The EU’s policy toward China is in the process of adjustment, sometimes swinging from side to side and contradicting itself. For example.
On March 25, Biden attended the EU summit (the first participation of a U.S. president since 2009) and called for stronger U.S.-EU cooperation in dealing with the CCP and Russia; however, German Chancellor Angela Merkel claimed that the EU could not share the same “attitude and policy” with Washington on the Chinese (communist) issue, and she stressed “This is absolutely clear”.
However, a little earlier, on March 22, the EU launched its first post-June 4 sanctions against the Chinese Communist regime, in coordination with the United States; on March 24, Blinken met with EC President Ursula von der Leyen and EU Chief Foreign Policy Representative Josep Borrell, and held successive meetings with the European Commission. Borrell), and issued a joint statement with Borrell after the meeting announcing the resumption of the U.S.-Europe-China dialogue.
From this contrasting and somewhat dramatic set of events, we can see that the EU’s policy toward China is at a crossroads.
On the one hand, facing the economic temptation and kidnapping of the CCP, the EU is either in love with it and cannot give up, or panic and dare not face it; on the other hand, the confrontation of values between the EU and the CCP, the CCP’s global ambition and war-wolf diplomacy make the EU obviously feel the strategic threat and tactical coercion of the CCP, and instinctively guard against and counteract it.
At this critical moment when the international situation is undergoing profound changes and the international strategic landscape is being reorganized, the EU urgently needs a strategic framework towards China that is clear rather than vague, forward-looking rather than old-fashioned, and internally coherent rather than contradictory.
After the first policy document on China, “Long-term Policy on China-EU Relations” was issued in 1995, the EU has issued seven more, namely, “A New EU Strategy for China” (1996), “Towards a Comprehensive Partnership with China” (1998), “EU Strategy for China – Implementation of the 1998 Document and Further Measures to Strengthen EU Policy” (2001), “Towards a Mature Partnership – Common Interests and Challenges in EU-China Relations” (2003), “EU-China: Closer Partners, Expanded Responsibilities” (2006), “Elements of a New EU Strategy for China” ( 2016), and the EU-China Strategic Outlook (2019).
In these documents, the EU has always seen the CCP as a “partner”, even if “China is not an easy partner”; it is only in 2019 that it starts to see China as a “However, this is only one of the three positions of the EU towards the CCP, the other two being “negotiating partner” and “economic competitor” (China The other two are “negotiating partner” and “economic competitor” (China is a negotiating partner, an economic competitor and a systemic rival), and the EU still does not give up its partner position and expectation of cooperation with the CCP. What is a “systemic rival”? The EU has not given a definite answer either.
One of the major reasons for the EU’s long-standing illusions about the CCP is the CCP’s united war against Europe. As early as the 1970s, Mao Zedong put forward the “Three Worlds Theory” and supported European integration and Europe becoming an independent pole in a multipolar world, with the fundamental aim of dividing the Western world (the US and Europe often disagree) and using Europe politically, economically, technologically and strategically, with deep intentions. In the post-Mao era, the EU was further trapped by the “reform and opening up” of the Chinese Communist Party (the European Union was established in 1993 when the Maastricht Treaty came into force). The EU opened up its markets, capital and technology to the CCP, contributing to the “rise of the CCP”.
For example, bilateral trade between China and Europe jumped from $55.68 billion in 1999 (according to the Chinese Communist Party’s customs statistics) to €586 billion in 2020 (according to Eurostat), with China overtaking the US as the EU’s largest trading partner for the first Time in 2020 (€555 billion in trade between Europe and the US). China’s long-term trade surplus with Europe is up to 181 billion euros in 2020. And bilateral trade between China and Europe is greatly weighted by Germany, with total Sino-German trade amounting to €212.1 billion in 2020 (with a German deficit of over €20 billion), making China Germany’s largest trading partner for the fifth consecutive year.
Another example is that, according to the Ministry of Commerce of the Communist Party of China, by the end of 2018, the number of EU-invested enterprises in China exceeded 16,000, with 47,224 projects established and a cumulative investment of USD 130.65 billion.
