing unwanted scenarios and extending the status quo for as long as possible.
The three key objectives are:
- Limit the EU’s willingness to join the US and other G7 actors in restricting China’s attempts to reshape the international rules-based order
- Minimize the build-up of restrictions of access to European technology against the backdrop of US expanding such restrictions until China has developed domestic capacities
- To the greatest extent possible, retain open access to the European single market during a transition to a greater reliance on domestic consumption and exports to developing markets
Beijing attempts to keep the EU engaged primarily through rhetoric adjustment rather than substantial actions.
Beijing’s supposed discouragement of Russia’s threat to use nuclear weapons is carefully worded to the extent of being hollow, especially against the background of its political proximity to Moscow. Similarly, Beijing continues to endorse the “correct understanding of the strategic autonomy” by the EU – understood as limiting dependence on the US. However, so far, no indications of market opening for European actors beyond rehashed support for Comprehensive Agreement on Investment or addressing other points of EU’s concern – such as Beijing’s tacit support for Moscow, economic coercion towards Lithuania, the human rights situation in Xinjiang – remain absent from Beijing’s rhetoric shift. But beyond these politically sensitive measures, the EU’s taste for multilateral solutions offers more non-controversial ways for Beijing to demonstrate goodwill – be it on the framework to restructure external debt of developing countries, international food security issues, multilateral solutions to address the challenges of climate change or WTO reform. The absence of serious positive contribution by China to take practical steps, put down proposals and seek compromise to achieve progress on these issues says much more than any diplomatic messaging could.
Beijing’s willingness to jeopardize relations, by choosing to retaliate against perceived infringements of its red lines such as EU’s human rights sanctions or support for Taiwan, illustrates that the goal is not necessarily to convince the EU but to arouse their interest enough to prolong the status quo. With the economic considerations of the war in Ukraine and IRA, Beijing feels that the EU has become squeezed and the ground for “China engagement” narrative has become more fertile.
Stuck in a quagmire
Given Beijing’s assessment of the EU being divided on its level of assertiveness towards China and on the degree to which it is and should be aligned with the US, Beijing does not need to implement a particularly proactive policy towards the EU. Rather, it simply needs to combine a set of sticks and carrots to delay any unwanted changes in the relationship for as long as possible. At the same time, the insufficient strategic trust and EU-China misalignment captured in the term “systemic rivalry” leaves China disinterested in pursuing an agenda of large-scale strategic cooperation.
The EU leaders should therefore be realistic about the scope of what can be achieved in its relationship with China, especially given that issues of unresolved challenges of unequal market access, strategic diversification, and differing visions of the international order simmer under the surface of the ongoing fragile stabilization. The EU needs to ask itself a question of what strategic vision of engagement with China it sees further down the line.