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Opened last Sunday with great fanfare by Chinese President Xi Jinping, the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) should end this Saturday, October 22 with his renewal for five years as General Secretary of the CPC. Official congratulatory messages from the European Union should be in order, but relations between the EU and China have deteriorated since Xi Jinping came to power a decade ago.
from our correspondent in Brussels,
In the space of two decades, the growth of Sino-European trade relations has been such that today China has become the EU’s largest trading partner, if we exclude the service sector. Consultations are organized each year and the 23ᵉ EU-China summit was held on April 1, by videoconference, Covid obliges.
But the tensions between the two parties are observed on the commercial, diplomatic and political fronts, as illustrated for example by the insistence of the Europeans who have been trying, without success, for six months toget China to denounce the war in Ukraine. We are a long way from the quasi-trade honeymoon that began in the 1990s. But today, what most symbolizes the change in the relationship between the two blocs is the fate of the Comprehensive Agreement on Investments between China and the European Union: this long and ambitious essentially commercial negotiation which is now in limbo awaiting ratification.
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Free trade Agreement
The first negotiations on a free trade agreement began at the start of the reign of Xi Jinping, who took over as head of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012. As its name suggests, the agreement covers industrial, financial, telecommunications for example. The give-and-take was that each opened up part of its protected areas to the other and the agreement was described by the European Commission as ” the most ambitious never concluded by China in the opening of its market to European companies. This agreement was negotiated for seven years and it was even signed in December 2020.
Repression
But the essay was untransformed, and political clouds gathered over the cradle of this stillborn deal. Everything has deteriorated with the fate reserved by Beijing for the Uyghur minority in the Xinjiang region. As soon as the agreement was signed, the European Parliament and several governments, including France, condemned the repression of the communist regime. On May 4, 2021, the global agreement with China is frozen because on that day the European Union officially denounces the treatment of Uyghurs, which leads in retaliation to Chinese sanctions against EU institutions and of their members.
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Conflicts are not lacking, since a dispute has also opposed Beijing and Brussels before the World Trade Organization. A real fundamental conflict on the very essence of the Chinese economy which the EU refuses to consider as a market economy, arguing that it remains a socialist-directed economy given the public aid granted to Chinese companies.
The Sino-European relationship is today that of those blocks competing with the EU which is acquiring internal instruments to monitor Chinese investments or which is setting up its global portal of 300 billion euros to counter China. and on his initiative called the “new silk roads”.