Lanxin Xiang

Opinion | 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

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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

Lanxin Xiang

Published: 1:00am, 26 Apr 2023

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.