【按：本月堅離地報聯盟挑選的《The Diplomat》付費會員專區，希望介紹耶魯大學法學院研究員 Nicholas Bequelin 這篇分析中歐關係的文章。近日意大利退出「一帶一路」，反映中國與歐洲的矛盾及衝突日益明顯，尤其在烏克蘭議題上，中國的親俄立場，令歐洲對中國的不信任到達高點。】 Does China value its relationship with Europe? Given the significance of mutual economic ties – second only to those with the United States – the answer should be an unambiguous yes. But Beijing’s diplomacy toward the continent says otherwise. Despite numerous high-profile visits to China by European leaders, from France’s Emmanuel Macron to Germany’s Olaf Scholz, and various European tours by top Chinese officials such as Prime Minister Li Qiang and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the reality is that distrust toward China across European capitals is now at an all-time high. Far from easing tensions, the recent uptick in interactions and reciprocal visits in preparation for the first post-pandemic face-to-face summit between the EU and China, scheduled for December 7-8, has instead hardened attitudes on both sides. “China hopes that the European Union (EU) will adopt a more pragmatic and rational attitude in cooperation with China,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned France’s top diplomatic advisor on October 31. “We must recognize that there is an explicit element of rivalry in our relationship,” Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission president, told the annual conference of EU ambassadors on November 6. The only thing that both parties seem to agree on at the moment is that responsibility for this woeful state of affairs lies entirely with the other side. Talking Past Each Other Mutual recriminations about unfair trade practices, veiled protectionism, lack of reciprocity and negative characterizations are nothing new. Trading barbs publicly ahead of a high-level meeting can be part of a repertoire of negotiating strategies. After all, Europe’s most powerful leaders, such as Macron and Scholz, are proponents of finding ways to accommodate China’s rise as a global power, not of alienating it. And views about how to approach the China issue differ widely across the 27 member states, in large part due to their divergent economic, trade and industrial interests. Yet, the European Union as a whole is inexorably moving toward a much more defensive, and indeed somewhat protectionist stance under the banner of “de-risking” its relationship with China. In large part, this is Beijing’s own doing. The main driver of European alienation has been China’s puzzling failure to appreciate the existential character of the Ukraine issue in European mindsets, almost two years into the conflict. China’s pro-Russian position – refusing to condemn the invasion and laying the blame for the conflict squarely on the failure of the West to heed Russia’s security concerns – was frustrating to Europeans from the beginning but not incomprehensible against the larger background of the mounting geopolitical rivalry between Beijing and Washington. What was hard to comprehend, though, was China’s insistence that differences over Ukraine be left out of the agenda of China-EU discussions. “China wanted to set aside our differences on Ukraine, they didn’t want to talk about Ukraine,” Josep Borrell, the EU foreign affairs chief, recounted to the EU Parliament after the first virtual China-EU Summit held after the invasion in March 2022. “This was not exactly a dialogue, maybe a dialogue of the deaf… We could not talk about Ukraine a lot, and we did not agree on anything else.” Beijing’s failure to appreciate how primordial the Ukraine issue is to Europeans, who were suddenly facing the triple shock of the return of war on the continent, the reappearance of an aggressive military power at their back door, and escalating concerns about economic destabilization, caused unprecedented damage to China’s image in the eyes of European decision-makers. Arguing “neutrality” was one thing; insisting that the conflict shouldn’t play a role in how Europe approached China was another one. To make matters worse, Beijing’s approach to most economic and security issues brought up since – such as the ballooning trade deficit in favor of China, the vulnerability of European supply chains, or the deteriorating business environment for Europe’s firms operating in China – has been to delegitimize such concerns and attribute them to “incorrect views” or the result of Washington’s influence. A great deal of diplomacy that could have been devoted to serious negotiations over the past 18 months was instead spent on lecturing Europe about why characterizing China as a “strategic rival” was wrong and had to be dropped before any serious discussion could take place. Partner or Rival? In earlier decades, Beijing might have been able to successfully shrug off European sentiment, confident that the strength and tone of its bilateral relations with individual European countries was enough of an anchor to prevent the bloc from taking collective action that would run counter to Chinese interests. This time, though, a critical difference was that the European Union institutions were already midway through a slow but inexorably moving process of articulating the parameters of the EU approach to China. While Beijing had been identified since 2019 by the European Commission as a “partner, competitor and rival,” there was in fact very little agreement about what it meant in practice, and deep resistance to disrupting relations with a rapidly rising global power. Not anymore. Beijing’s tone-deaf diplomacy on Ukraine, excessive displays of chumminess with Vladimir Putin’s Russia and refusal to take European economic concerns seriously means that positions emerging through layers of consensus-building within Brussels institutions have become more and more defiant. Partisans of a harder line on China, such as European Commission President von der Leyen, have had plenty of elements to point to indicating that China was overtly pursuing objectives that were detrimental to Europe’s interests and security, such as providing diplomatic cover for Russia or being intransigent in its approach to trade and investments