What are the points of contention in EU-China relations?
China is once again opening its doors for business. A delegation from the European Union, with Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen and French President Emmanuel Macron visited to discuss trade and shore up relations.
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00:00 Reducing risk, Ukraine and human rights, the three points of contention between the EU
00:07 and China.
00:08 Beijing is once again opening its doors for business and the European Union.
00:13 Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and French President Emmanuel Macron are its
00:17 guests.
00:18 But while China seeks to intensify trade ties, the EU wants to gradually become less dependent.
00:25 Easy risk without decoupling, this is the main focus of the bilateral meeting between
00:30 China and the EU.
00:32 So over the last 10 years, the European Union's trade deficit has become more than, has more
00:38 than tripled.
00:40 It reached almost 400 billion euros last year.
00:45 And we discussed that because this trajectory is not sustainable and the underlying structural
00:50 issues need to be addressed.
00:53 Decoupling won't be easy.
00:55 In 2022, China was the EU's third largest partner in terms of exports and the largest
01:00 in terms of imports, a trade volume that von der Leyen puts at 2.3 billion euros per day.
01:07 The real concern on the Chinese side is precisely that Europe will take a view of China.
01:15 Firstly, that given the security and political developments that Europe is seeing, that it
01:20 will impose a set of tightened restrictions when it comes to particularly technology access,
01:28 which I think China's counted on being able to continue to acquire from Europe.
01:34 The second point of contention is the relationship with Russia.
01:37 Clearly, this visit has a commercial engagement agenda, but also a diplomatic one.
01:42 After several years of isolation from the world as a result of its zero Covid policy,
01:47 there is a collective effort to begin to re-engage China at the highest levels.
01:52 And the most pressing engagement for Europe is for Beijing to play a more constructive
01:57 role in the war in Ukraine.
02:00 China ensuring that Russia sees sense, that essentially China is able to operate either
02:07 as a broker to try and encourage peace talks, to try to act as a restraining influence on
02:13 Russia.
02:36 The third point of contention is human rights.
02:39 A disagreement that has led the EU to place sanctions on China over Beijing's alleged
02:45 abuses of ethnic and religious minorities in the Western region.
02:50 To which China responded in kind by placing sanctions on the EU.
02:56 I expressed our deep concerns about the deterioration of the human rights situation in China.
03:02 The situation in Xinjiang is particularly concerning.
03:05 It is important that we continue to discuss these issues and I therefore welcome that
03:12 we have already resumed the EU-China human rights dialogue.
03:17 Despite the differences of opinion, there are some areas where they agree to cooperate,
03:22 such as the climate.
03:34 [BLANK_AUDIO]