Europe and China Trade Negotiations: Can Brussels Face Reality? Part 1

The EU’s difficulties in negotiating with China go beyond tariffs and quotas — structural economic differences, political fragmentation within Europe and broader geopolitical tensions reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the China that Brussels is dealing with and the world in which it must compete.

The Strategic Disconnect: Europe’s China Blindspot

It’s not just a matter of tariffs or quotas; it’s a reflection of Europe’s short-term memory compared to China’s long-term strategy.

Brussels is still governed by a mainly technocratic and transactional approach, whereas Beijing conducts its negotiations with the kind of patience typical of a civilization that thinks in terms of decades and centuries rather than election cycles. The European Union’s habit of looking at China mostly from regulatory, economic and ideological points of view prevents it from seeing the fundamental causes of tension.

China is not merely another trading partner that can be forced to alter its economic model in accordance with European preferences. It is a major power which has its own historical experience, political system, economic model and strategic goals.

Europe needn’t approve of China’s political system, but if it wishes to negotiate effectively, then it must understand it.

EU leaders ought to remember what the former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani has so clearly stated: “China is the country which will drive the 21st century – that should be clear to all.”

The issue is that Brussels too frequently deals with China from a stance of assumed superiority. Although the argument that “China is not a democracy” is constantly employed in order to set Europe apart from Beijing, it fails to shed any light on how China actually thinks or why its policies have led to the economic results they have.

As Kishore Mahbubani has argued, it is difficult to transfer political values from one civilisation to another. In China, historical experience has given particular weight to political stability, social order, peace and material well-being,........

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