Chinese Premier Li Qiang began a five-day trip to Germany and France on Sunday, arriving in Berlin just as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was visiting Beijing.
The optics of Li working to peel away vital U.S. allies as American influence fades under the Biden administration were unmistakable.
China’s state-run Global Times was not subtle about playing up those optics on Sunday:
This is Li’s first foreign trip since taking office in March to be the Chinese premier, with experts saying it shows that China attaches great importance to the bilateral ties with the two European countries and to the China-EU strategic ties. They noted that Li’s visit will bring more certainty for the China-Europe cooperation and will benefit the global economic recovery when the world is still in turbulence caused by the Ukraine crisis and when the US unilateralism and hegemony threaten the trend of multipolarization.
The Global Times hammered the notion of European powers looking for an off-ramp from American foreign policy so they can sign up for China’s model of amoral authoritarian hegemony:
The world is deeply impacted by two pairs of relations – the confrontation between Russia and the West over the Ukraine crisis, and the US-launched great power competition against China, experts said. Under the impacts of these two factors, the EU, especially its leading members, need to find possibility from cooperation with China to break the deadlock on the Ukraine crisis and restore peace and stability for the continent, and to deal with US’ bullying that aims at undermining EU’s economic environment and potential.
China also needs to make sure the EU keeps neutral on the issues that are China’s core interests, and to seek more cooperation with European countries, especially in the fields such as science and technologies, as well as economy and trade, to balance the pressure from the US, analysts noted.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry explicitly told the Germans to feel honored by Li’s presence during his first overseas trip as premier, because it “fully shows the importance China attaches to its relations with Germany,” and demonstrates Beijing’s eagerness to build a “super engine of cooperation between the two countries.”
The Global Times used its “Chinese expert” mouthpieces to tell the Germans to think long and hard about “global hot spot issues” like Ukraine and the “reconciliation wave in the Middle East,” by which China means the reconciliation it brokered between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The practical results of the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement have been underwhelming so far, but China touts the agreement as the greatest diplomatic achievement of the century, a sign that Beijing has supplanted Washington as the fulcrum of international negotiations.
“Especially amid the Ukraine crisis, Paris and Berlin find that neither has enough leverage to independently deal with Washington’s bullying and pressure, so France and Germany want to find a solution by deepening cooperation with China to jointly push the multi-polarization of the world order,” asserted China Institute of Fudan University scholar Song Luzheng.
Upon arriving in Berlin, Li said China is “ready to engage in frank and in-depth exchanges with the German side based on the principles of mutual respect, seeking common ground while reserving differences, and achieving mutual benefit and win-win outcomes.”
“During his stay in Germany, Li will meet with German President Steinmeier, chair the seventh China-Germany intergovernmental consultation together with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, attend the China-Germany Economic and Technical Cooperation Forum and a round table for Chinese and German entrepreneurs, meet with representatives from German industrial and business communities, and visit Germany companies in Bavaria state,” China’s state Xinhua news service reported.
China has been Germany’s biggest trading partner for the past seven years running, with a trade volume of about $319 billion in 2022 and a trade deficit of about $92 billion. Some German policymakers have expressed concerns about relying too heavily on China for trade, at the expense of Germany’s long-standing relationship with its Number Two partner, the United States.
The German opposition is also worried that left-wing Chancellor Olaf Scholz is selling too much of Germany’s infrastructure to China. In May, after months of political warfare, the German government overcame its eleventh-hour doubts and approved the sale of a major stake in a Hamburg container terminal to China’s Cosco shipping company.
Scholz pushed hard to close the deal despite critics who said Beijing was making progress on a plan to “bring infrastructure throughout Europe under its influence.”
On the other hand, Scholz announced a deal on Monday that would bring almost $33 billion in semiconductor investment from U.S. chipmaker Intel to the German city of Magdeburg. The deal was backed by some $10 billion in German state subsidies, a controversial detail in a time of tightening government budgets.
Scholz said the Intel deal was important for making Germany “one of the world’s major semiconductor production locations,” and because it would “avoid dangerous economic dependencies” on China. He also took the opportunity to caution China to “abide by international rules” and avoid the temptation to “forcefully change the status quo in the East and South China Seas.”
Scholz hastened to add that none of this was meant to irritate Beijing or suggest that Germany wants to back out of the lucrative Chinese market. He said he still saw a “need to work with China on global issues,” and promised Germany has “no interest in impeding China’s economic rise.”
France is a bit less friendly with China at the moment. The French are pressuring the European Union to take steps against unfair Chinese trade practices in export markets such as electric vehicles (EVs), and possibly even impose tariffs on Chinese EV exports.
The French want anti-dumping protection because they fear China’s state-supported automakers, with their endless supply of cheap labor, could drown European automakers with a flood of inexpensive EVs. France and other European countries have similar concerns about Chinese medical devices.
“We must not repeat in the electric car market the mistakes we made with photovoltaics, where we created a dependency on Chinese industry and made its manufacturers prosper,” French President Emmanuel Macron said last month.