Europe Has No Clear Goal on China Amid Trade Tensions

Europe has spent this month threatening China with a trade “kill switch”, rebuking it in parliament, sending its trade commissioner on a much-trumpeted trip to Beijing and announcing three new economic security instruments.

Taken together, the sequence has exposed a European Union that has no clear goal on China and no agreed hierarchy of priorities.

The bloc has also not reached agreement on what it wants from Beijing or what it would pay to secure those aims.

That uncertainty has created an opening for China, which has built its European policy around Europe’s lack of a settled position.

China’s method is to apply pressure, wait for Brussels to react and then offer small concessions on Beijing’s terms.

The result is that Europe may announce new measures without establishing how they fit into a broader strategy towards China.

European leaders present the new instruments as evidence that they remain in control.

Beijing, however, records each measure as information about Europe’s pain threshold.

China knows Europe’s price better than Brussels does, according to the source.

Berlin and Paris opened the latest sequence.

On October 5, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron called for a “kill switch” that would be able to cut a country’s access to the single market.

The proposal underlined the scale of the pressure Europe was prepared to discuss, but the wider sequence also showed the limits of acting without a shared objective.

With its priorities unsettled and its demands from Beijing still undefined, Europe risks leaving the threatened “kill switch” unused while China continues to respond on its own terms.

Source: South China Morning Post