EU-China agenda stalls under Donald Trump’s long shadow
Holding pattern could break next week as EU decides if China crossed red line in arming Russia, a move that would force Beijing to respond.
Five years ago, the newly minted EU trade commissioner Phil Hogan was fresh off the plane from his first overseas mission: a trip to Beijing.
The Irish official was thrashing out a long-negotiated investment deal that would be hastily concluded barely a year on, then frozen in perpetuity after a dispute over human rights sanctions a few months later.
Now, with a new European Commission team in place, none of its commissioners are talking about going to China. Frantic bursts of dialogue over the course of the summer and autumn have been replaced by silence.
Negotiations over a deal to end a long-running row over the EU’s electric vehicle tariffs have paused without delivering anything, while stiff retaliatory measures that Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao promised EU leaders would land early November – in their “dozens” – have not materialised. It is, in part, a measure of how times have changed.
There are few positive items on the EU-China agenda today, certainly not anything as constructive as a trade or investment pact. There was also a need for commission chief Ursula von der Leyen to get her college of commissioners confirmed, after a messy six months since the EU elections.
But in reality, a holding pattern was adopted as Brussels and Beijing await with trepidation the return of Donald Trump to the White House on January 20.
