Brussels and Beijing are preparing to stage a new dialogue of the deaf. The European Union and the Chinese government will meet on July 24 for a bilateral summit that, in theory, was supposed to commemorate 50 years of diplomatic relations between the two blocs, but which has soured before it even begins. Neither the global trade uncertainties nor the tariff threats that both sides are trying to weather have managed to reduce the mutual tension that the EU and China have been experiencing for years. In fact, the meeting was supposed to take place last April, but Xi Jinping refused to travel to Brussels, so it will be the President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the President of the Council, António Costa, who will travel to the Chinese capital with a full delegation of EU officials. But they are doing so on a war footing. Von der Leyen recently accused China of flooding world markets with subsidized overproduction and using its dominant position over rare earths as a diplomatic and commercial weapon. That's why, at the end of 2024, the EU imposed tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles after determining that state subsidies gave Chinese manufacturers an unfair price advantage over their European competitors. Beijing responded with a 39% tariff on European cognac, targeting the exporting heartland of countries like France.
But while the EU legislates against this inequality, accuses China of "blackmail," and demands reciprocity from the Beijing authorities, the reality between member states is more complex and less homogeneous. Over the last decade, trade between the European Union and China has continued to grow. The EU is China's largest trading partner, while China is the EU's second largest. Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy are the main importers and exporters of goods to and from China. Others, such as Spain, Hungary, Slovakia, and Malta, are trying to increase Chinese investment in their territory.
The same complexity can be understood in the EU's official position on China, which it describes as an economic "rival," a necessary "partner" in multilateralism, and a "systemic rival" that promotes alternative governance models. This 2019 definition serves, at the very least, to portray the contradictions and the growing sense of threat that China's growing hegemony arouses in Brussels. It highlights how the power relations between the two blocs have been reversed over these four decades of trade.
In a Europe punished by the economic and financial crisis, awareness of the arrival of this Chinese power—which in 2016 gained control of the port of Piraeus, the most important in Greece, and in 2019 incorporated Italy and part of the Balkans into the Route of the Route project—is a source of friction. The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the EU's excessive dependence on China for strategic goods. The geopolitical confrontation heated up in 2021 when Brussels sanctioned Chinese officials for alleged human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region, and Beijing responded with its own sanctions against EU politicians and the halt of some bilateral exchanges. The EU's geopolitical rhetoric has hardened especially after what Brussels considers Beijing's tacit support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
At the end of 2022, a senior Brussels official admitted that "the litmus test of strategic autonomy would be decided in the EU's relationship with China and not just in how to reduce dependence on the US security umbrella." However, since those words, the internal contradictions within the European Union have grown even greater, both in the strategy to reduce the risk of trade dependence on China and in the fear of a confrontational escalation with the new Trump administration.
The reality is that Europe is caught in the struggle between the United States and China for global hegemony, and each side is repositioning itself in the new scenario. But while the EU seems to have opted for a relationship of vassalage in the face of Washington's challenge, Brussels is standing up to Beijing and calling for a "genuine rebalancing." This week's summit will probably only be part of a representation, but both China and the European Union are immersed in a mutual escalation that they need to reduce.
