Zhao Huaipu

As the three major forces in the international system, China, the United States and the European Union will bring about multilateral effects on international pattern and then speed up its readjustment no matter what happens in any bilateral relationship among them. The trilateral relations among China, the U.S. and the EU are dynamic, full of cooperation and competition, and feature long-term, complex and asymmetric games. With the rise of China and the expansion of its influence, the U.S. and the EU constantly readjust their policies towards China and increasingly strengthen their dialogue and policy coordination against China, thus promoting the continuous evolution of the trilateral relations among China, the U.S. and the EU.

CHINA’S RISE FACILITATES THE FORMATION OF THE TRILATERAL RELATIONS AMONG CHINA, U.S. AND EU

China’s rise has become the primary factor affecting the readjustment of the international pattern since the end of the Cold War, particularly since the beginning of the 21st century. The U.S. and the EU as the major founders and leaders of the current international order are worried about China’s rise and its possible impact on the international order and their own interests. Therefore, they share common interests in maintaining a favourable international order and regard each other as a natural partner.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at a press conference on the Global Gateway Strategy. (Photo/IC Photo)

The U.S. and the EU have gradually strengthened their interaction on China question along with the continuous readjustment of their respective China policies. The U.S. and the EU have both made readjustment on their China policies in the 1990s. In 1995, the EU released its first China policy document,The Long-Term Policy on EU-China Relations, which took enhancing dialogue and cooperation with China as the long-term goal of its China policy. The most fundamental factor in EU’s China policy is the economic motivation, hoping to bring China into and bind it to the international mechanism through contact. China policy of the U.S. highlights the realistic power politics logic, which aims to influence and change China in line with the U.S. own interests. Therefore, the U.S. has taken multipl?e approaches to suppress China, such as strengthening the East Asian alliance system as well as the bilateral relations with East Asian countries, influencing and interfering with the process of East Asian cooperation and strengthening military deterrence, etc..

U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet Commander Harry Harris at the Shangri-La Dialogue 2015 in Singapore. (Photo/Xinhua)

The readjustment of their policies towards China by the U.S. and the EU has stimulated the rise of Chinarelated dialogue between the two sides. In the late summer of 2001, experts from some think tanks in the United States and Europe launched the transatlantic dialogue on China or East Asia, aiming to explore China’s future trend and its role in the world and predict the problems caused by the differences between the U.S. and the EU on China’s rise. In May 2005, the two sides built a strategic dialogue mechanism involving high-level decision-makers to deal with China’s rise, marking the upgrading of the level of the dialogue from track two to track one. Later, as a result of the shelving of the EU’s arms sales ban to China, especially the shifting of the attention of the U.S. and the EU to the situation in Iraq and the Iranian nuclear issue, the official strategic dialogue was relatively relaxed.

All in all, China’s rise gave birth to the trilateral relations among China, the U.S. and the EU, and aroused the strategic interaction between the U.S. and the EU to jointly deal with China, although with very limited early achievements. Both sides hope to integrate China into the current international system, yet the U.S. is more likely to view China’s rise from a geopolitical perspective and seek to contain China. As a contrast, the EU pursues a China policy centred on the strategy of engagement and partnership. However, the opening of the China-related dialogue between the U.S. and the EU is after all an important trend in the strategic relationship between the two sides after the Cold War, which has laid a foundation for both sides to strengthen their future interactions on China.

U.S. AND EU STRENGTHENING INTERACTIONS ON CHINA AFTER INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL CRISIS

The international financial crisis and the European debt crisis in 2008 have severely damaged the strength of the U.S. and the EU, and enhanced the readjustment of the international pattern toward the trend of declining West and prospering East. With the changing in the strength of China, the U.S. and the EU, the cognition of the U.S. and the EU on China’s rise is becoming more diverse and negative. The U.S. has been wantonly playing up the so-called “China threat”, while the EU also began to analyse the possible impact of China’s rise on Western interests from the perspectives of politics, economy, environment and development model.

