Opinion | The EU must see the threat that Xi Jinping’s China poses to European values

Neither the European public nor European political and business leaders fully understand the threat presented by President Xi Jinping’s China. Although Xi is a dictator who is using cutting-edge technology in an effort to impose total control on Chinese society, Europeans regard China primarily as an important business partner.

The rush to embrace Xi is greater in Britain, which is in the process of separating itself from the EU, than in the EU itself. Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants to distance the country from the EU as much as possible and to build a free-market economy that is unconstrained by EU regulations.

He is unlikely to succeed, because the EU is prepared to take countermeasures against the type of deregulation that Johnson’s government seems to have in mind. But, in the meantime, Britain is eyeing China as a potential partner, in the hope of re-establishing the partnership that former chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne was building between 2010 and 2016.

The Trump administration, as distinct from US President Donald Trump personally, has done much better in managing its ties with China. It developed a bipartisan policy that declared China to be a strategic rival and put tech giant Huawei and several other Chinese companies on the so-called Entity List, which forbids US companies to trade with them without government permission.