Europe’s self obsession nurtured its naivety about China for the wrong reasons. It’s time for a reality check
- Throughout the EU’s history, Europe’s leaders were more concerned with links between themselves than with the global economy, in particular Asia
- At the heart is the erroneous belief that the world economy rests on Europe, the US and Japan. The naivety was to dismiss China, Asia and Africa
The Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Europe tour is attracting ess media attention than usual, squeezed as it is between the long-awaited release of the Mueller Report in the United States, and the ever more bewildering twists of Britain’s exit from the European Union.
That does not detract from its importance, embracing meetings with Italian Prime Minister Guiseppe Conte, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the European Commission’s President Jean-Claude Juncker. It is vital in shaping China’s “long game”, parrying unilateral US pressure in Donald Trump’s trade war, and in defining what Beijing regards as its appropriate place in the global world order.
The media noise about Xi’s Europe trip might be all about Belt and Road (BRI) infrastructure business, but this exaggerates the importance of BRI, and diverts attention from the main purpose: to work with important global trade groupings to reaffirm the primacy of multilateral routes to tackle world problems.
A second purpose is to discretely deflect the unilateralist divide-and-rule pressure being exerted by Trump and his trade Rottweilers, who are due to land back in Beijing on Thursday to resume talks to resolve the trade war.
Let’s look at these issues in turn: first, the BRI, which is about so much more than a string of infrastructure projects intended to curry favour with a clutch of cash-strapped economies of strategic importance to China. The BRI remains a 100-year vision, not determined by a port here, or a railway there. It is intended to give shape and coherence to what China sees as its place in the world, many decades from now.