In this context, both the U.S. and the EU have further readjusted their policies towards China. China policy of the U.S. becomes more targeted and offensive than ever before, while that of the EU is more bifacial. On one hand, the EU wants to get rid of the difficulties caused by the debt crisis through strengthening its cooperation with China. On the other hand, the deepening of strategic suspicions about China has resulted in more intention of containing and preventing China’s development. The rise of China’s strength after the international financial crisis has aroused more strategic vigilance in the U.S. and the EU, so both sides feel more urgent to respond together and strengthen coordination.

After years of silence, the U.S. and the EU began to increase the Chinarelated dialogues significantly since 2009, which have shown some new features. Firstly, with more extensive contents, the track two dialogues are obviously more in-depth and specific. Both sides stress that the dialogues should fully cover the questions in the U.S. and EU relations with China, including economy, trade and finance, military contacts and military technology transfer, domestic governance, human rights, among others. They both believe that they should build a framework for comprehensive and constructive interactions in dealing with China’s rise.

Secondly, there are increasing track 1.5 dialogues involving officials and think tank scholars from both sides, which are focused on East Asian security cooperation. In these dialogues, policy recommendations have been proposed on enhancing the EU’s attention to Asia Pacific security and strengthening its security role in the region in order to form synergy with the U.S. strategy, which reflects that the dialogues aim to support and promote the coordination between the U.S. “Asia-Pacific rebalancing strategy” and the EU’s Asia strategy.

Finally, while funding and participating in the track 1.5 dialogues, the high-level official interactions between the U.S. and the EU thrived again and were upgraded to the level of the U.S.-EU summits. The joint statement issued at the 2011 U.S.-EU autumn summit mentioned for the first time that strengthening cooperation on political, economic, security and human rights issues in the Asia-Pacific region was in the strategic interests of the U.S. and the EU; the U.S. and the EU plan to strengthen dialogue on Asia-Pacific issues and coordinate actions to show that the two sides have a lasting high-level commitment to the region. This shows that the China-related interactions between the U.S. and the EU are not only promoted by think tanks in a bottom-up way, but also a joint promotion in both top-down and bottom-up ways.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken with Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne at a meeting between foreign ministers of the Quad. (Photo/IC Photo)

In short, the U.S. and the EU have significantly strengthened their interactions on China since the outbreak of the international financial crisis, gradually forming a framework for multi-level interactions in which the track two and the track 1.5 dialogues are closely intertwined with and complementary to the official track one diplomacy, demonstrating a new trend of promoting from the top level downwards. The dialogues at all levels focus on more comprehensive and detailed issues, concentrating on the policy and cooperation space between the U.S. and the EU in specific problem areas. The policy recommendations put forward have an increasing impact on the official policy making of the U.S. and the EU and the coordination of their policies towards China.

NEW TRENDS IN TRILATERAL RELATIONS AMONG CHINA, U.S. AND EU AGAINST BACKDROP OF INTENSIFIED CHINA-U.S. GAME

In recent years, with the substantial improvement of China’s overall strength and influence, the anxiety of the U.S. and the EU towards China has further aggravated. As a result, they have made profound readjustments of their China policy. Since taking office, Biden has continued with the Trump administration’s China policy to a large extent, regarding China as the most severe competitor faced by the U.S.. The Biden administration continued to take a strong attitude towards China in economy, trade, science, technology and military. In particular, human rights and other ideological issues have been used to increase pressure on China. Internationally, the Biden administration attaches importance to repairing U.S.-EU relations and emphasizes the need to unite allies for pressing China.

With the intensification of the game between China and the U.S., the EU has also made a profound readjustment of its China policy. The 2019 EU strategic document on China positioned China as a comprehensive competitor with four identities, namely cooperation partner, negotiating partner, economic competitor and institutional competitor. After the new EU leadership took office, it continued its uncompromising stand towards China and strengthened its values-based diplomacy towards China. The EU even imposed sanctions on China for the so-called “human rights” issue in Xinjiang. It seems that China-EU relationship features both competition and cooperation in economy, seeking cooperation in global governance, tit-for-tat in politics and ideology, which is likely to be new normal of China-EU version of “cold politics and hot economy”.

