Blind Summit: Europe’s meeting with China

‘There is a tide in the affairs of men,’ as noted by Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, that forces us to recognize the ebb and flow when charting our future course of action.

On 24 July, the European Union’s two presidents, António Costa and Ursula von der Leyen, set out for Beijing to meet China’s leadership. Even though the summit marks the 50^th anniversary of EU-China diplomatic relations, the mood is far from festive. Preparations have not gone well. President Xi will not attend and is sending Premier Li Qiang. No significant agreements or breakthroughs are anticipated on the major issues, such as trade obstacles or diplomatic tensions over the war in Ukraine.

In this fraught context, the fact of the meeting itself is a positive. Holding it avoids a hiatus in the annual EU-China summit calendar and keeps the conversation going between two of the world’s three major economic blocs. But with the stakes so high, this sets the bar very low.

When Europe and China meet, at a moment of global flux, both sides should be able to speak politically: give their view on world events, share their strategic orientation and long-term objectives and communicate a sense of time and place. These dimensions are not always perceived through the lens of Brussels policymaking, which views the meetings as a series of discrete files, such as EV tariffs, solar panels or COP30. But regardless of the specific agenda items of the day, as Ties Dams underlines in his guest essay for BIG, such summits are also encounters between powers. Powers positioning themselves, looking for status and recognition, testing their interlocutor’s political will.

There is an uncomfortable asymmetry here, though. Whereas the CCP leadership has a vision for China – as an economic bloc, as a great power and even as civilization – the Europeans collectively have no clear game plan. Having relied on America’s lead since the 1970s (when ‘Nixon went to China’), they are currently rather disoriented. At June’s NATO summit in The Hague, Europe’s leaders displayed their security dependence on the US for all the world to see. The Chinese seem to have drawn their conclusions, whereas the Europeans seem oblivious to their strategic blind spot.

The subsequent meeting between China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi and the EU’s High Representative, Kaja Kallas, embodied this. In this pre-summit ‘Strategic Dialogue’, the former Estonian prime minister apparently did little to dispel the impression that she can only think about the Russian threat. When criticized for surreptitiously supporting the Russian war with Ukraine, an irritated Wang left diplomatic niceties and spoke candidly along the lines of ‘This is what Great Powers do. China cannot afford for Russia to lose the war in Ukraine, otherwise the US will divert its full focus to Beijing.’ The report in the South China Morning Post does not say how the EU’s ‘High Rep’ reacted to this lesson in strategic realism. The Wang-Kallas argument may well have been one reason why the Chinese hosts truncated the upcoming summit to one day in Beijing, skipping the second day in Hefei.

At the leaders’ level, preparations for the China summit were handicapped by the distraction of the transatlantic trade war. The European Council summit of 26 June would have been the perfect moment to hold a strategic debate on China among leaders. Even without formal decisions, it would have given Costa and Von der Leyen a mandate to speak to Li Qiang on behalf of Europe and not just ‘Brussels’. Tellingly, however, the summit session on ‘geo-economics’ was almost exclusively devoted to a briefing on the state of play in the trade war, which left little time to deal with the major geo-economic challenge posed by China. A similar lack of bandwidth may be the issue in Beijing, as the potential harm to the Chinese economy from Trump’s hefty tariffs outweighs any benefits that improved economic relations with Europe could bring.

Xi Jinping’s 2019 whistlestop tour of Europe seems a long time ago, when he visited France and Italy and a productive EU-China summit took place in Brussels in its wake. On that occasion, the Union rethought its approach and sought a more strategic footing. The March 2019 EU-China Strategic Outlook introduced a nuanced triple definition of China – as partner, competitor and systemic rival. Once seen as provocative, this triple definition is now viewed as a turning point in Europe’s ability to speak the language of power. While acknowledging fundamental differences and risks, it created space for pragmatic partnerships, such as those on climate or security, and for economic competition on a level playing field. It stood in contrast to previous more naïve EU language, but critically also to the US approach, which regards all interaction with China through the lens of ideological rivalry.

Six years on and several skipped summits later, the mood has shifted. The Covid-19 pandemic with its broken supply chains and the global scramble for vaccines and facemasks revealed a more assertive China. Under the leadership of Chancellor Merkel and President Macron, an ambitious EU-China trade deal was nevertheless agreed in late 2020 during an online summit with Xi (the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment). It never entered into force, as human rights concerns plus sanctions and Chinese countersanctions on MEPs, academics and think-tanks decreased the space for cooperation. Russia’s 2022 war against Ukraine, and China’s ‘friendship with no limits’, has placed the relationship on a more adversarial footing, shifting the balance away from partnership towards rivalry.

Following Trump’s re-entry into the White House, there were overtures towards improved EU-China relations. In Davos in late January, Von der Leyen spoke in terms of ‘we want to work together’ to do business with China. Ideological differences with China were downplayed, and momentarily the sentiment was: perhaps Europe could now assess its strategic interests and navigate its own course?

By April 2025 the threat of a global trade war loomed, to which China reacted with composure (‘we don’t care’), but which cornered the Europeans. The combination of US security dependence and transatlantic trade interdependence crippled the European response; it was unwilling and unable to use its leverage.

Squeezed within a volatile economic triangle defined by escalating Sino-American rivalry, within months the EU changed the timbre of the cooperative Davos tone to a more hawkish one at the G7. Referring to China’s tit-for-tat rare earth export restrictions, which in April dealt a heavy blow to Europe’s car industry, Von der Leyen warned of a ‘new China shock’ and unleashed a series of criticisms of its ‘pattern of dominance, dependency and blackmail’.

Whatever else this demonstrates, the rapid volte-face reveals a lack of an underlying sense of direction. As a consequence of a narrow focus on policy objectives, a single measure can upend a relationship. It is like changing your approach with every wind, something that great powers do not do. As Zhuangzi put it twenty-four centuries ago: ‘A man without a goal is like a boat without a rudder, drifting with the current and going nowhere.’

The downgraded summit with China forces a strategic rethink; Europe needs both an anchor and a rudder to navigate the choppy geopolitical seas ahead.