Opinion | Small steps, not great leap forward key to future EU, China ties

Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement did not dominate the 19th EU-China summit that concluded last week in Brussels as expected. Some thought there would be a strongly worded declaration signalling the two sides’ shared a commitment and determination to co-lead on this major global governance issue.

The summit ended, instead, with a press release and a sober assessment by the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, that the EU was “happy to see that China is agreeing to our unhappiness about the American climate decision” and that the two sides would proceed with the implementation of the Paris agreement.

For the second consecutive year, an EU-China summit ended with no joint statement. Differences on trade issues may have narrowed, but insufficiently for the two sides to produce a document addressing both climate change and other aspects of their relationship. The conflict crystallises on China’s steel overproduction and the EU’s corresponding anti-dumping measures, but it is about more than steel.

In a speech that went on the offensive, EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström summarised Europe’s economic frustrations, calling for a bigger role for the market in China’s economy to “help reduce overcapacity and trade imbalances in sectors like steel, aluminium or solar panels”. She also linked to China’s unfair trade barriers the fact that “EU investment in China is at its lowest level in years while Chinese investment in the EU reaches record levels”.

Did the EU just deny China a symbolic acknowledgement the leadership role it is now seeking on climate change? Clearly, despite a changing international environment providing a positive momentum for co-leadership, there are more pressing issues to address from the European perspective. And there is certainly scepticism in Europe towards President Xi Jinping’s China trying to fill the vacuum left by an inward-looking America, especially as this consists – for now – of symbols and rhetoric.

In fact, rather than strategic convergence and co-leadership, a down-to-earth functionalist logic is at play in EU-China relations, as the area of international security cooperation shows. For more than a decade, the EU has complained that the strategic partnership with China was strategic in name only because of the lack of joint action on international crisis management. China’s response was to point to the size of trade between the two sides, arguably big enough to make the relationship strategic for both. Or, using an argument still put forward by Premier Li Keqiang last week in Brussels, the stability of the relationship in an uncertain world was evidence of its strategic nature.