The EU–China Summit: Past and Present

We have a shared determination to be master in our own house. … Both of us a people of yesterday, a people of tomorrow.

Sir Christopher Soames, Beijing, 8 May 1975¹

Summits are not just about what is on the table for the negotiation, but who is there – the encounter of personalities and the powers they represent. Summits offer a platform for power recognition: the diplomatic performance is about who is asking for recognition, who grants it and what happens at the table during the dance of negotiation.

The upcoming EU–China Summit comes at a pivotal time for both actors. If the EU is to make the leap to strategic autonomy, it needs China to recognize it as a pole in a multipolar world. If China is to survive the American confrontation, it needs access to the European market. For China, America’s decline is an opportunity, for Europe, a risk – but for both it may have come too early. Is Europe ready to command great power recognition?

Will Presidents Costa and Von der Leyen be able to perform this dance with their counterparts? The new EU presidents would do well to look back to the beginning of the China–EU relationship, a fleet-footed quick-step performed at a banquet in Beijing by an auspicious protagonist, Sir Christopher Soames.

Beijing Banquet

On 4 May 1975, Soames, the EEC’s Vice President and Commissioner for External Relations, flew to Beijing. Four days later, at a lavish banquet Soames himself hosted for Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, he proposed the start of official diplomatic relations.

A large and loud man, Soames had modelled himself on his father-in-law, Winston Churchill, when he was appointed some years earlier as the UK’s Ambassador to Paris. His brief then was to convince President Charles De Gaulle to let Britain join the Community. Soames was well equipped to represent and encounter great powers in person. De Gaulle and he were cut from similar military cloth: Soames had been awarded the Croix de Guerre for heroism at El Alamein. He was able to meet the General head-on. One of Soames’ aids would reflect that ‘[Soames] was a political animal and ... when I say animal, I mean animal; ... he was like a huge bear.’¹

After Paris, the bear became the diplomatic face of a Community that encompassed not one, but two of the former European empires: the French and the British. Of this transformed Community, Soames would say in Beijing, ‘You behold a Europe which has recovered its footing and rediscovered its future... Once again the Europeans are becoming a force to be reckoned with in the world.’²

Sir Christopher did not go to Beijing to grant recognition, nor to ask for it. At the banquet he hosted, he first proposed and then magnanimously welcomed the Chinese decision to send an ambassador to Brussels. He encountered Zhou Enlai from a position of self-evident dominance – and a desire to stick it to Henry Kissinger.

Like other European politicians, Soames had been outraged by Kissinger’s 1973 Year of Europe speech, in which the German-born strategist had patronizingly stated that ‘The United States has global interests and responsibilities. Our European allies have regional interests.’³ Kissinger was right, of course. But Soames wanted to prove that the new Europe had global ambitions nonetheless. One way was to beat the Americans in establishing official diplomatic ties with China.

To his surprise, Soames found in Beijing a more sympathetic audience for the idea of an emerging European ‘third power’ than was to be found in Washington. During the banquet, Sir Christopher stated pointedly:

We do not believe that the world’s problems can or should be resolved only by the action of the two superpowers, and we believe it important that Europe should speak with a single voice in its dealing with them.⁴

The problem for Soames, however, was that the Chinese audience knew little about the European Economic Community. Is it ‘Europe’? Is it the old empires or a novel institution?

So Soames had ‘to tell Europe’s story well’, to echo a slogan now often used by Xi Jinping. In the official documents he was sure to speak only on behalf of ‘the Community’, which was then nine countries. But in his speeches, he spoke for ‘Europe’ – and he spoke of Europe as, in his words, the ‘common spiritual heritage of European civilization’.

He explained that the ‘European Community’ as a ‘newcomer to international society’ presented a means of rebuilding Europe’s standing on the world stage. Europe, like China, he argued, was now both young and old: it represented the longing for restoration of an ancient entity cast in novel institutions. The Chinese audience, Soames told them, must recognize the

similarities in history with the achievements of the Chinese people and but few others. ... Both of our societies have recently emerged from the shadows of civil wars and war between nations. ... And we both share the same interest in achieving the greatest possible independence in what is an increasingly interdependent world.⁵

For Europe, according to Soames, this independence was from the United States, as the PRC had won its independence from the USSR during the decades before. He did not mince his words or fear the chagrin of Washington. Debriefing the European Parliament upon returning, Soames emphasized above all

one point ... over which I found myself in complete agreement with our Chinese hosts. This was over the future of the Community. They consider it in the interests of everyone that Western Europe should be strong and united. They think it is less likely to be a potential battlefield if it is united. And they see it as having a vital role to play in the world.⁶

Soames knew that to be someone on the world stage, one has to win recognition – whether by charm or coercion – from the incumbent great powers. And to achieve recognition for Europe, he needed to recognize China as a great power.

