this week’s meeting in Paris when three of the most powerful EU leaders urged China’s President Xi Jinping to open his country’s protected home market underlined how important China has become as an EU partner — and competitor. The meeting between Mr Xi, French President Emmanuel Macron, German chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker came days after European leaders endorsed at a summit last week a “strategic outlook” on China. The document was a turning point in EU attitudes towards Beijing.
The EU’s language was forthright. Long a supposed “strategic partner”, China was for the first time identified as a “ systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance” and “an economic competitor in the pursuit of technological leadership”. European political leaders and companies alike are unhappy about restricted access to the Chinese market and, in their view, the aggressive and unfair practices of state-owned Chinese companies in China and abroad.
Never before has the EU faced managing relations with a country with which business ties are essential, but whose values and behaviour undermine the rules-based international order of which the EU sees itself as a pillar. Under Mr Xi, China has become more repressive at home — in its treatment of the Uighurs, for example — and more truculent abroad — in, say, its island-building in the South China Sea. EU leaders realise China is moving away from, not towards, European notions of the rule of law, freedom of speech, political pluralism, transparency and fair competition.