Chinese President Xi Jinping and French President Emmanuel Macron chat during a stroll through the Pine Garden in Guangzhou on April 7. Macron has alluded to to an unhealthy, even dangerous, trend in transatlantic relations. Photo: EPA-EFE/Xinhua
Opinion
Lanxin Xiang
Lanxin Xiang
Why the EU should never have tried to paint China as a ‘strategic rival’
The label, introduced in 2019, pleases no one, having failed to curry US favour or extort Chinese concessions. Instead, the EU should focus on maintaining strategic autonomy
French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to China exposed a fundamental dilemma in the European Union’s China strategy, between its much-publicised strategic autonomy and its concerns about being seen as a US vassal.
When EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen came to office in 2019, she declared that she wanted to lead a “geostrategic commission” to pursue “strategic autonomy”, implying an EU desire to pursue a foreign policy independent from the United States’.
But earlier that year, EU foreign policy bureaucrats had released a strategic outlook paper newly designating China as a “systemic rival”, combining that with the original concept of China as a partner and a competitor. The inherent contradiction is obvious.
The EU has never been able to properly articulate what “systemic rival” means. If the label was designed to please Washington and stress an ideological camaraderie, then the EU was barking up the wrong tree – then-president Donald Trump seemed to hold no truck with ideology and clearly disliked the EU. And if the label was designed to restrain China in the hope of bargaining for some benefit, it has failed miserably there too, because China loathes an ideological war.
In theory, the “systemic rival” strategy should have found better purchase with the post-Trump administration of Joe Biden, which seems obsessed with Cold War bloc politics.
But in reality, with Europe facing a hot war (in Ukraine), a brewing cold war (between the US and China) and a potential crisis in the Taiwan Strait that could disrupt world trade and the economy, the “systemic rival” strategy has become totally unsustainable. It contributes to neither regional stability nor world peace.
From Trump’s trade wars on both China and the EU, to Biden’s efforts to decouple from China and wage a new cold war, the EU has suffered, pushed into a corner where it faces difficult decisions between maintaining its strategic autonomy and hewing to a common transatlantic China policy – one that is increasingly headed for a major confrontation.
This is exactly what Macron pointed out following his Beijing trip. His allusion to an unhealthy, even dangerous, trend in transatlantic relations is nothing new, and the view perfectly matches the Gallic tradition in France. But the timing and clarity of his views were a major shock to many European politicians who have made new careers out of bashing China in recent years.
The bottom line is, will the EU sacrifice everything with China to jump on the American bandwagon? Will the EU mobilise its military might to help Taiwan fight off mainland forces in case of an attack? Does the EU really comprehend the grave danger of mishandling the Taiwan question to begin with?
Fortunately, while the EU stands with the US in opposing any unilateral change to the status quo in Taiwan, no one – not even the most devoted advocates of China as a “systemic rival” such as German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, and even von der Leyen – is willing to praise America’s China policy of decoupling and confrontation.
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French and EU leaders urge China to ‘bring Russia to its senses’ and stop invasion of Ukraine
French and EU leaders urge China to ‘bring Russia to its senses’ and stop invasion of Ukraine
The “systemic rival” approach pleases no one. In perhaps trying to offer something to an American president who does not care and another president who has pushed too far, the EU has dug itself a hole it does not know how to get out of.
For the EU to be great again, and to regain its voice on the world stage, it will have no choice but to firmly maintain its policy of strategic autonomy. Neither China nor the rest of the world would be able to take seriously an EU that becomes a vassal of the US, a development Macron has spoken sharply against.
And if Macron and Chinese President Xi Jinping manage to broker a ceasefire in Ukraine, the EU strategy of systemic rivalry will surely be consigned to the dust heap of history – a curio of EU incompetence in foreign policymaking.
Lanxin Xiang is founder of PN Associates Strategic Consultancy, and a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center
