China is dispatching Wu Hongbo, Special Representative for Europe, to Brussels this week, to discuss the fallout from last month’s virtual EU-China summit and to shore up troubled ties with the European Union. EU Commissioner for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell described the Summit as “a dialogue of the deaf”. “China wanted to set aside our differences on Ukraine, they didn’t want to talk about Ukraine. They didn’t want to talk about human rights and other stuff and instead focus on positive things,” Borrell said during a fiery debate on China in the European Parliament in Strasbourg. In the six weeks since the most recent summit, EU officials have been unable to nail down a date for their biennial High-Level Trade and Economic Dialogue with China. A commitment to maintaining the dialogue, which last took place in 2020, was one of the few deliverables from the Summit and was earmarked to be held before the end of June.The EU has proposed dates, but China has so far not responded.
China has yet to name a replacement for Zhang Ming, the former Ambassador to the EU who left five months ago to take the reins of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). But it has stepped up virtual engagement in recent weeks with a number of high-level calls between President Xi Jinping and European counterparts. Wu’s visit follows a lengthy tour of Central and Eastern Europe by Huo Yuzhen, Beijing’s Special Envoy for that region, who visited the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Poland. China’s Climate Envoy Xie Zhenhua is also planning to visit Europe later this month.
In early May the EU signed a Group of Seven statement that roundly condemned China on everything from human rights and the crackdown on the political opposition in Hong Kong, to “cyber-enabled intellectual property theft” and “coercive economic policies”.
