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Finbarr Bermingham

A frenzied fortnight of EU policymaking on China kicked off on Tuesday, amid signs that big member states may be willing to take a tougher stance on trade despite huge pressure from Beijing.
Beijing’s commerce vice-minister, Ling Ji, was set to meet with new EU trade director Ditte Juul Jorgensen in Brussels and have talks with Chinese businesses in the Belgian capital before heading to forums in Berlin and Dusseldorf.
At the same time, EU diplomats began preparations for next week’s blockbuster summit, where the 27 members will decide on the future direction of the European Union’s China policy.
The debate has reached fever pitch. Threats continue to roll in from Beijing, which has pledged to counter various EU moves to reduce Chinese firms’ market access, while sources in Brussels are increasingly convinced that a trade war between the two sides is on the horizon.
While the European Commission is determined to defuse tension by ramping up engagement with China, expectations are low among some of those involved that Beijing is willing to give even an inch on long-standing EU demands to rein in its trade and industrial policies.
Instead, there is frustration that Chinese officials continue to ignore explanations from Brussels that its policies are pro-Europe – aimed at shoring up its own manufacturing resilience – rather than anti-China.
Among some officials, there is a fatalistic mood that Beijing will not come to the table until a bruising tit-for-tat trade battle begins.
For others, there is acceptance that regardless of what Europe does, China will retaliate forcefully anyway, therefore the bloc should move full-steam ahead with its plans before deindustrialisation takes root and there is nothing left to protect. It is commonly heard in Brussels these days that the cost of inaction due to paralysis is greater than that of actually taking action.
For everyone involved, though, there is consensus that nothing will meaningfully change in the EU’s China policy until Germany is onside. Diplomatic sources said that Berlin did not disagree with the diagnosis that a “China shock” to European industry was being caused by low-cost Chinese goods that were of increasingly high quality, paired with a devalued yuan and layers of state support.


Germany did not join France, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands and initially Spain in signing a paper last month that called for more robust action, even though sources said it was seen in Berlin as a “step in the right direction”. Madrid later withdrew its support.
But it is still unclear exactly which solution Berlin will land on. The commission is intensifying dialogue with its German counterparts to convince them of the need for new EU trade weapons and the more rapid deployment of the tools it already has.
Last week, EU trade chief Maros Sefcovic said the EU needed a specific instrument to force companies to diversify their suppliers and tackle overreliance on China.
“Either we fight back, or China will cripple parts of our industry. The EU must now use its trade policy instruments decisively and without hesitation,” Manfred Weber, the German leader of the conservative European People’s Party in the European Parliament, told Berlin tabloid Bild over the weekend.
“The time for naivety is over. We must defend European interests more clearly, more firmly and more consistently,” he said, adding that “we need even more of these protective measures”.
The forceful intervention from Weber – who helms the “sister party” to Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union of Germany – is seen as a sign that official thinking may also be changing in Berlin. EU lawmakers met to discuss China last week with Merz, who, according to Politico, “is now more pessimistic about Beijing than ever before”.
Back in Brussels, security-focused ambassadors at the Political and Security Committee received an intelligence briefing on China on Tuesday as they prepared for a meeting of foreign ministers on Monday.
The preparations will continue on Wednesday, with envoys on the bloc’s powerful Coreper II committee set to bless new sanctions on Chinese firms accused of helping Russia’s war machine, even as they temporarily pause restrictions on Chinese chipmaker Yangzhou Yangjie Electronics, which was sanctioned in the last round, so that it can fulfil existing orders to European car companies.
Elsewhere, French President Emmanuel Macron is reportedly pushing for a video conference between Group of 7 leaders and Beijing ahead of next week’s summit of the club of rich nations in Evian, France. Politico reported that he was pushing for a call to take place on Thursday, having previously failed to convince Chinese President Xi Jinping to attend in person. The summit is set to discuss global macroeconomic imbalances.

Bilateral tensions, meanwhile, continue to flare online, where every development is being scrutinised in forensic detail – a sign of how much is at stake over the coming weeks.
After a European Commission orientation debate on China policy on May 29, EU officials posted and then hastily deleted a short readout, replacing it with a corrected version that was missing the phrase “while communication channels remain open”. Sources indicated that this was a clerical error – the meeting notes were handwritten as no phones were permitted, and a missing comma in the original text could have suggested that the EU did not expect dialogue with China to continue, which was not the case.
Nonetheless, the correction was seized upon by a group of Chinese state media journalists working on the Substack newsletter Brussels Tea House, which posted an AI-generated image of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen cutting telecoms cables reaching towards China.
“The fact that such a symbolic and courteous phrase was removed after publication deserves attention. It suggests that China policy is becoming an increasingly sensitive subject within the European Commission itself,” the newsletter said.
On the same platform, a former long-time Chinese foreign ministry staff member quickly deleted a post after it started to attract online attention. The article suggested that Beijing was worried about the EU’s trade moves because they were legislative in nature and therefore difficult to negotiate away, unlike – say – US trade tariffs.
A cottage industry of EU-based analysis has sprung up in recent weeks too, as the bloc looks to move from admiring the challenges it faces from China to doing something about it.
An article in The Diplomat prompted significant debate in policy circles. The piece, co-authored by German China experts Nadine Godehardt and Maximilian Mayer, said that as Europe continued with its assertive trade and industrial plans, it should try to soften the blow through some positive agenda items too.
The authors advised that the bloc should go ahead with its tougher policies on China, but consider launching free trade agreement talks at the same time to manage the ensuing tensions.
“The European Commission lacks a sustained strategic engagement with China at the highest political level. Instead, Europe’s approach to Beijing is increasingly defined by ad hoc reactions,” they wrote, saying that it should “adjust its language and symbolism accordingly, not as a concession to Beijing, but as a prerequisite for making Europe’s de-risking strategy viable at all”.


While many policymakers in Brussels would reject the authors’ prescription as too accommodating of Beijing, the piece struck a nerve by questioning whether Europe can successfully de-risk without also offering China a credible vision of what a stable long-term relationship should look like. In doing so, the authors suggest, the EU may reduce the risk of a doom-spiral of retaliation.


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China

Diplomacy

Ahead of next week’s leaders’ summit, some are pushing for the bloc to end its ‘naivety’ and forcefully counter cheap imports


Ahead of next week’s leaders’ summit, some are pushing for the bloc to end its ‘naivety’ and forcefully counter cheap imports.


China debate reaches fever pitch in Brussels as EU’s crunch fortnight kicks off

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Ahead of next week’s leaders’ summit, some are pushing for the bloc to end its ‘naivety’ and forcefully counter cheap imports

Ahead of next week’s leaders’ summit, some are pushing for the bloc to end its ‘naivety’ and forcefully counter cheap imports