EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell eyes October trip to China, but has not been assured he will meet absent Foreign Minister Qin Gang, sources say
- Borrell ‘tentatively’ agreed to the visit after a meeting with China’s foreign policy chief Wang Yi last week, according to a senior Brussels source
- He has twice had to postpone trips to China this year – first because he caught Covid and then because of Qin’s sudden unavailability
However, Brussels has not been given assurances that the meeting would be with Qin Gang, the foreign minister who has not been seen in public for three weeks, according to a senior EU source who spoke on condition of anonymity.
A second source said Qin’s name did not come up during Saturday’s meeting with Wang, who is head of the Communist Party’s Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission.
No detailed explanation was given by the Chinese side as to why the foreign minister was not available to host Borrell.
The aim of Borrell’s visit is to hold the annual “strategic dialogue”, a necessary precursor to the EU-China summit, which is supposed to happen before the end of the year.
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“Who is going to be the interlocutor obviously is for the Chinese to say. As long as this gentleman is the foreign minister of China, he is obviously our interlocutor, but it’s for them to say who is going to be on the other side of the table,” said a senior EU official, who was speaking on condition of anonymity.
Instead Wang, who holds a more senior rank in the Communist Party hierarchy, flew out in his place and met Borrell during the visit.
The foreign ministry has since then remained tight-lipped on Qin’s situation, and even scrubbed mentions of his ill-health from transcriptions of the June 11 press conference posted on its website.
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According to the Chinese foreign ministry website, Qin’s last recorded activities were on June 25, when he met Russian deputy foreign minister Andrey Rudenko in Beijing to discuss China-Russia relations.
Qin also held separate meetings that day with Vietnamese Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son and his Sri Lankan counterpart, Ali Sabry.
Borrell will brief the 27 foreign ministers from the EU member states about his discussions with Wang on Thursday during a meeting in Brussels.
“What was decided, in principle, was to have the strategic dialogue before the next summit. We don’t have a date for the next summit, but it’s safe to say that it will be after October, so October is a tentative date [for Borrell trip],” the EU source said.
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According to the Chinese foreign ministry’s account of the meeting in Indonesia, Wang told Borrell to “clarify the positioning of the strategic partnership between the two sides, and promote China-EU relations to move forward”.
The policy has caused division among the 27 member states. It proposed a tool that would screen EU companies’ investments in sensitive hi-tech sectors in China, to the consternation of some of the bloc’s free traders and others who worried the strategy was too close to policies being devised in Washington.
