Don’t Make a Rival out Of the Dragon: Rethinking the Eu-China Policy

As expressed in the EU-China 2020 Strategic Agenda for Cooperation adopted in 2013, the European Union and the People’s Republic of China are committed to a comprehensive strategic partnership. The new nature of Chinese foreign policy under the leadership of Xi Jinping has caused new problems in European-Chinese relationships. The rise of China to a position of global superpower, symbolized by the Belt and Road Initiative, has changed the conditions for EU-China relations and created a necessity for Europe to revise its approach or even to profoundly change the way it perceives relations with Beijing.The goal of this article is to discuss EU policy towards China between 2013 and 2019 in the context of these new conditions and the changing perception of China in Europe. The rethinking process on the side of the EU was symbolized by describing China as a systemic rival in the strategic outlook presented by the European Commission in March 2019. The main research question is: how did public debate in Europe around the term systemic rival, and the change in perception of China it caused, correspond with the actual state of EU-China relationships on the level of political practice? The hypothesis, that the commotion caused by the use of the term systemic rival created a distorted impression of the current state of EU-China relations will be tested by analyzing specific cases of the operationalization of EU policy such as investment screening frameworks, European industrial policy and the major political EU-China visits and summits in 2019.