“Out of clumsiness or hubris, Beijing is pushing the Europeans into the arms of the Americans”

VSt is a sign that does not deceive: the hottest supporter of European strategic autonomy is not to be found in Brussels or even in Paris, but in Beijing. Xi Jinping said it again on April 7 by phone to Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is not yet the most fierce advocate of this concept: the Chinese president hopes that Europe can “Exercise judgment in complete independence and achieve strategic autonomy in the true sense of the term”, according to the report of the interview published in Beijing.

Two days later, it was the turn of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to encourage President Macron’s diplomatic adviser, Emmanuel Bonne, on this blessed path. “China appreciates that France pleads for the strategic autonomy of the European Union (EU), he told her, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

Pendulum return

If the Chinese leaders insist so heavily on this necessary independence of Europe, it is because they see that it is in the process of tilting – and not in the direction which they had wanted. In the great clash between Chinese and American blocs that is emerging, China has done everything to keep Europe at a distance from the United States. Widely helped by Donald Trump, she even seemed to have succeeded. But the last few months have revealed a backlash: through clumsiness or hubris, Beijing is pushing the Europeans into the arms of the Americans.

Summary of previous episodes. Ten years ago, the EU was struggling with the sovereign debt crisis. Driven by German demands, the indebted countries had to resign themselves to selling family jewels: their infrastructure. In Beijing, the idea of ​​the “new silk roads” was born, formalized in 2013 by Xi Jinping, presented as a development strategy to link Asia to the rest of the world by a gigantic rail and maritime network. Fascinated by the speed of China’s rise, Europe saw it as an economic rather than a geopolitical project. The family jewels were put up for sale. Since 2013, China has acquired stakes in fourteen European ports.

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Then the Europeans became disillusioned. The “Silk Roads” appeared for what they were: a power project, and an authoritarian power. In 2019, the EU, stripped of its “Naivety”, declared to base its relation with China on a conceptual triptych: Beijing is a partner, but also a competitor and a “Systemic rival”. This did not prevent Italy, then ruled by the baroque couple Ligue-5-Etoiles, from signing that year with Xi the only memorandum of understanding of a G7 country endorsing the strategy of “roads of the silk ”. At the end of 2020, the tide really turned with the pandemic, the repression in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.

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