Xi’s world tour fails to distract from CCP’s tightening grip
From Zhongnanhai: This week in Chinese Politics
EU attempts to replicate successes of Biden-Xi summit
Low expectations for EU-China summit show limits of negotiations amid distrust.
The CCP leadership continued its post-Covid world tour, which aims to highlight how China is reengaging with the world after the pandemic and to entice foreign investors to remain in the country. Following General Secretary Xi Jinping’s meeting with Biden last month, the CCP met with leaders of Vietnam and the EU in tandem with a planned politburo meeting on economic work and fiscal policy. The EU-China summit, which aimed to reduce tensions over trade and economic disputes, occurred amid a worsening of relations between Beijing and Brussels, with Italy announcing its formal withdrawal from the CCP’s flagship Belt-Road Initiative at the same time as the publication of a major report commissioned by a member of the European parliament detailed how forced labor in Xinjiang enters European supply chains. Moreover, reports that Ukraine blew up a key railway link between Russia and China refocused attention on Beijing’s support for Moscow’s continuing hostilities.
Analysis: The EU’s labeling of China as a simultaneous partner and “systemic rival” underscores Brussel’s bipolar approach to Beijing, at once calling for a narrowing of the EU’s trade deficit with China while chastising the CCP’s tightening grip on power, human rights abuses, and continuing support for Russia. Chinese leaders aimed to use the summit to ease discussions of “derisking” that have come to dominate discourse on China in the US and Europe and have spurred moves to relocate manufacturing of key industries out of China and restrict Chinese products in sensitive technologies from entering the EU. Questions of forced labor and China’s support for Putin, however, dominated the summit and proved a thorny issue for the Chinese side which hoped to keep discussions to “apolitical” economics.
To keep the EU on the backfoot, Xi met the Belarusian president Aleksandr Lukashenko the week prior to the summit in an assurance to Russia that talks with the EU would not sway Beijing’s position in Europe. By contrast, and as a show of goodwill (and to try to slow calls in Europe to “derisk” from China), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that it would introduce unilateral visa-free travel for Europe’s five largest economies (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands). Some Chinese supporters of this proposal argued that China should unilaterally implement the EU investment accord as a way to undermine EU accusations of unfairness. However, this approach currently appears to have limited sway over the CCP leadership. In sum, both the EU and China appear to be walking a fine line with each other where they need mutual trade and investment but will continue to fundamentally disagree about almost everything else. Amid continuing distrust–despite China’s unilateral visa decision–and reports that the Chinese economy is not recovering from the pandemic as its leaders hoped, businesses in both the US and the EU will therefore need to closely monitor the economic and political risks of continued engagement with China.
