Status: 13.10.2023, 20:38 PM
By: Finn Mayer-Kuckuk
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EU chief diplomat Josep Borrell. © Philipp von Ditfurth/dpa
EU chief diplomat Josep Borrell is finally catching up on his trip to China. His mission: to make it clear to his Chinese interlocutors that the EU and its members are not puppets of the US, but want to be taken seriously as geopolitical players.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell is in China until Saturday. He arrived in Shanghai on Thursday and made a series of appointments: he met EU companies to listen to their concerns and held discussions with academics at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies. In the coming days, he will have appointments in Beijing.
In view of the threat of trade conflicts between China and the EU, the trip is receiving a lot of attention. It had also been eagerly awaited: in April and July, it had been cancelled, once due to illness and once after cancellation by Beijing. So the mission was already off to a bad start.
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Numerous lines of conflict torn open
Sentiment between China and the EU is bad for several reasons. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has taken the initiative in several areas to advance her de-risking strategy.
- It is having tariffs on Chinese e-cars examined, which it assumes are offered below the production price.
- Together with the United States, it is considering tariffs on certain steel products.
- In general, she warns against dependencies on raw materials, for example, and sees democracy in the EU at risk from Chinese influence.
- Von der Leyen criticizes China for circumventing sanctions against Russia.
The planned tariffs in particular have the potential to trigger a backlash from China. Even in the trade conflict with the USA, China has not let any trade measures sit on its hands and has reacted with a roughly similar sanction in each case.
Borrell: EU is its own geopolitical player
In an interview with the South China Morning Post, Borrell set out some positions he wants to represent in China before departure.
- Europe takes China seriously, but China should also take the EU seriously as an independent player.
- Above all, this is about the insinuation often heard by China that Europe is only acting on the instructions of the USA. "Europe has no secret plan to sabotage China's rise," Borrell stresses. China should stop "looking at us through the lens of relations with others."
- The war in Ukraine has sharpened the EU's foreign policy profile, Borrell said. It is no longer just an economic power, but sees itself more as a geopolitical actor.
In fact, "European independence" is a key phrase in China's EU policy. It insinuates that Brussels and the member states are acting at the behest of Washington and have therefore shown themselves to be hostile to China in recent years. The implicit call to finally free oneself from the U.S. knout and "independently" turn back to China is also brought up again and again at top-level talks.
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China's fixation on the U.S.
This view may have something to do with the fact that China is generally very fixated on the United States as the dominant great power that it wants to overcome. The EU, as a militarily insignificant player, joins either the US or China in this simplistic worldview. In China, the assumption that Europe is just an appendage of the US is so widespread that it is hardly questioned.
Now Borrell explicitly opposes this way of thinking. From the point of view of the Commission in Brussels, Beijing is vastly underestimating how much Europe thinks about the world – and how much resentment there is in Europe towards the US.