Europe must reassess its relations with China, says EU chief
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has called on Europe to reassess its diplomatic and economic relations with China before a visit to Beijing next week with the French president, Emmanuel Macron.
Europe needed to have “a clear-eyed picture on what the risks are”, she said in a wide-ranging speech in Brussels, noting that EU-China relations had become “more distant and more difficult” in recent years as Chinamoved into “a new era of security and control” and ramped up “policies of disinformation and economic and trade coercion”.
Von der Leyen and Macron are expected to meet the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, in Beijing on Wednesday, after the French president invited her to join a trip in order to present a united European front.
In her speech to the European Policy Centre and the Mercator Institute for China Studies, which she noted had been put on Beijing’s sanctions list in 2021, Von der Leyen said the Chinese Communist party’s goals were “systemic change of the international order with China at its centre”, promoting an alternative vision “where individual rights are subordinated to national sovereignty” and “security and economy take prominence over political and civil rights”.
She also described China’s “grave human rights violations” in Xinjiang a cause for great concern, adding that the issue of human rights would be “another test for how – and how much – we can cooperate with China”.
Western countries and the UN have accused China of mass repression of the Uyghurs inXinjiang, where it is thought a million or possibly more have been sent to indoctrination camps, where inmates are said to be subjected to mass surveillance, torture, sexual assault and forced sterilisation.
But to preserve Europe’s
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