 |
| Image: Flickr User - Friends of Europe |
By Shannon Tiezzi
China will host the leaders of Germany and France less than two weeks after Xi’s visit to the U.K.
As Diplomat readers doubtless know, Chinese President Xi Jinping was in the United Kingdom last week, making him the first Chinese president to visit Britain in ten years. However, Xi’s trip to London (with a stopover in Manchester) was only the beginning of a flurry of Chinese diplomacy with European Union countries.
In the next week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel (October 29-30) and French President Francois Hollande (November 2-3) will visit China. King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands is already there, and held talks with Xi on Monday. In this context, Xi’s U.K. visit is part of a broader context: China’s growing relationship with Europe (and particularly the European Union) as a whole.
China’s relationship with the EU has changed drastically in since the 20th century. That change is most obvious on the economic front. “Just two decades ago, China and the EU traded almost nothing,” proclaims one fact sheet [PDF] from the European Commission. In 2014, total bilateral trade [PDF] was worth 466 billion euros ($514 billion). Today, the EU, if taken as a whole, is China’s largest trading partner, accounting for over 14 percent of China’s total global trade in 2014. China, meanwhile, is the EU’s second-largest trading partner (after the United States).
Given the rapid rate of growth in EU exports to China, Brussels sees even more potential in the relationship. EU exports to China were worth 48 billion euros ($53 billion) in 2004; by 2014 that number had skyrocketed to over 164 billion ($181 billion). European governments are particularly eager to enter China’s lucrative service sector, which still has tight restrictions on foreign investment, but which Chinese leaders have promised to open up as part of their plan for economic rebalancing.
The overall trend of economic engagement has received major boosts from China’s grand strategic visions. Most notably, the “One Belt, One Road” is ultimately a plan to link China and East Asia to Europe. That means Europe will be a strategic region for China as it seeks to turn the “belt and road” into action. Beijing has found Eastern and Central Europe more receptive to its offers of investment and infrastructure building, but Xi’s visit to London proves that Western Europe may be increasingly willing to get on board the Silk Road train.
Read the full story at The Diplomat