The Chinese foreign ministry did not comment on the matter.

Postponement would rob the EU of a chance to push Beijing into making good on its promise of April last year to give European companies equal treatment in China and put an end to a practice of forcing foreign companies to share sensitive data when operating in China.

While the coronavirus pandemic appeared to have passed its peak in China, a series of preparatory meetings in Beijing and visits to Brussels by senior Chinese officials, including leading trade negotiator Vice-Premier Liu He, have all been cancelled in recent weeks as a result of the health crisis.

That made a summit all but impossible to hold because little negotiation had been carried out to seal deals at the summit on areas from trade to green energy investments.

Coronavirus forces Europe to confront China dependency

“China has been paralysed. Everything is complicated by the coronavirus,” an EU official said.

While all 27 EU leaders and China’s President Xi Jinping were still set to meet in the German city of Leipzig in September, EU diplomats hoped to use the March meeting as a stepping stone to a breakthrough on trade in the autumn.

Brussels wanted to strike an investment agreement with Beijing at the summit. EU Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan said that to do so, negotiations would largely have to be completed in July, but that a lot of time had already been lost.

An EU official close to the talks said that the two sides had not started on a common official declaration for the March summit, something regarded as an essential step for progress.

In the past, such EU-China summits were seen mainly as “feel-good” gatherings to cement ties between two economies defending an open global economy based on multilateral rules.

But French President Emmanuel Macron has called for “an end to naivety” about Chinese power, and the EC, the EU’s executive, last year labelled China a “systemic rival”.

Many European governments have felt frustration at what they said was China’s failure to keep its promise to open up.

A second senior EU diplomat said China could try to use Leipzig as a “huge propaganda machine” to show close ties with the EU, the world’s biggest trade bloc, in contrast to China’s trade war with US President Donald Trump.