U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns observed last week that “China’s silence on the existential issue of Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence is deafening. Its support to Russia is very troubling indeed.”
Burns is correct. Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to dominate Ukraine and the Baltics because he believes they belong to Russia. But by supporting Russia with vastly increased imports, now accounting for half of Russia’s lucrative oil exports, China is funding Russia’s war of aggression. This support underlines the hollow nature of the Chinese Communist Party’s claim that it views territorial integrity as a sacrosanct concern.
One key reason China is able to get away with its duplicity is that the European Union won’t hold it accountable. The EU made a big deal last week of new sanctions it imposed on a select few Chinese businesses that are helping Russia skirt sanctions. But the EU knows these sanctions are barely drips in what is a vast ocean. It could do far, far more to alter Beijing’s calculus on Ukraine.
China’s economy faces a range of systemic challenges and desperately needs new growth. Considering that the EU ran a $429 billion trade deficit with China in 2022 (the last year for which I could find complete figures), it has a great deal of untapped influence it could exercise. Indeed, the EU could force China to reduce its trade with Russia dramatically if it wanted. “Either that,” the EU could say, “or we’ll put tariffs on your exports and start buying from other low-cost exporters instead.” Yet, while the EU lectures the United States on the need to do more for Ukraine, with French President Emmanuel Macron painting the conflict as an existential issue for the EU, it won’t punish China for directly supporting that war!
We recently gained an excellent example of this tolerance for China’s aggression. It came via Chinese foreign policy chief Wang Yi’s attendance at the Munich Security Conference. Wang was asked by Angela Merkel’s former foreign policy guru why, if China was truly serious about standing up for territorial inviolability, it continued to engage in heavy trade with Russia. When Wang shamelessly skirted the question, interviewer Christoph Heusgen simply moved on. Beijing has learned that when dealing with EU challenges, it need only respond with deflection and new efforts to divide the political union. The Chinese see European complaints over Beijing’s support for Russia for what they are: hot air.
Yet the division point is also key. Because the EU requires all its members to agree when it comes to robust foreign policy action, China exploits the divided interests of each member to its own advantage. Some, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban, are simply bought off. Others, including Germany, are variously coopted or corralled with promised access or threatened restrictions for automobile exports. Indeed, Heusgen laughably evinced as much by begging Wang for reduced restrictions on German automakers. Prospective challenges from other EU powerhouses, such as France, are deferred via China’s direct investment and attached expectations of political caution. The result is that the EU is either unwilling or unable to produce any kind of serious policy response to what China is actually doing to Europe — which, again, is fueling a war that shreds the sacrosanct principle of the European project: peace and democratic sovereignty on the European continent. And this is entirely aside from other threat considerations, such as China’s endemic espionage and political interference in Europe.
The EU’s incapacity to confront China effectively proves two things: first, the impotence of Macron’s “strategic autonomy” narrative of a Europe that is able to effect its will in the world and, second, the reality that European foreign policy concerns can ultimately be bought off with trade.
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Some EU officials, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, have sought to improve things. But they have met many obstacles. Von der Leyen has had to deal with European Council President Charles Michel. While serving as Belgium’s prime minister between 2014 and 2019, Michel was a poster boy for European freeloading within NATO. Now Michel helps Chinese leader Xi Jinping to water down any EU action that would impose credible costs on China for its duplicity. A much-vaunted EU tool to prevent China from singling out specific EU member states from trade blackmail/retaliation has been repeatedly delayed, for example.
This shouldn’t mean that the U.S. ignores Ukraine’s plight in protest at the EU’s tolerance of China’s support for that war. Of course not. But the EU’s profound hypocrisy at least bears noting.