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EU-China summit: thorny issues to dominate as tense ties reflect ‘sober realism’
- Deeply against Beijing’s stances on Ukraine, trade and human rights, Brussels to seek ‘more on the political front’ before agreeing deals, source says
- First in-person summit since 2019 likely to find EU leaders urging Xi Jinping and Li Qiang to pressure Vladimir Putin to end war
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Finbarr Berminghamin Brussels
When EU and Chinese leaders last met for an in-person summit in April 2019, they signed a joint statement running to nearly 3,000 words.
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Filled with pledges that would be hard to imagine today, the document now reads like a relic from another era.
The sides vowed to cooperate on steel overcapacity and on 5G, “the basic backbone for future economic and social development”. In the South China Sea, they urged restraint “from actions likely to increase tensions”, and threw their joint weight behind the “full implementation of the Minsk agreements” on Ukraine.
Even on arguably the longest-standing bilateral grievance, both agreed that “all human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent”.
The statement was signed just weeks after the EU first designated China a “systemic rival”, giving Brussels leverage in negotiations, according to people involved in the talks. But four years on, it provides a perfect illustration of how far ties have slipped.
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Sources say Germany, the bloc’s biggest member, is on the verge of following 10 others in kicking Chinese companies like Huawei out of its 5G network. And on human rights, the EU sanctioned Chinese officials for alleged abuses in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region in 2021, helping scupper an investment pact the pair were prioritising in 2019.
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