Flashpoints | Politics | East Asia

Europe’s Left and China: Beyond Campism and Atlanticism

The European left can make Europe’s China policy more socially intelligent. But leftists must not forget that Chinese society is more than the Chinese state.

The European left has never had one China. It has had several: China as the last great revolution still standing; China as a developmental state that appears to have escaped neoliberal decline; China as authoritarian capitalism; China as a climate and trade partner; China as a strategic counterweight to American primacy; and China as the negative image of what socialism becomes when the party-state devours society. These Chinas coexist, compete, and often appear in the same speech. The result is not a single left-wing China policy, but a field of interpretations in which empire, capitalism, sovereignty, class, development, and democracy are constantly rearranged.

That field now matters for Europe. The European Union’s 2019 strategic outlook described China at once as a cooperation partner, negotiating partner, economic competitor, and systemic rival. Six years later, this formula is harder to sustain without political imagination. Eurostat reported that in 2025 the EU exported 199.6 billion euros in goods to China, imported 559.4 billion euros’ worth, and ran a deficit of 359.8 billion euros. Meanwhile, the 2025 China-EU summit showed how crowded the agenda has become: market access, rare-earth dependencies, climate cooperation, Russia’s war against Ukraine, Taiwan, and the South China Sea now sit on the same diplomatic table. 

Public opinion has also shifted: Pew Research Center found in 2025 that people on the ideological left were more likely than those on the right to prioritize a close economic relationship with China. The left’s China debate is therefore not marginal. It is one of the places where Europe tests whether strategic autonomy is more than a slogan.

The political danger lies in false symmetry. Liberal hawks often reduce China to a security threat and mistake alignment with Washington for strategy. Campist leftists often reduce China to a counterweight and mistake opposition to Washington for analysis. Both flatten China; both turn Chinese society into an object of European argument. A better approach begins by distinguishing among the different meanings of left-wing sympathy, critique, and engagement with China.

Yet “the pro-China left” is a misleading category. Sympathy is not alignment; alignment is not dependence; contact is not capture. Conversely, opposition to war, sanctions, or American primacy does not automatically amount to democratic internationalism. The relevant question is more precise: under what conditions does criticism of U.S. power become uncritical accommodation of Chinese state power? And under what conditions can left-wing skepticism toward securitized China policy improve Europe’s judgment?

One influential grammar is anti-hegemonic, often couched in anti-imperialist language. It reads China less as a regime than as a geopolitical function: the main obstacle to a U.S.-led order. Campaigns such as No Cold War, peace movements critical of AUKUS and NATO expansion, and figures such as Yanis Varoufakis frame de-escalation with China as a precondition for global survival. In this register, China represents not utopia but leverage: proof that the Washington consensus was not destiny, that industrial policy can work, and that the Global South need not accept a permanent hierarchy designed in the North Atlantic. 

Similar motifs appear in statements by parts of the European parliamentary left. Helmut Scholz warned already in 2019 against “anti-China hysteria,” while the French National Assembly’s 2025 report by Sophia Chikirou called for abandoning the EU’s partner-competitor-rival triptych in favor of cooperation respectful of sovereignty. Chinese state media and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences-linked platforms have also highlighted Pablo Iglesias’ appeals for stronger China-EU ties and reduced dependence on the United States.

This current gets something important right. European China policy often dresses weakness as virtue: dependence on Chinese supply chains is denounced only after it has been built; deindustrialization is treated as Beijing’s fault rather than as a result of European policy choices; and human rights language is applied with striking selectivity. The left is right to ask who pays for de-risking, whether it becomes another name for militarized industrial policy, and how a Europe that cannot build enough batteries, grids, trains, affordable housing, or public digital infrastructure expects to bargain with a state that has made planning capacity a core instrument of power. It is also right to take China’s developmental record seriously. The World Bank’s estimate that nearly 800 million people in China were lifted out of poverty is not a propaganda footnote; it is a historical fact that any serious account of global inequality must explain.

But this is where the left’s strongest critique can become its weakest reflex. Admiration for state capacity becomes evasive when it loses interest in the state as domination. A democratic socialist analysis of China cannot stop at growth, poverty reduction, or multipolarity. It has to ask what happens to workers, lawyers, feminists, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hong Kong democrats, Taiwanese citizens, and Chinese Marxists who contest the party-state’s monopoly over political meaning. The U.N. human rights office’s Xinjiang assessment concluded that the scale of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities may constitute international crimes. U.N. human rights officials have also warned that Hong Kong’s expanded national security regime can criminalize conduct protected under international human rights law. These are not incidental liberal talking points. They concern the elementary socialist question of whether society can speak back to power.

A second grammar is democratic-internationalist. It begins from the same unease with U.S. primacy and European hypocrisy, but refuses to translate anti-imperialism into camp loyalty. Here China is neither a civilizational enemy nor a progressive surrogate. It is a powerful authoritarian-capitalist state whose cooperation is indispensable on climate, debt, trade, health, and war, and whose political model remains incompatible with democratic socialism. This position is often found among green-left, social-democratic, trade union, human rights, and China studies voices. Its difficulty is political rather than analytical: it lacks the emotional simplicity of both hawkish liberalism and campist anti-imperialism. It asks Europe to compete, cooperate, and criticize at the same time.

A third grammar is governmental and pragmatic. Once left parties enter office or coalition, China becomes less a symbol than a dossier: investment, ports, universities, electric vehicles, rare earths, sanctions, Russia, Taiwan, and industrial policy. The British government’s 2025........

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