(CN) — Amid cooling relations and global conflict, European Union leaders met Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday in Beijing to press him on trade and his support for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
It was the first face-to-face meeting between the two sides since the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the world in early 2020. Overall, the summit was chilly and no major breakthroughs were announced, as was expected.
Before the pandemic, such summits were annual events that underscored the importance of the relationship between the two powerhouses. China is second only to the United States in the volume of trade with the EU.
In a news conference, European Council President Charles Michel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said they urged Xi to use his influence to get Putin to stop waging war on Ukraine, and said the EU could no longer allow European businesses suffer from what they called unfair trading practices by China.
“We need to make our trade relationship more balanced,” Michel said, referring to the EU’s growing trade deficit with China even as trade soared following the pandemic.
For his part, Xi said he saw the EU as a “key partner in trade, a prioritized partner in technology cooperation, and a trustworthy partner in industrial and supply chain cooperation.”
“The economies of China and Europe highly complement each other,” he said in a statement. “Both sides should make more efforts to tighten the bonds of the China-EU community of shared interests through deeper and broader cooperation.”
Relations between the 27-member EU bloc and Beijing have grown tense in recent years as European leaders have become more wary of China’s growing power. The EU’s combative approach has largely followed Washington’s aggressive stance toward Beijing.
This wariness was put into sharp relief this week with Italy’s announcement it was pulling out of China’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative, a massive globe-spanning trade and infrastructure effort spearheaded by Xi. It is commonly called the “New Silk Road.”
In 2019, Italy joined the project in the hope of reaping a bonanza of trade and investment. But the move angered many Western allies who saw it as undermining NATO’s unity and it raised debates about whether China was buying access to critical infrastructure and businesses in Italy.
Italy’s addition to the project signaled a major shift because it is one of Europe’s biggest economies and the first, and only, G7 nation to buy into China’s scheme.
On Thursday, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said the project hadn’t been beneficial for Italy.
“I think we should maintain and improve trade and economic cooperation relations with China, but the Silk Road instrument has not given the expected results,” she said, as reported by ANSA, an Italian news agency.
As with much of Europe, Italy’s trade deficit with China soared even as it participated in the project. Still, some Italian local governments and companies will continue to work with China under the project’s terms.
Chinese officials were critical of Italy’s decision. A spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry said “China firmly opposes smearing that damages Belt and Road cooperation.”
While trade remains robust between the EU and China, European leaders and businesses complain about a growing trade deficit.
Last year, trade reached a record 857 billion euros ($925 billion) but Chinese imports into the EU grew 32% to reach 626 billion euros ($675 billion). For the EU, the deficit ballooned to nearly 400 billion euros ($431 billion) last year.
“We agreed that it is in our joint interest to have balanced trade relations,” von der Leyen said.
In September, von der Leyen targeted China’s trade practices in a State of the Union speech and announced an anti-dumping probe against China over unfairly helping its electric vehicle makers. Sales of Chinese electric cars are outpacing those of European rivals.
In that speech, she said Europe could not afford to repeat the mistake of not challenging China, as happened when the Asian giant took the lead in the solar panel market thanks to state subsidies.
On Thursday, she declined to comment on the anti-dumping probe.
Von der Leyen also is pushing the EU to become less reliant on China for raw materials that go into making digital technologies. She has accused China of hurting European companies by putting export restrictions on gallium and germanium, goods that are essential to making semiconductors and solar panels.
However, von der Leyen and Michel were careful to distinguish their policy of “de-risking” from China from Washington’s language about “de-coupling” from China.
“The EU does not intend to de-couple or to turn inward,” the EU said in a statement.
But the governing body said China needs to take “concrete action to improve market access and the investment environment for EU investors and exporters.”
The EU leaders said they also brought up their “deep concerns” about human rights violations in China. They called attention to “systemic human rights violations” in the Chinese regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, forced labor, the mistreatment of human rights defenders and minorities.
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.