Master in our own house

Soames’ lesson resonates today. The two powers meet again with the desire to be master in their own house. But now, the days of self-evident European dominance are long gone.

Of course, the summit agenda itself is more complicated than it was in 1975. Soames’ negotiations resulted in a trade agreement that covered little more than Chinese textiles. Today, the EU and China are at loggerheads over major issues. China wants the EU to reduce tariffs on electric vehicles; the EU wants to avoid becoming the dumping ground for Chinese overcapacity. They will surely find common ground in working together on fighting climate change. Airbus will sell planes to China, which may buy more French cognac. None of the likely deliverables is expected to change the balance of power.

This is what is on the menu, but every feast has a spectre. Looming over this Beijing banquet will be the unspoken issue of recognition. Xi’s snub of the EU’s invitation to Brussels, requiring the EU to make the trip to Beijing, was poignant. The June NATO Summit in the Hague signalled to the world that European leaders are undiminished in their willingness to kowtow to the US – even to an administration which has launched a war of words on the legitimacy of the European Union itself.

In the Strategic Dialogue which preceded the Summit, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi reportedly told the EU’s High Representative Kallas that China cannot afford a Russian loss in Ukraine for fear that the US would then shift its whole focus to Beijing.⁷ This shows that the PRC views the Russian war of aggression solely through a lens of its own great power competition with the US, in which Europe is an arena, not a player.

EU officials were struck by Wang’s willingness to put China’s existential concerns openly on the table. This can also be read as an opening for recognition. In earlier dialogues, Chinese representatives simply reiterated official stock phrases or tried to avoid the subject of Russia altogether. Here, Wang seemed to speak from a need for Europe to understand China’s position. This is more than we can currently say of the US.

The PRC has been promoting the idea of Europe as a pole in a multipolar world for a long time. Ever since 1963 when Mao said that ‘The six-nation Common Market, represented by De Gaulle, … [is] unhappy with the US. … Things are evolving and contradictions are revealing themselves.’⁸ In 2003, when the PRC published its first ever EU strategy; and again in 2014, when, under Xi’s authority, it stated that ‘China and the EU ... share [an] important strategic consensus on building a multi-polar world’.⁹ China has long anticipated US decline. Trump may personify the US on the brink of the collapse of its post-WWII leadership; nonetheless, the US is as big a threat to China as it ever was: American military power is still in place and its leadership unprecedently unpredictable.

China approaches the present with great anxiety. Its imminent victory is happening far too soon according to Party logic, more than two decades ahead of the scheduled Great Rejuvenation of 2049. After 2035, Xi stipulated, the work begins to ‘build China into a great modern socialist country that leads the world in terms of composite national strength and international influence by the middle of the century’.¹⁰ 2049 is still far off; right now, Beijing is not quite ready for the role and responsibilities, as Xi is in the midst of the biggest overhaul of the Chinese economic model since Deng heralded reform and opening up. He is frantically purging a military he cannot trust, while still in the process of building the architecture for diplomatic clout in a multipolar future that is now suddenly present.

China needs Europe to survive its victory. Access to the European market is a necessity for China to weather American tariff wars and complete its economic overhaul. Fifty years after establishing official relations with the EEC, the People’s Republic encounters a Union that is rearming itself, poised to finally cross its own Rubicon towards strategic autonomy. And in this transformation, the EU needs China too.

Most urgently, Europe needs Chinese critical raw materials to resuscitate its defence industry – a resource on which the PRC has imposed export restrictions in response to Trump’s tariff war. Will Xi lift the ban for European companies?

Probably not. This too is, at its core, a matter of recognition: in spite of decades of anticipating the prospect of a European third power, the present PRC primarily treats the EU as an instrument of US power, rather than representing a will of its own.

Soames’ lesson

It is not enough for the Union’s leaders to pursue the policies needed for strategic autonomy. For these policies to work, they need to convince Europe’s significant others that there is, at the table, a ‘Europe’. Costa and Von der Leyen need to personify this Europe even more than Soames. If there ever was a time for China to have an interest in – and opportunity for – helping ‘contradictions reveal themselves’, it is now. China cannot make Europe a master in its own house, but without China’s recognition of the EU, the Union cannot attain the power it needs for that mastery.