China-EU relations: retrospect, inspiration and outlook

Next year will be the 50th anniversary of China-EU diplomatic relations. Considering the crossroads we are facing in today’s increasingly complicated international context, China and the EU,as two great powers, markets and civilisations, have the common responsibilities to draw experiences and lessons from their half-century of cooperation in order to further bilateral cooperation and jointly promote the transition of the world order moving towards an equal,inclusive and orderly system.

In the past half century, China-EU relations have also seen its ups and downs, but in the end the relationship is progressing in the direction of a peaceful, win-win cooperation. China and the EU, being mutually indispensable, have engaged deeply with each other and have greatly contributed to a mutual development process. Getting through difficult exploration in the early stage of its socialist construction, China has become the second largest world economy with more than 45 years of opening up and reform process in which the EU’s technology, market and experiences have had an important role. The EU, at the same time, as a unique and powerful actor in the world system arising from the ruins of the Second World War, has also benefitted significantly from the large Chinese market. China and the EU, by common efforts, have seen great leaps in their bilateral relationship with the gradual expansion of areas of cooperation, increasing mutual understanding and deepening partnership.

Multilaterally, China and the EU have jointly promoted international financial system reforms, shared efforts in fighting against piracy in Somalia, joined hands defending the Paris Climate Agreement and commonly advocated for the fulfillment of 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Economically, China and the EU have been highly integrated with each other; the EU has been China’s biggest trading partner for 15 consecutive years, and nowadays they are each other’s second-biggest trading partner. This close trade and investment connectivity not only has the bilateral implications in regard to the mutual economic, social and technical development, but also has global impacts on promoting open and inclusive globalisation. Culturally, China and the EU have also set different layers of exchange mechanisms which have greatly enhanced mutual understanding. In retrospect, well-developed China-EU bilateral relations have been set on three key pillars: The first is the strategic consensus that China and the EU has no geopolitical conflict; the second is the economic win-win cooperation, which is also the key internal driving forces of the relationship; the third is a kind of cultural “agree to disagree spirit” in dealing with their ideological differences. 

However, even with the sound and solid basis of bilateral cooperation, China-EU relations today are also facing unseen challenges mainly brought about by the unprecedented changes of the global power shift and world order transition. With the combined shocks of the US unilateral containment policy toward China, Covid-19 and the Ukrainian crisis, the EU increasingly sees the world, and therefore also China-EU relations, through a geopolitical lens which fundamentally reshapes the Union’s policy towards China. China has been considered more as a competitor, even a systemic rival, than a partner, largely weakening mutual strategic trust and putting the “no geopolitical conflict” consensus into question. Since 2019, in the name of strategic autonomy, the EU has produced unprecedented policy instruments to “derisk” from China, which has left the economic cooperation highly politicised and securitised, arousing great uncertainties among business communities. In practice, it has led to the rising of economic friction and declining trend of trade and investment cooperation. Even worse is the EU’s increasingly-expanded misperception of China as a “systemic rival” stretching from different political systems to the so-called “model competition” in different areas worldwide, which highly narrows the cooperation potential multilaterally and with third parties.

China and the EU are born to be different economically, politically and culturally, but their history of cooperation fully demonstrates that differences don’t necessarily mean competition or confrontation. Learning from the past 50 years of experiences and drawing valuable lessons could help provide clues to ways out of current challenges. Firstly, China and the EU should jointly rebuild the strategic trust which is the precondition and guarantee of stable and healthy China-EU relations as history shows. Secondly, win-win economic cooperation has been the strongest internal driving forces in keeping the cooperation sustainable and mutually beneficial; it is the high time for both sides to work together in managing tensions and frictions in order to avoid the economic lose-lose scenario, in which it is important for the EU to reevaluate its derisking strategy because in the end, it will lead to a decoupling that the EU itself opposes. Last but not least, it is the common task for the EU and China to seek the path towards “Unity in Diversity”; a common philosophy of both the EU and China. Here, I would like to quote our European colleague: “in the globalised world, the true threat is not conflicts but the lack of mutual respect and admiration of mutual differences”, which is totally in line with what China has always advocated for.

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.