issues. European advocates of a softer line, meanwhile, couldn’t even rely on traditional allies, such as industrial lobby groups or China-based Chambers of Commerce, which were increasingly despondent as a result of President Xi Jinping’s turn away from market-friendly reforms. While in earlier eras there was always the prospect that a future leadership succession would bring a turn of policy, Xi’s ruler-for-life status brought such hopes to an end. Adding to European wariness, in late February 2023, China issued a 12-point “Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis” that reiterated that violations of the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity could be justified if neighboring countries had “reasonable security concerns” (合理安全关切; clumsily rendered as “legitimate security concerns” in the official English translation). While the primary purpose was to find a way to defend Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while shoring up China’s claims over its own periphery (especially Taiwan and the South China Sea), the vague framing, without any reference whatsoever to international law, raised concerns about China’s commitment to the bedrock principles that have underwritten collective security since 1945. That same month, Xi traveled to Moscow, in an unambiguous display of support to Putin, reinforcing the perception that Beijing was now seeing opposition to the West as the key driver of its geopolitical stance. The consequences were not long to come. “How China continues to interact with Putin’s war will be a determining factor for China-EU relations going forward,” von der Leyen declared in March in a landmark speech about the EU Commission’s approach to China. “Defining a European strategy towards China – defining what success looks like – must start with a sober assessment of our current relations and of China’s strategic intentions.” The main thrust of Europe’s approach in the coming years, she announced, would be “de-risking not decoupling” its relationship with China, so as to reduce dependencies and vulnerabilities that threaten Europe’s national security and economy. “The Chinese Communist Party’s clear goal,” she added, “is a systemic change of the international order with China at its center.” Two months later, the European Council (the body made of the heads of state or governments, and presided over by Charles Michel, that defines the EU’s overall political direction and priorities) issued equally stern “conclusions on China.” “The European Union will continue to reduce critical dependencies and vulnerabilities, including in its supply chains, and will de-risk and diversify where necessary and appropriate,” the document read. While stressing that “the European Union and China have a shared interest in pursuing constructive and stable relation” and that the EU “does not intend to decouple or to turn inwards,” the document read like a determined program to stand up to Beijing on every sensitive topic, including Ukraine, the lack of a “level playing field,” stability “in the East and South China Seas,” as well as human rights in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong. Divide and Rule No More For a long time, a hallmark of Beijing’s diplomacy in Europe had been its ability to skillfully play one country against the other, in order to prevent the emergence of a united European front. What Chinese diplomats failed to see in post-Russian invasion Europe was that Ukraine provided this unity; that EU decisions were the result of carefully negotiated consensuses, especially as they involved significant budgetary sacrifices from members; and that Europe’s military dependence on the United States and NATO did not mean that Washington was driving Europe’s collective policy toward China. Time and again, Beijing had opportunities to recalibrate its approach to diplomacy in Europe. Instead, it failed to see the centrality of the Ukraine question, overestimated its ability to influence intra-institutional dynamics within the EU organs, stuck to outdated tactics to influence European decision-makers, and stopped engaging meaningfully on economic and trade issues. China’s diplomats underestimated the optics of the Russian embrace and the sensitivity of trying to turn Global South sentiment against the West, and vainly hoped that tarring EU positions as being puppeteered by Washington would lead Brussels to back down. A June 2023 interview by the China’s ambassador to the EU, Fu Cong, is emblematic of how out of step with European realities Beijing’s diplomacy remains to this day. In a wide-ranging conversation, Fu challenged the EU’s right to raise national security issues (“For the EU to talk about national security, I don’t think that is even appropriate”); feigned not to be aware of decision-making processes within the European Union (“It seems that the Commission is ordering the member states to do things that the member states may not agree to. So that is the most confusing part of the EU as far as I’m concerned”); and pretended that Europe’s quest for greater “strategic autonomy” only meant decreasing dependence on the U.S., not on China (“We support the strategic autonomy of the EU… [concrete measures] need to be implemented and need to be reflected in the foreign policies of the EU countries”). Most tellingly, he never once mentioned Ukraine or Russia by name. In July, in perhaps the biggest blow to Beijing’s diplomacy in Europe so far, Beijing’s largest and historically most reliable European trade partner, Germany, published its first-ever “China strategy,” designed to guide the action of the federal government. While crafted in careful language – it was the result of compromises between coalition partners and different branches of the government – the document made clear Berlin’s growing disquiet: “For Germany, China remains a partner, competitor and systemic rival,” Foreign Minister Annabella Baerbok commented. “But the aspect of systemic rivalry has in recent years increasingly come to the fore.” The Gap Widens Over the last two months, the EU has sent one top off...