The EU’s chief diplomat has warned that China will “take geopolitical advantage” of a Russian defeat in Ukraine and that Brussels needs to respond to Beijing’s global ambitions.
Josep Borrell, the bloc’s high representative for foreign policy, has urged member states to find a “coherent strategy” to deal with China that responds to both Beijing’s rising nationalism and a “hardening of the US-China competition”.
“The China issue is much more complex than the Russia issue,” Borrell wrote in a private letter to EU foreign ministers seen by the Financial Times. “China’s ambition is clearly to build a new world order with China in its centre . . . A Russian defeat in Ukraine will not derail China’s trajectory. China will manage to take geopolitical advantage of it,” he added.
The letter was pitched as a starting point for two days of discussions between EU foreign ministers starting on Friday to draft a new policy towards Beijing which EU leaders are set to discuss next month.
The Stockholm discussions are expected to focus on adjusting the bloc’s current strategy on China with its three-pronged approach of “partner, competitor, rival” to give greater weight to the “rival” part, according to people familiar with the talks. This shift “follows from a careful analysis of what China is doing”, one EU diplomat said.
In his letter sent on Thursday, Borrell also emphasised the bloc’s willingness to “engage seriously” with Beijing over the war in Ukraine, despite its rhetorical support for Moscow. He said the EU “welcomes all genuinely positive moves coming from China aiming at finding a solution”.
The Chinese leadership has put forward peace proposals but has been criticised by the west for taking Moscow’s side and failing to engage with Kyiv. China president Xi Jinping eventually called his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy 14 months after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February last year, but that gesture was largely seen as an attempt at repairing strained relations with European capitals.
Borrell wrote in the letter that the EU should not seek to “block the rising power of emerging countries”, in a nod to reluctance among member states to embrace the US’s more hardline approach to China.
He also made a pitch for the EU’s “de-risking” strategy, which he portrayed as less risky than America’s decoupling from China. The strategy was first laid out by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen when she called for “new defensive tools” for sectors such as quantum computing and artificial intelligence.
Brussels should also factor in China’s influence when dealing with low-income countries, Borrell wrote, warning against expecting those nations “to take one side or the other”.
The majority of developing countries have been reluctant to endorse western sanctions against Russia and China has seized the opportunity to cast itself as a non-aggressive power that is neither starting wars nor pressing other countries to adopt economic restrictions on its rivals.
“The EU must be aware that many countries see the geopolitical influence of China as a counterweight to the west and therefore to Europe,” Borrell wrote. “They will seek to strengthen their own room for manoeuvre without picking sides.”