Europe sees China as a rival. China sees Europe as a has-been

Yet China may be underestimating Europe’s willingness to push back
Nov 17th 2025

European leaders reserve some of their fiercest criticism for themselves. They are admirably blunt in diagnosing their political and economic problems, if sadly not as adept at fixing them. Yet if they are feeling especially masochistic, they should consider travelling to China. There they will find much of their own self-criticism broadcast back to them—but amplified and in even harsher tones.

Europeans endlessly debate how to avoid becoming trapped between America and China. For many in China that seems needless, because they already view Europe as an American pawn. “Europe is incapable of truly breaking free from America to become independent,” opined a scholar from Fudan University in a recent article. Europeans obsess over their competitiveness. In China many see that as laughable. “Europe simply lacks the strength to meet the challenges” in many technological domains, declared the Economic Daily, a Chinese newspaper. As for challenges to European unity, Eurocrats love to navel-gaze. In China critics go a step farther. “Whether the European Union can even survive until 2035 is a question,” Zhang Weiwei, a nationalist academic, said on television in September.

And these are just the public comments. In private, as Chaguan recently heard from a range of Chinese scholars, the opinions are often more scathing. Europe is a bit like an ageing concubine who cannot accept that she has been ditched by her American emperor, says one consultant. “Europe hates innovation,” says another. This disdain can sometimes seep into official affairs. A European business representative reports that on a recent visit to the Chinese foreign ministry he was greeted with a wolf-warrior-like berating—mainly, he surmised, for the sport of it.

The analysis that Europe is weak and divided is not entirely wrong. But the Chinese view tends towards an extreme caricature of Europe’s challenges, and this leads to two blind spots in China’s approach to Europe. The first is to assume that Europe largely follows America’s lead. Over the past few years many, though not all, Chinese analysts have applied this lens to the war in Ukraine. At its core they see the conflict as pitting America against Russia. From this perspective, Europe craves peace and stability, but it is brutish America that wants to prolong the war at little cost to itself in order to weaken Russia. There is barely any reflection on why most European leaders see the war in Ukraine as a direct threat.

Another example is the Dutch government’s decision to seize control of Nexperia, a Chinese-owned, Netherlands-headquartered chipmaker. The Dutch can scream until they are blue in the face that they acted of their own volition to counter risks to their economic security, but Chinese observers do not believe it. Surely, a small country acting so boldly must be doing America’s bidding.

The other blind spot is to believe that China somehow offers Europe a way out of its problems. Chinese scholars are well aware of Europe’s long pursuit of “strategic autonomy”. They reason that Europe, like any rational middle power, wants to find a balance between China and America. In recent weeks China’s commerce ministry has talked about restarting trade negotiations. It apparently has not given up on an investment pact that stalled in 2021 amid a row over China’s actions in Xinjiang, a region in the country’s north-west. At some level the Chinese can be forgiven for this thinking: they can always find some European interlocutors who flatter it by holding out the prospect of “win-win” co-operation.

Yet such pining for deals betrays insufficient recognition of the extent to which China’s economic model has become a major concern for Europe in its own right. In the past few years alone Germany’s trade relations with China have shifted from being basically in balance to running a gargantuan deficit on track to exceed $100bn this year. European companies that long profited from the Chinese market now see it as their fiercest competitor. And although it was a response to Donald Trump’s trade war, China’s export-control regime for rare earths was as disruptive to European companies as to American ones. It was a lesson for Europe in the dangers of dependence on China.

One-sided rivalry

Things are getting tetchier on the diplomatic front. In June the EU scuttled an economic dialogue with China because of a lack of progress on trade disputes. In October Germany’s foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, postponed a visit to Beijing when he was not offered the usual complement of high-level meetings. The Chinese, for their part, were upset that Mr Wadephul had used a speech in Japan to criticise China’s “increasingly aggressive” behaviour in Asian waters. And European officials in Beijing report that the Chinese foreign ministry has taken the unusual step of refusing demarches, or requests for formal diplomatic meetings. One European representative says that China is simply bored of Europe’s hectoring and feels able to ignore it.

Indeed, China sees little reason to worry about a souring of its relations with Europe. Policy officials in Beijing seem confident that they have already outmanoeuvred Mr Trump in the trade war, and think that dispatching Europe will be even easier. What’s more, China has much experience in cultivating warmer ties with individual European countries to neuter their cohesion as a bloc. These days, it has identified Hungary and, increasingly, Spain as two countries that are especially receptive to Chinese investment. Moreover, even when Europe acts, as with tariffs on Chinese evs, it remains constrained by its deep commitment to rules. Bureaucrats in Brussels do not strike fear into the hearts of the hard men in Beijing.

Is China at risk of miscalculating? So long as the Ukraine war continues and China remains a supporter of Russia’s pariah, Vladimir Putin, there are limited prospects for improvement in Europe’s relationship with China. Meanwhile, on trade, Europe’s views are fast evolving. A continued surge in Chinese exports could ultimately provoke Europe to take more measures—some possibly aggressive—to head off the threat. If that happens, it would be a demonstration of Europe’s stiffening backbone. But Beijing, convinced that America is calling the shots, would probably still miss what matters: Europe’s new anger is its own. ■