Is Europe doing Beijing’s work for it? China’s invisible coercion strategy
Is Europe doing Beijing’s work for it? China’s invisible coercion strategy
WRITTEN BY MARIE HILIQUIN
15 July 2026
In late April 2026, the Seychelles and Madagascar denied overflight clearance for Taiwan’s presidential aircraft, citing their one-China policy commitments, while Mauritius neither confirmed prior authorisation nor issued a formal statement, effectively blocking the route. Together, these three Indian Ocean states prevented President Lai Ching-te from reaching Eswatini for a planned state visit. Yet another episode in the same affair attracted far less attention. When Taiwan attempted to reroute the flight via Europe, Germany and the Czech Republic also reportedly declined access, once again without any public statement. Taipei attributed the reversals to direct economic pressure from Beijing, a characterisation each government denied. German authorities’ official assessment was that allowing Lai aboard a Taiwanese state aircraft in Frankfurt would be “problematic”.
The episode cuts against the EU’s declared strategic posture. Since 2019, Brussels has formally positioned China as simultaneously a “partner, competitor, and systemic rival.” This tripartite formula has since been operationalised into a de-risking framework structured around three tracks: reducing strategic dependencies, protecting critical infrastructure, and maintaining selective cooperation. In 2024, a European Parliament study already asked whether the EU could deliver on this agenda, given the depth of its trade and technology exposure to China. This episode exposes a structural gap: de-risking was designed to manage China’s leverage over Europe, not to prevent the EU from extending that leverage on Beijing’s behalf. None of these tracks addresses how Chinese pressure can shape diplomatic outcomes or how deference becomes policy.
China’s toolkit for containment
China’s diplomatic toolkit operates on four interdependent levers to manage rival powers: economic conditionality, security capacity, diplomatic reach, and norm-setting. These interacting strategies range from actively pressuring an adversary (coercion) to an induced outcome where a power’s own behaviour restricts it in relation to another (self-containment). The levers’ force comes from their combination and from the fact that targeted governments rarely experience them as coercion at all.
China’s diplomatic strategy draws its strength from long-term prioritisation, central coordination, and tactical flexibility. Europe, by contrast, holds more economic leverage over a domestically fragile Beijing than it chooses to deploy. Yet rather than pressing that advantage, European governments have progressively narrowed their own diplomatic and economic policy space.
The foundational lever is economic conditionality, created by structuring market access, trade dependencies, and investment flows to make the cost of any political friction materially visible. Eswatini, the only African state to maintain official diplomatic relations with Taiwan, has been excluded from tariff-free access to the Chinese market. Since 2020, China remains a major trade partner for African countries but also an opportunity to diversify their economy. Indeed, Beijing engages in various sectors, from green and technological development to industrial capacities upgrades. Although this exclusion has limited economic impact and may even lead the country to receive more economic concessions from Taiwan, it signals to any government the long-term price of symbolic solidarity with Taipei. At the European scale, dependence on trade surpluses with key Chinese markets means that any EU government contemplating a visible gesture toward Taiwan must cautiously calculate its sectoral exposure.
The second lever, security capacity, provides the bottom-line guarantee of coercive credibility. In April 2026 China’s Ministry of Commerce added seven European defence contractors to its export control list, invoking national security concerns and non-proliferation obligations. The listings came within days of the Lai overflight episode — an oblique signal that could plausibly be read as a warning. Through its recent supply chain law, Beijing sent two messages: that it has less tolerance for the EU sanctions targeting Chinese firms, and that is closely monitoring EU activity. As the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported: “the entities (…) include four companies from the Czech Republic and German sensor and avionics firm Hensoldt AG. In 2024, then-CEO Thomas Mueller said in a call with analysts that Hensoldt had delivered two units of its TRML air defence radar to Taiwan.”
The third lever, diplomatic reach, converts China’s global diplomatic network of bilateral relationships into operational leverage, making coordinated pressure more central. In May 2026, the same week as the Trump-Xi summit, China convened EU diplomats in Beijing and framed the bilateral relationship as the responsible alternative to great power confrontation. The offer arrived with a call to “commit to the One-China Principle and the basic norms of international relations including non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs” at a moment of maximum European anxiety about American reliability.