The U.S. and the EU have further enhanced their interactions on China due to their profound readjustments of China policies. The recent years have witnessed more enthusiastic dialogues and policy discussions on tackling “China Challenge” at all levels between both sides which cover a wider range of contents. In March 2021, the Atlantic Council, an American think tank, published the report

The China Plan: A Transatlantic Blueprint for Strategic Competition, which put forward a clear strategic competition route and countermeasures against China. At the official level, the U.S. regards working with the EU in containing China as a necessary condition for the U.S. to effectively curb China, while the EU sees coordinating with the U.S. as a key way and measure for maintaining the Atlantic Alliance and promoting its own interest in Asia and in China. After Biden took office, the U.S. and the EU have had a stronger motive for China-related interactions, so they restarted the dialogue mechanism on “China issue” and have already held two high-level dialogues.

It is needless to say that the U.S. and the EU coordinate their China policy with each other deeper than ever before. If the previous interactions between both sides focused more on expert dialogues and policy suggestions as well as more official policy announcements and less practical actions, the China-related interactions between the U.S. and the EU nowadays have more substantive connotation. Both the U.S. and the EU in recent years have tightened their openness to China’s overseas mergers and acquisitions, strategic infrastructure and key technology fields. There have been a series of major policy changes in strengthening the review of China’s overseas investment and in arms sales and export control of dual-use products to China.

It is worth noting that in the context of “the rise of the East and the decline of the West” and the intensification of the game between China and the west, the U.S. and the EU are both worried about the growing maturity and confidence of the socialist system with Chinese characteristics. The Trump administration listed the “values challenge” as one of China’s three major challenges to the U.S., while Biden since taking power has put more emphasis on the values competition with China. The EU defines China as an “institutional opponent”. The human rights issue has become one of the important topics of China-related dialogues and policy coordination between the U.S. and the EU.

Summits of NATO, G7 and EU held consecutively in Brussels.(Photo/Xinhua)

The U.S. and EU are also strengthening their coordination and linkage against China in the field of military security and geo-strategy. NATO claims to turn to the Asia-Pacific region. The NATO 2030 Initiative issued at the end of 2020 proposed that NATO must think more seriously about how to deal with China and its military rise. The NATO Summit in June 2021 issued a communiqué, which proposed for the first time that China posed a systematic challenge to NATO. In addition, the U.S. and the EU have also coordinated against the connectivity in the Indo-Pacific region. The Biden administration plans to launch an Indo-Pacific economic framework, while the EU will implement the “global portal” plan. Both sides are likely to strengthen strategic coordination against the Belt and Road initiative in the fields of digital economy, technology, supply chain flexibility and infrastructure, among others.

However, the policy coordination between the U.S. and the EU toward China has got its limitation that cannot be overcome fundamentally. The different identities, interests and policy concerns, especially the structural contradiction between American hegemony and EU strategic autonomy all contribute to the limitation of the depth of policy coordination between the two sides. The United States emphasizes the security threat posed by China in East Asia and hopes that the EU and NATO will participate in its military deterrence against China. Having always regarded Russia as its major threat, the EU disagreed to NATO’s excessive involvement in Asian security affairs, and was hesitant to involve in the U.S. military deterrence against China. The EU’s China policy is still focused on China-EU economic and trade relations, and China’s sustained economic growth is still highly attractive to the EU. China has surpassed the U.S. and became the largest trading partner of the EU for the first time in 2020. Although China-EU economic and trade disputes have increased in recent years, both sides hope to respond to each other’s key demands through negotiations and eventually accomplish the negotiation of the China-EU Comprehensive Agreement on Investment.

(Photo/IC Photo)

Looking to the future, we should not underestimate the impact of the EU’s strategic autonomy and the resilience of China-EU relations on the trilateral relations among China, the U.S. and the EU. The EU will remain consistent with the U.S. in areas of overlapping interests and cooperate with the U.S. on China-related issues of common concerns based on the consideration of tackling the “China Challenge”. However, it will not give up strategic autonomy, nor will it completely cut off its relations with China. In a word, the U.S. and the EU will increase pressure on China in the future, yet the EU is not likely to completely turn to the U.S.. The U.S. and the EU will only form a limited tactical alliance to curb China instead of an overall strategic alliance against China.