Xi Jinping is making his first visit to Europe in almost five years. The Chinese leader’s tour of France, Serbia and Hungary is calibrated to divide his rivals, to weaken the unity of Europe on trade and to advance China’s goal of a new world order.
That may be a lot to hope for from just five days from May 5-10, but his emissaries have prepared the ground well. Will this be what Xi likes to call a “win-win” moment?
President Emmanuel Macron will welcome him to Paris, seeking to build on what aides at the Elysée imagine to be a personal rapport. The two men will hold talks and then head to the Pyrenees for a change of scene.
The preliminary conversations took place between Macron’s diplomatic counsellor, Emmanuel Bonne, and Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, who has meanwhile emerged as the key interlocutor with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in talking down tensions with the West.
It may be a pious hope that the Western positions are coordinated, but there is no risk of mixed messaging from the Chinese side. Wang is a faithful echo of his master’s voice and he will have advised Xi on the sequence and timing of the European tour. Typically, the Chinese Foreign Ministry confirmed the schedule at the last minute, but this time they had shrewd tactical motives to delay the decision.
One element in Xi’s calculations is that a long-delayed party meeting to set economic priorities will take place in July (for connoisseurs, it will be the Third Plenum of the 20th Communist Party of China Central Committee.) His government has bold aims to boost growth with “new productive forces” in digital and green industries, talking of long-dated bond issuance, and the use of interest rates and bank reserve requirements as policy tools. Like the West, Xi is engaged in a balancing act between prosperity and geopolitics.
Xi has just hosted the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in a trade-focused visit that failed to produce either a breakthrough or a rupture as the Scholz delegation navigated around the incompatible aims of keeping in with Beijing and staying aligned with Western strategy.
The chancellor asked Xi to stop helping Russia in its war on Ukraine, a request that both men must have known was made merely for the sake of form. On Scholz’s return home, the Wall Street Journal reported that Germany may scale back plans to scrutinize Chinese investments. That was a double win for Xi.
At some point the Europeans will have to realize that Ukraine is a brilliant wedge issue for Chinese foreign policy. The US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken says China is not supplying (finished, manufactured) arms to Russia but the Kremlin is getting many of its military-linked parts from China — 90% of its microelectronics and 70% of its machine tools come from its “no limits” ally in Beijing. Trade between the two has soared, with Russian imports rising by close to 50% last year.
The NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg says that Europe must not repeat the mistake it made with Russia by relying on China as an economic partner. And Vladimir Putin himself is due to visit the People’s Republic later in May to underline their common hostility to the democracies.
In pursuit of its balancing act, China is keen to tug at the weakest links in the West. The Global Times, a strident state-run paper, has quoted a scholar as saying that “the Russia-Ukraine conflict has made Europe realize its high dependence on the US, and this transatlantic relationship has jeopardized Europe’s China policy.”
The words came from a certain Sun Keqin, a research fellow at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, which is a front for the Ministry of State Security. He added: “If Europe continues to follow the US to view China from a security and ideological perspective and takes a confrontational approach toward China, it will not avoid the fate of being a US vassal.”
Such warnings may be past their sell-by date because Macron has invited Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, to join the talks in Paris, a move that makes the meeting trilateral and was thus intensely displeasing to Beijing.
Von der Leyen is the new unspeakable figure in the Chinese media with whom there can be no pretense of friendship. She has said there may be “punitive” tariffs on the tide of low-cost Chinese electric vehicles into Europe and advocates “de-risking” supply chains.
The EU has launched a probe into Chinese procurement practices, and its competition inspectors recently raided the offices of Nuctech, a manufacturer of security equipment once headed by the son of Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao. Alleged spies for Beijing have been arrested in several EU countries. “The gloves are off — almost,” says a diplomat.
Xi will get a warmer buzz when he visits Belgrade on the 25th anniversary of a NATO airstrike which hit the Chinese embassy; the United States later said it was a mistake and apologized. In Hungary he will toast Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose views on Russia and on the EU can sound like a set of Chinese talking points.
Orbán’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, recently told the Global Times: “I think everyone knows deep in his or her heart that China offers a huge chance, but many of them are simply not brave enough to speak about it openly, because the expectation of the liberal mainstream is totally different.”
It is China’s fond expectation that the “liberal mainstream” will lose out to right-wing populists when European voters elect a new parliament in June. That alone would be a “win-win” for Xi’s spring campaign.
Michael Sheridan’s new biography of Xi Jinping, ‘The Red Emperor’, is to be published by Headline Books, part of the Hachette group, in August 2024. He is the author of ‘The Gate to China: A New History of the People’s Republic and Hong Kong’ (2021) and was Far East Correspondent and later Paris Correspondent of The Sunday Times.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