The close economic ties between China and Europe have made the EU, especially Germany, quite disillusioned with the CCP. A prominent manifestation of this is that in 2020, when China and the United States started a new Cold War, despite the opposition of the Trump administration and the Biden team, Angela Merkel insisted on using her position as Chancellor of the German EU Presidency to suppress opposition voices in the EU in the last moments of her administration and led the negotiations of the China-EU Investment Agreement with the CCP, and finally accepted Beijing‘s nebulous commitment to safeguard human rights and signed the China-EU Comprehensive Investment Agreement .
However, what the Chinese Communist Party has rewarded the EU and Germany with is economic bondage and threats. In December 2019, the German newspaper Handelsblatt reported that the Chinese ambassador to Germany, Wu Wei, had warned Germany that it would face problems importing cars from mainland China if huawei was discriminated against and excluded from telecom construction in Germany.
In other words, although the EU has contributed to the “rise of the Chinese Communist Party”, the Chinese Communist Party is not softening its grip and is a growing threat to the EU: on the economic and technological fronts, the Chinese Communist Party’s challenges are becoming more and more serious; on the international order, the Chinese Communist Party is becoming more and more destructive; on the international political and diplomatic fronts, the Chinese Communist Party is becoming more and more undisguised as a wolf. In terms of strategy, the confrontation between China and Europe is self-evident.
Even though it is such a grim reality, some forces within the EU are still unwilling to face it. The mainstream view of the EU on the “rise of the Chinese Communist Party” is still that it is a partner, a competitor and an institutional opponent of the EU in economic, technological and global issues.
This view stems from a January 2019 report on China by the Federation of German Industries. According to the report, Germany and Europe should abandon the “trade for change” policy towards China and not try to change the Chinese Communist Party. After more than 40 years of development, China has established its own political, economic and social “hybrid model” that combines elements of the state-owned economy and the market economy, and the Chinese Communist Party has become a rule-maker instead of a rule-follower. It has become the institutional opponent of Germany and Europe’s “open market economy.
The subtext seems to be that Western societies are expected to “coexist peacefully” with the Chinese Communist Party. In the 1950s, Khrushchev trafficked in the “three peace lines”, that is, the “peaceful transition”, “peaceful competition” and “peaceful coexistence” between the U.S.S.R., socialist countries and capitalist countries. “peaceful coexistence”, which soon went bankrupt. It is ridiculous that certain forces within the EU now seem to be picking up Khrushchev’s tooth and claw again.
This is very dangerous. in a speech to the Czech Senate on August 12, 2020, then U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo said, “A greater threat today is the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party and its coercive and controlling activities.” “What is happening now is not Cold War 2.0. resisting the challenge of the Chinese (Communist) threat is in some ways more difficult. This is because the CCP has become intertwined with our economy, our politics and our society in a way that the Soviet Union never was.”
Indeed, it is the EU’s own illusions about the CCP that give it the power to deter the EU. The real China-EU power comparison shows that the advantage is on the EU’s side. Luke Patey, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute of International Relations, writes that Beijing wants to bully European countries with economic threats, but Europe does not actually need the CCP as much as it thinks it does.
For example, some boast that more than 1.5 billion euros of goods move between EU countries and China every day. But the total daily trade between EU member states and their intra-EU and extra-EU partners amounts to nearly 30 billion euros per day. Another example is that in 2020, the EU achieved a total of 3,645,860 million euros in external trade, down 10.43% year-on-year, while total intra-EU trade was 5,620,362 million euros, down 7.37% year-on-year. Both in absolute terms and in terms of the shrinkage affected by the shock, intra-EU trade shows a stronger resilience than external trade.
Therefore, it is nonsense to say that Europe is economically dependent on the CPC; if we must say that it is dependent on each other, and the dependence of the CPC on the EU is far greater than the dependence of the EU on the CPC.
If the EU can “not be afraid of the floating clouds”, then it will not be so difficult to make a policy on China, and the crossroads will be crossed in one step. Hesitation, illusions and confusion will only cause more and more trouble for itself.
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