This rush to Beijing, in such a disorderly and thoughtless way, is exactly what should not be done. First it was the Australian Prime Minister. The French President and the Irish, Canadian and British Prime Ministers followed suit. Soon it will be the German Chancellor, before many others, because what is happening is clear.

In 2024, Europeans recorded a trade deficit of more than €300 billion with China. This did not improve last year and is in no way set to improve this year. The EU now has every reason to curb this Chinese onslaught as quickly as possible, but its member states fear retaliatory measures, as they all have a vital need to develop their exports to Beijing. Like Australia and Canada, each of them is therefore trying to get ahead of the others in what is becoming a fratricidal battle.

With the red carpet rolled out and big smiles all round, Xi Jinping is no longer hiding his delight. One could almost believe what is said about Europeans – ‘divided’, ‘naive’, ‘big losers of the changing era’ – but it was they who torpedoed the American-Russian plan to surrender Ukraine and who forced Trump to back down on Greenland. How, then, can we understand why they are united against Trump and Putin but so disunited against Xi that they spare him the trouble of having to divide and conquer?

The answer is that it is enough to coordinate to counter aggression, but that the Union would already have to be a political power in order to negotiate on equal terms with China. It was not easy to find weapons and money to support Ukraine, but it was not impossible to do so, even if it was too little, too late. It was not easy to say ‘no’ to Trump on Greenland, but even Viktor Orbán did not dare to say ‘yes’ to him, while in the face of Xi, the EU suffers from a Himalayan mountain of weaknesses.

Without a common industrial policy, we are not in a position to negotiate a trade compromise with China that would preserve our priority sectors while supporting our essential exports.

Without joint promotion of industrial giants to counter those supported by Chinese public authorities and monetary policy, we are in a position of weakness and are becoming increasingly weaker.

Without joint research, China is no longer competing with us on the price of T-shirts but on technological innovation, as we are already seeing with its electric vehicles.

Without a common capital market, we are unable to invest together and in the long term as much as the Chinese leadership can.

We are just a jigsaw puzzle, while China is a state. Even though our GDP is higher than theirs, it is not wrong to say that the world’s second largest economy is not the EU but China, because China is able to pursue a single economic policy, while we are still structurally incapable of talking to it with one voice.

Yet everything would dictate that we do so, both economically – because the imbalance in our trade relations is untenable – and politically, because in the face of Trump, we need to assert the possibility of another partnership.

This is what De Gaulle did with the USSR to escape American tutelage. This is what Nixon did with Mao to outflank the Kremlin. This is what we should do in turn, but to do so we would have to stop panicking. Before jumping on the first flight to Beijing, we would have to define a common basis for negotiations with China and do so without wasting any time, i.e. not with all 27 Member States but with just a few, namely Beijing’s main trading partners.

Necessity dictates this, and in doing so we will take the first real steps towards a common industrial policy and foreign policy for the Union.

Image by netsay @ Deviantart