EU-China Summit: A relationship stuck in time

13 December 2023

When reading China’s account of Xi Jinping’s meeting with Charles Michel and Ursula von der Leyen during the EU-China Summit on 7-8 December, one cannot but feel that time froze or even went backwards and that none of the issues that the EU and China have faced in the past years, if not months, ever happened. Holding the first in-person summit since 2019 is an important achievement, and the EU has been able to express some important concerns to Xi Jinping directly; however, the words — especially from China — demonstrate Beijing still views the EU mostly as an economic partner.

EU – China economic complementarity

The part of the Chinese account that displays the highest degree of detachment from reality comes in paragraph four and opens with “there is a high degree of complementarity between the Chinese and EU economies”. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs probably meant that despite its best efforts, China remains an export-driven economy with an issue of oversupply, and the EU remains the largest trading block. But that is where the complementarity stops if it can even be called so.

Instead, the reality is a lack of complementarity and growing competition between the EU and China’s economies. The examples are countless. The recent anti-subsidy case launched by the European Commission against Chinese battery electric vehicles (BEV) perfectly exemplifies the lack of complementarity between the two economies. China’s BEV production is growing exponentially, threatening the automotive sector in Europe, which is itself an accomplice to the success of the Chinese companies. This presents a serious point of contention, as the European automotive industry is fundamental to the EU’s economy, accounting for 6.1 per cent of employment in the EU and more than 7 per cent of the EU’s GDP.

The lack of progress on key points for the EU is hardly surprising and, in all likelihood, it was not the intended scope of the summit nor does it take away from the importance of the summit itself.

The paragraph from the Chinese account proceeds with a list that elaborates China’s view of the EU as a “key partner for economic and trade cooperation, [..] preferred partner for key science and technology collaboration […] [and] trustworthy partner for industrial and supply chain cooperation” — words that might have rung more true during the last in-person summit in 2019 but feel misplaced in 2023. Much has happened since then: there has been a pandemic which led the Commission and EU member states to reconsider the resilience of their supply chains; China increasingly exercised economic coercion against the EU by hitting Lithuania, the EU, and its member states with strengthened foreign investments screening and export controls; the Commission published a toolkit to “mitigate foreign interference in research and innovation”, and recently also adopted a list of ten critical technologies, to mention a few.

In June, the European Commission and the High Representative jointly published the EU Economic Security Strategy. Although neither the strategy nor the measures in it officially target China, unofficially, they all pay special attention to China as a major concern for the EU’s economic security. The economic security strategy is thus in great dissonance with China’s outdated account, with the most notable anachronism not laying in the optimistic tone, but in the areas for collaboration selected, which, to different degrees, have all been the focus of the EU’s economic security approach.

A relationship based on respect for the international rules-based order

On the EU’s side, the readout reflects the underwhelming nature of the summit that matched already low expectations. As usual, grievances were expressed, and unilateral requests were made without much progress. The need for a more level economic playing field and the issue of the trade surplus are a leitmotif of EU-China summits. The former will simply not see much progress and the latter separately received a resounding dismissal by Wang Lutong, China’s foreign ministry director general. The consistent lack of validation of the EU’s concerns stands out even more loudly against China’s description of the EU as a key economic and trade partner.

The list of topics discussed during the summit included Russia’s war in Ukraine and related EU sanctions, the Middle East, climate and health, human rights, and growing tensions in the Taiwan Strait and the East and South China Seas. No progress was expected in any of these areas before the summit and no progress was achieved.

Remarkably, Michel’s words about the summit and the relationship between the EU and China were not less detached from reality than those in the Chinese document: “The EU and China have a shared interest in a stable and constructive relationship based on respect for the international rules-based order”. China speaks, also in the readout, of multipolarism and engaging more in the G20 and UN, but it does not mention the rules-based international order once. One thing that by now even the high ranks in the consilium should know is that China does not buy into the rules-based order. For Beijing, the rules-based order is American or Western-made and does not conform to China’s needs. In part, the term brings back memories of the 2019 summit, where in a Joint Statement, the EU and China agreed to “firmly support the rules-based multilateral trading system with the WTO at its core”. But even then, the rules-based framework was applied to a very narrow element: trade.

Partner or counterpart?

The mere fact that the first in-person summit between the EU and China since 2019 took place is an achievement and that this happened after the high-level dialogues restarted speaks to a normalisation of the diplomatic relationship — a positive and welcome development. To have a venue where the two actors can express their positions and concerns face-to-face has become more important amid growing tensions. The lack of progress on key points for the EU is hardly surprising and, in all likelihood, it was not the intended scope of the summit nor does it take away from the importance of the summit itself.

But the summit is somehow weakened by the detachment from reality of some of the phrases used to describe the relationship, which turn it into a showcasing of pre-prepared statements. For China, this is a regular modus operandi, and it is hardly surprising that Beijing would highlight as ongoing a very positive economic relationship that no longer exists between the two actors because that is what matters the most to Beijing. For the EU, and the consilium specifically, the decision to say that China respects the international rules-based order may echo a larger issue: the difficulty of reflecting the EU’s changed approach to China in its official language.

That difficulty goes beyond the summit and is well represented in the resilience of the three-pronged approach that describes China as a partner, competitor, and systemic rival. The three terms, adopted in 2019 and reconfirmed in the European Council Conclusions on 30 June, keep surviving despite the increasing difficulty of identifying any partnerships between the EU and China. Perhaps ‘counterpart’ would be a more fitting term than ‘partner’, and maybe it is time to bridge the gap between the reality of the relationship and the words we use to describe it.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Dr Francesca Ghiretti is a Senior Geoeconomics Analyst at the Adarga Research Institute. She obtained her PhD from the Centre for Grand Strategy, War Studies, King’s College London where her thesis received the Outstanding Thesis Award. Previously, Francesca worked as analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) where she covered economic security, EU-China relations, UK-China relations and the BRI. Image credit: © Council of the European Union, 2023.