The fourth lever, norm-setting, operates differently from the first three. While economic conditionality, security capacity, and diplomatic reach all work through visible pressure and can be resisted, norm-setting does not raise the cost of non-compliance but rather modifies the threshold of what counts as compliance in the first place. China’s Ambassador to Canada, Wang Di, was optimistic about warming ties between Ottawa and Beijing but warned that “official engagement” by parliamentarians with Taiwanese officials “will be hurtful”. In doing so, he is not issuing a threat but proposing a definition where contact with Taiwan isn’t neutral. In this same vein, the One-China principle is folded into the “basic norms of international relations”: framed not as a Chinese preference but as a universal standard. Therefore, the cost of non-compliance is therefore not imposed by Beijing but by the partner government’s own reading of what is allowed, and to what extent.
The efficiency of this strategy rests on a structural asymmetry where compliance looks like prudence; you cannot build a political response to something which has not been named. Through this sequenced deployment across multiple fronts, China maintains pressure everywhere at the once. Thanks to a decade of engagement through economic and diplomatic cooperation, norm absorption has also become easier, and boundaries are increasingly blurred.
Is Europe trading its strategic autonomy for economic comfort?
China’s diplomatic strategy draws its strength from long-term prioritisation, central coordination, and tactical flexibility. Europe, by contrast, holds more economic leverage over a domestically fragile Beijing than it chooses to deploy. This fragility is visible in slowing growth, a debt-ridden property sector, and shrinking fiscal space — all eroding the growth dividend that has long sustained Party legitimacy. Yet rather than pressing that advantage, European governments have progressively narrowed their own diplomatic and economic policy space. This quiet drift toward self-containment was never formally chosen by any member state, and none has moved to reverse it. Europe’s consistent struggle to convert its leverage into practice can be explained through three structural asymmetries.
The first asymmetry is time horizon. China masters the art of balancing importance, urgency, feasibility, and rationality across long cycles, institutionalised through deadlines of the Five-Year Plan, the 2035 modernisation target, and the 2049 centenary goal. European governments, by contrast, operate on electoral incentives and immediate economic exposure. When two Canadian Liberal MPs left Taiwan three days early on government advice, ahead of Prime Minister Carney’s Beijing meeting, no strategic calculation was visible beyond preserving a freshly negotiated trade truce. Self-containment, in other words, requires that the short-term cost of friction outweigh the long-term cost of deference.
Second, with member states having different strategic interests, the EU lacks a unified centre. Despite demonstrating a capacity for rapid institutional integration when threats are collectively recognised — such as NextGenerationEU after Covid-19 and coordinated sanctions and military support after the Russian invasion of Ukraine — that capacity has not extended to its China posture. The EU has no Taiwan policy and no coordinated member state position on diplomatic exposure. The preparedness frameworks for emerging threats that Brussels has built in recent years are designed for declared crises. Germany and the Czech Republic accordingly declined Lai’s transit without coordination or any EU-level discussion.
Third, Europe’s collective economic weight gives it real tools, but individual member states cannot deploy collective leverage unilaterally, and Brussels cannot use it without a member state consensus that does not exist. The result is a structural trap: the EU is large enough to matter to Beijing economically — its trade deficit with China reached €359.9 billion in 2025, more than doubling in value over the past decade — but too fragmented to act on that fact politically. China’s framework is designed to operate in this exact environment. Hungary illustrates this mechanism: it is the largest recipient of Chinese investment in the EU, host to BYD's European headquarters, and the first European stop on Wang Yi’s 2026 European tour. One member state’s alignment is enough to fracture the overall collective posture.
A test case already underway
Currently under negotiation, the 2028-2034 Multiannual Financial Framework is where the EU’s next chapter will be written. It includes a European Competitiveness Fund explicitly designed to reduce critical dependencies in sectors where China holds structural leverage: batteries, rare earths, and semiconductors. Its significance extends well beyond supply chain reorientation.
At a moment when American reliability under Trump is openly questioned and Chinese leverage operates across this full spectrum, Europe holds an asset neither Washington nor Beijing can easily replicate: predictability. Through its rules-based framework, the regulatory depth, and the institutional continuity, the European External Action Service — the EU’s diplomatic service — can propose and deploy those comparative advantages. For Global South states navigating between great power pressures, and for democratic partners watching the diplomatic space around Taiwan quietly shrinking, a stable and coherent European partner could become the most credible one. The Competitiveness Fund offers the instrument; the question is whether Europe moves fast enough to make the offer before the pattern of accommodation becomes the norm. China’s toolkit is designed for the long term. Europe’s window appears to be now.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent those of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Marie Hiliquin is a political geographer and a researcher at IRSEM Europe, the strategic research institute of the French Ministry of Armed Forces in Brussels. Her analysis focuses on China's foreign policy, the Belt and Road Initiative, and the geopolitics of infrastructure and power projection. Image Credit: BMEIA/ Michael Gruber