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Europe's recalibration of relations with China shows the EU-US divide
EU Council President Charles Michel's upcoming visit to China shows that energy-hungry Europe wants to secure economic ties with Beijing.

EU Council President Charles Michel's upcoming visit to China shows that energy-hungry Europe wants to secure economic ties with Beijing.

Fearing an economic downturn due to the conflict in Ukraine - and deepening tensions between Russia and the West - Europe's top leaders are reaching out to China, signaling a crack in US-led Western resolve against the Asian giant in growth.

Following German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's visit to China earlier this month, EU Council President Charles Michel will also go to Beijing to meet the country's top leader Xi Jinping on December 1.

Many European countries – from Germany to the Netherlands – reluctantly joined the US-led Western alliance against Russia over the conflict in Ukraine.

But as the Russian offensive continues, some capitals such as Berlin and Amsterdam feel growing economic pressure to reach out to China to ease their strained finances.

Experts believe that Michel's visit demonstrates a possible split in the Western camp to go against China in a unified way. Michel's visit comes after US President Joe Biden's three-hour meeting with Xi in Bali, Indonesia during the G20 summit.

"The US definitely wants to isolate Beijing, waiting for Europe to join Washington's anti-China alliance. But, as we are clearly seeing in the Ukraine conflict, Europe has paid the heaviest price for Washington's policy towards Russia," says Bulent Guven, a Turkish-German political scientist.

According to Guven, the energy-rich US is not facing any shortages of gas or oil, unlike its European partners, who are struggling to meet their demands, leading to public discontent.

The Netherlands has already lifted some sanctions against Russia to ease the pressure on its economy and has indicated that it will also extend to China.

"The Netherlands will not copy American measures one for one," Dutch Foreign Trade Minister Liesje Schreinemacher said in an interview this month, referring to Washington's export controls on China.

French leader Emmanuel Macron has also signaled he will visit China early in the new year in a bid to recalibrate Paris-Beijing ties, showing another crack in the anti-Beijing Western camp.

"I am convinced that China can play, for our part, a more important mediating role in the coming months, in particular to prevent a more powerful return of ground offensives at the beginning of February," Macron said, referring to the conflict in Ukraine.

Macron's statement is another indication of growing differences over the West's China policy.

The biggest loser

Among others, Germany appears to be the biggest loser in the Western camp. With gas supplies cut off from Russia - Germany's biggest supplier before the war in Ukraine - Berlin is facing an unprecedented energy crisis which has largely affected Europe's largest economy, pushing the country to the brink of a the financial friend.

According to experts, the German economy may already have entered a period of recession and some signs show that it will continue to shrink further next year.

As a result, Germany, hit by high energy prices, is desperate not only to secure gas supplies during the harsh winter months, but also to open alternative trade routes with larger economies such as China to improve its finances. her.

Under severe economic pressure, which has led to anti-government protests, Scholz was due to visit China and meet Xi, who marched to an unprecedented third term as the top leader of the Chinese Communist Party. But the visit was derided by many in the US and some other Western countries.

"Germany thinks that a US-centric China policy, which is similar to Washington's Russia policy, could cost Europe dearly, especially in economic terms," ??Guven told TRT World, referring to the need to Scholz to visit China with a large delegation.

Scholz's team included senior business executives from BASF, Volkswagen and Bayer, who have invested in the Asian giant.

"If China is changing, then our approach to China must change," the chancellor was quoted as saying before his visit to Beijing, signaling Germany's opposition to the US approach to the world's second-largest economy.

In September, in a sign of Germany's troubled gas supplies, Scholz unveiled a huge package to help German families "get through this winter". With his latest visit to China, the chancellor wants to keep German trade ties with China intact to save Berlin from an economic downturn, according to Guven.

Despite his efforts, things could turn ugly in Germany, experts say, as the country's major industrial players recently warned Berlin that measures against China would deeply damage the European country.

In an ominous sign of Germany's growing problems, Scholz's visit to China, which lasted just 11 hours, was met with much criticism inside and outside Germany.

He is the first Western leader to visit Beijing since the outbreak of the global pandemic. Reinhard Butikofer, a member of Germany's Green party, which is a coalition partner of Scholz, called it "the most debated visit to the country in the last 50 years".

Also, several opposition political parties in Berlin publicly rebuked the chancellor, labeling his meeting with Xi as appeasement for the new leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. In turn, Macron, one of the leading voices in the EU, offered Scholz to go together to China to show Beijing that Europe as a continent acts together.

But Scholz rejected Macron's proposal, pointing to another rift in the Western alliance over the direction of its China policy. Despite much opposition from his coalition partners and the US as well, Scholz also allowed China to take a critical stake in a Hamburg port terminal, showing his insistence on strengthening Beijing-Berlin ties.

"The chancellor is originally from Hamburg. "Despite opposition from six of his cabinet ministers, including the interior and finance ministers, he approved the Chinese offer to buy a 24.9 percent share of the terminal," Guven says, underscoring Berlin's internal wrangling over country policy. to China.

But some saw Scholz's move to accept the Chinese offer as a generous offer to Beijing ahead of his visit to China.

"It seems that Scholz, just before leaving for Beijing, is offering the Chinese government a gift," said Noah Barkin, an expert on EU-China relations at the Rhodium Group, a US think tank.

German dependence on China

Scholz needed to give such a "gift" to China because he wanted to secure the investment of the German automobile industry in the Asian giant, according to experts.

"Some German companies have a great dependence on China. The German automobile industry has strong investments in China," says Guven, referring to companies such as Volkswagen, Mercedes Benz and BMW. Those ties played a critical role in Scholz's visit because he wants to protect their market share in China, he adds.

Germany's political ties with countries like China have been formulated under a policy coined Change through Trade, a term developed by former Chancellor Angela Merkel.

"The German economy is so intertwined with China that breaking this dependence by colliding in the short term could seriously damage the German economy and German companies. That's why he's so careful," says Guven.

As a result, unlike Russia-West ties, which have quickly deteriorated after the Ukraine conflict, Germany wants to realign its ties with China in an incremental process "spread over time," says Guven. Under pressure from the US, Europe as a whole aims to reorganize its trade ties with China, the analyst adds.

"In addition to cutting off energy and resource imports [from Russia], cutting off the market [from China] would be economic suicide," said Cui Hongjian, an expert at the China Institute of International Studies.

A senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British think tank, Raffaello Pantucci, also believes that Scholz's visit to China marks a return to "the approach that Europe had to China before".

"Many other people and countries are also returning to their previous positions regarding China," he told TRT World.

As European states continue to raise issues like Taiwan and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, they also aim to return their economic relations with China to pre-pandemic levels moving forward, according to Pantucci.

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