<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It was also a moment that crystallised for Merz the power of China\u2019s 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\u2019s private views.<\/p>\n
Read:
Mercedes mulls sharing SA plant with China\u2019s GWM
Greenland faces crunch week as Europe seeks to defuse Trump<\/p>\n
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\u2019s companies, maybe Europe needs to reach a new settlement with Beijing.<\/p>\n
At a time when President Donald Trump is hitting EU\u00a0companies with US tariffs, questioning the security guarantees that have protected the continent for generations, and unleashing bedlam\u00a0in energy markets, the idea of taking a hard line with China is becoming increasingly unpalatable for officials across the continent.<\/p>\n
\u201cEuropean leaders are traveling to China with the hope of hedging political bets vis-a-vis the US,\u201d\u00a0said Agatha Kratz, a partner in Paris at Rhodium Group, an advisory firm.<\/p>\n
A more reliable counterpart<\/p>\n
They just don\u2019t have the stomach for two trade wars at once, according to people familiar with the thinking in key capitals, and Trump isn\u2019t giving them much choice about the first one.\u00a0So time and energy that might have been devoted to working out how to reduce their\u00a0dependence on Beijing is instead being spent dealing with crises triggered by the US, the officials said, asking not to be named discussing private conversations.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s misguided given persistent challenges in our relations with China,\u201d said Kratz.<\/p>\n
ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n
CONTINUE READING BELOW<\/p>\n
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\u2019\u00a0prosperity.<\/p>\n
Officials in the Trump\u00a0administration acknowledge the EU\u2019s shift to managing the risks posed by the White House, people familiar with the deliberations said,\u00a0but largely they ridicule it.<\/p>\n
Trade between the Europe\u00a0and China has surged\u00a0in the first two months of the year but the EU\u2019s overall trade deficit of \u20ac359 billion ($412 billion) last year has become a source of acute concern in European capitals.<\/p>\n
Read: Trump says he\u2019ll cut off trade with Spain over air base use<\/p>\n
Some officials in Brussels have been warning against any pivot toward\u00a0Beijing and the threat to EU\u00a0industries 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\u2019s executive arm which runs trade policy, has not altered its position.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think the EU is pivoting because the harm to the EU economy is huge from China\u2019s exports,\u201d said Alicia Garcia Herrero, a senior fellow at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
ADVERTISEMENT:<\/p>\n
CONTINUE READING BELOW<\/p>\n
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\u2019s four major economies, and the UK too, have met senior counterparts in Beijing in that time, as have the premiers of Finland and Ireland.<\/p>\n
Giorgia Meloni of Italy is the most notable EU leader who hasn\u2019t 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\u2019s global infrastructure push, the Belt and Road Initiative.\u00a0Nevertheless, Stellantis NV, the owner of Italian\u00a0carmaker Fiat,\u00a0is exploring deals with Chinese carmakers to support its struggling European operations, Bloomberg reported this month.<\/p>\n
On the EU\u2019s borders, other countries are already further down that path.<\/p>\n
Tiny Montenegro awarded a \u20ac640 million\u00a0highway 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\u2019s military also held its first joint exercise with the People\u2019s Liberation Army in China last year.<\/p>\n
But it was Merz\u2019s visit that prompted a broader rethink.<\/p>\n
In campaigning for last year\u2019s election, the German chancellor had criticized China for abusing leverage over supply chains, threatening stability in the Taiwan Strait and supporting Russia\u2019s war against Ukraine.<\/p>\n
He started out in office pushing for a tougher line. But over time he\u2019s come to realize how difficult that would be for Germany, and last month he took his country\u2019s biggest-ever trade delegation to Beijing where he was treated to a lush dinner by President Xi Jinping.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe should strengthen our relations with China and I, for one, am determined to do so,\u201d the chancellor said at the end of the visit.<\/p>\n
ADVERTISEMENT:<\/p>\n
CONTINUE READING BELOW<\/p>\n
That diplomatic reversal was met with some confusion in both Berlin and Brussels.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s foreign policy, as he sought to justify the abrupt shift to Merz\u2019s\u00a0conservative colleagues.<\/p>\n
In the Belgian capital,\u00a0where some policymakers had pinned their hopes on the chancellor\u2019s initially hawkish stance,\u00a0EU officials are worried that efforts to reduce Europe\u2019s dependencies on critical minerals or to prevent Chinese firms having access to sensitive telecoms infrastructure will unravel. Germany\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Leaders themselves are aware that visiting Beijing one-by-one plays into China\u2019s longstanding strategy of picking off individual countries to maximize leverage, people familiar with the discussions say.\u00a0But they see few alternatives to directly engaging with Beijing.<\/p>\n
For its part, China appears willing to throw breadcrumbs to EU members as part of public signaling, but there\u2019s still been a dearth of tangible benefits, according to one European diplomat in Beijing. The bloc\u2019s ambassador there has has been \u201cfrozen out\u201d of meetings with ministries for some time, the South China Morning Post reported last month.\u00a0Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi this month welcomed the improved ties with Europe but urged the EU to do more to abandon \u201cthe attic of protectionism\u201d and engage with his country\u2019s vast market.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe urgency to derisk from China remains, and even increases by the day,\u201d said Kratz from Rhodium. \u201cEurope has two problems.\u00a0It needs to deal with both.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a9 2026 Bloomberg<\/p>\n
#Europeans #building #bridges #China #chaos #unleashed #Trump<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the exhibition hall at Unitree Robotics in Hangzhou, Friedrich Merz smiled and applauded the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[4761,1110,1030,173,4760,721,4762],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2019"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2019\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}