The Wall Street Journal reported on Dec. 10 that an annual China-EU trade forum was quietly canceled last month. The report said the European organizers of the forum rejected Beijing’s request to bar critics of Chinese policy from attending.
The annual China-EU CEO and Former Senior Officials Dialogue, a closed-door event that includes about 40 CEOs, senior officials and academics from Europe and China, was to have been the fourth round of the dialogue and was scheduled to be held by video conference, the report said. This year’s Dialogue, originally the fourth, was scheduled to be held by videoconference. Organizers of the dialogue said the list of participants had not been controversial in previous years. But this year, the European organizer, Business Europe, rejected a request from the Chinese side to exclude certain participants. Business Europe includes national business federations in several European countries and regions and advocates for businesses of all sizes in those countries.
The report cited sources familiar with the matter as saying that the participants the Chinese side wanted to exclude were German Reinhard Butikofer, chairman of the European Parliament’s China Relations Group, who has publicly criticized Beijing’s policy on Hong Kong and the Uighurs, and Mikko Huotari, head of Germany’s Mercator Center for China Studies (MERICS).
The previously undisclosed move, according to the paper, highlights the increasing difficulty Europe has in balancing its commercial interests with the preservation of democratic values in the face of an increasingly aggressive global posture by the Chinese Communist Party. The U.S. and Australia, for their part, have taken a tougher stance against pressure from the Chinese Communist Party, sparking open disputes and trade wars.
The newspaper said the cancellation of the event showed Europe’s increasingly hardened stance toward Beijing, an orientation that became clear last year after the EU defined China as a “systemic adversary. Peter Sennekamp, spokesman for Enterprise Europe, said, “We have held this annual event very successfully for three years, whether in Brussels or in Beijing. But unfortunately this year’s dialogue had to be cancelled”. An official from the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, a Chinese co-organizer, said the event was intended to promote international economic research and trade cooperation, but some participants did not seem to meet the event’s principles or goals.
Chinese officials have sought to ban German politicians, academics and journalists from participating in the event in the past, but this is the first time senior members of the European Parliament, who are responsible for European-Chinese relations, have been targeted, sources said. The incident has also raised concerns because China is negotiating a China-EU investment agreement with the European Union, which is progressing more slowly than officials on both sides have said they hope to achieve.
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