Europeans building bridges with China amid chaos unleashed by Trump

In the exhibition hall at Unitree Robotics in Hangzhou, Friedrich Merz smiled and applauded the martial arts display by a platoon of humanoid warriors. But when a robot boxer advanced toward him, punching the air with its red-gloved fists, the German chancellor flinched, a look of alarm crossing his face as he appeared to realise the danger posed by an autonomous fighting machine.

It was also a moment that crystallised for Merz the power of China’s technology, according to a person familiar with his thinking. He saw it, too, as a sign of how far behind Germany has fallen and how European Union regulation holds back their efforts to catch up, the person said, asking not to be named discussing the chancellor’s private views.

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The trip, last month, has triggered a broader reckoning that is starting to settle in across Europe: maybe de-risking from China is just too big a task. Despite the threat of China’s companies, maybe Europe needs to reach a new settlement with Beijing.

At a time when President Donald Trump is hitting EU companies with US tariffs, questioning the security guarantees that have protected the continent for generations, and unleashing bedlam in energy markets, the idea of taking a hard line with China is becoming increasingly unpalatable for officials across the continent.

“European leaders are traveling to China with the hope of hedging political bets vis-a-vis the US,” said Agatha Kratz, a partner in Paris at Rhodium Group, an advisory firm.

A more reliable counterpart

They just don’t have the stomach for two trade wars at once, according to people familiar with the thinking in key capitals, and Trump isn’t giving them much choice about the first one. So time and energy that might have been devoted to working out how to reduce their dependence on Beijing is instead being spent dealing with crises triggered by the US, the officials said, asking not to be named discussing private conversations.

“That’s misguided given persistent challenges in our relations with China,” said Kratz.

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After a year of antagonism from the White House, some European officials are starting to think that China may even represent a more reliable counterpart, despite the threat to their countries’ prosperity.

Officials in the Trump administration acknowledge the EU’s shift to managing the risks posed by the White House, people familiar with the deliberations said, but largely they ridicule it.

Trade between the Europe and China has surged in the first two months of the year but the EU’s overall trade deficit of €359 billion ($412 billion) last year has become a source of acute concern in European capitals.

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Some officials in Brussels have been warning against any pivot toward Beijing and the threat to EU industries from what is seen by many as unfair competition. They argue that any shift is more about optics than real policy at this point and the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm which runs trade policy, has not altered its position.

“I don’t think the EU is pivoting because the harm to the EU economy is huge from China’s exports,” said Alicia Garcia Herrero, a senior fellow at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels.

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But the change in sentiment in European capitals can be seen with the spate of leaders who visited China just in the past six months. Government chiefs or heads of state from three of the euro region’s four major economies, and the UK too, have met senior counterparts in Beijing in that time, as have the premiers of Finland and Ireland.

Giorgia Meloni of Italy is the most notable EU leader who hasn’t shown up in Beijing. Since taking office in 2022, the Italian premier has been trying to distance herself from China after her predecessor-but-one had made Italy the only Group of Seven country to join China’s global infrastructure push, the Belt and Road Initiative. Nevertheless, Stellantis NV, the owner of Italian carmaker Fiat, is exploring deals with Chinese carmakers to support its struggling European operations, Bloomberg reported this month.

On the EU’s borders, other countries are already further down that path.

Tiny Montenegro awarded a €640 million highway contract to a consortium of Chinese companies last month, and Serbia recently bought supersonic missiles made by China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp, the first known purchase of such weapons by a European state. Serbia’s military also held its first joint exercise with the People’s Liberation Army in China last year.

But it was Merz’s visit that prompted a broader rethink.

In campaigning for last year’s election, the German chancellor had criticized China for abusing leverage over supply chains, threatening stability in the Taiwan Strait and supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine.

He started out in office pushing for a tougher line. But over time he’s come to realize how difficult that would be for Germany, and last month he took his country’s biggest-ever trade delegation to Beijing where he was treated to a lush dinner by President Xi Jinping.

“We should strengthen our relations with China and I, for one, am determined to do so,” the chancellor said at the end of the visit.

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That diplomatic reversal was met with some confusion in both Berlin and Brussels.

One German official said that US policy under Trump has become so erratic that the chancellor can no longer follow the frameworks established for his country’s foreign policy, as he sought to justify the abrupt shift to Merz’s conservative colleagues.

In the Belgian capital, where some policymakers had pinned their hopes on the chancellor’s initially hawkish stance, EU officials are worried that efforts to reduce Europe’s dependencies on critical minerals or to prevent Chinese firms having access to sensitive telecoms infrastructure will unravel. Germany’s new approach will also make it tougher to find common ground on the use of trade defense tools, like the Anti-Coercion Instrument, the next time Europe confronts a dispute with Beijing, according to people familiar with the deliberations.

Leaders themselves are aware that visiting Beijing one-by-one plays into China’s longstanding strategy of picking off individual countries to maximize leverage, people familiar with the discussions say. But they see few alternatives to directly engaging with Beijing.

For its part, China appears willing to throw breadcrumbs to EU members as part of public signaling, but there’s still been a dearth of tangible benefits, according to one European diplomat in Beijing. The bloc’s ambassador there has has been “frozen out” of meetings with ministries for some time, the South China Morning Post reported last month. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi this month welcomed the improved ties with Europe but urged the EU to do more to abandon “the attic of protectionism” and engage with his country’s vast market.

“The urgency to derisk from China remains, and even increases by the day,” said Kratz from Rhodium. “Europe has two problems. It needs to deal with both.”

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