“In the last decades China has become an economic powerhouse and a key global player. It is now reducing its dependency on the world while increasing the world's dependency on itself”, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen said at the European Parliament plenary session on 18 April, speaking about EU-China relations. She called for a new EU approach that should focus on ‘de-risking, but not decoupling'. This follows her recent trip to Beijing where she discussed with President Xi the shared challenges that the EU and China need to work on together.
“We can – and we must – carve out our own distinct European approach that also leaves space for us to cooperate with other partners, too”, she stressed, noting the need to have ‘a shared and very clear-eyed picture of the risks and the opportunities in our engagement with China'.
She touched upon a number of factors that have become symptomatic of the fact that China was moving into an era of ‘security and control' - from the shows of military force in its neighbourhood, to Taiwan, to human rights violations in Xinjiang, to economic and trade coercion.
Against this background, President von der Leyen called for developing a new approach to China that would be tailored to Europe's economic and national security imperatives.
She outlined four key areas as crucial for this new approach:
- A more competitive, resilient economy and industry
- Bolder, better use of trade defence instruments
- Addressing leakage of emerging or sensitive tech through investment controls
- Cooperating with partners
“We do not want to cut economic, societal, political and scientific ties. We have many strong links and China is a vital trading partner – our trade represents some EUR 2.3 billion a day. Most of our trade in goods and services remains mutually beneficial”, she explained, underlining however that there was an urgent need to rebalance the EU-China relationship on the basis of ‘transparency, predictability and reciprocity'.
“What we want is China to respect the level playing field when it comes to access for our companies to the Chinese market, to respect transparency about subsidies, to respect the intellectual property”, she added. “The central part of our future China strategy must be economic de-risking.”
She concluded her speech by calling for ‘Europe to move to action' and demonstrate its collective will by jointly defining what success would look like in EU-China relations, and to show that unity makes Europe stronger.
Read more
- Speech by President von der Leyen on EU-China relations to the Mercator Institute for China Studies and the European Policy Centre
- Remarks by President von der Leyen at the press conference at the end of her visit to China
- Statement by President von der Leyen with President of the People's Republic of China Xi Jinping following the trilateral meeting
- Statement by President von der Leyen ahead of the trilateral meeting with President of the People's Republic of China Xi Jinping and French President Macron
