Discovering Europe: China, the EU and the Trump Administration

Relations between the European Union (EU) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have undergone a fundamental rebalancing act since the inauguration of the Trump administration. Scholarship on the EU-China axis has often argued that the EU has become a peripheral actor in the worldview of Chinese foreign policy-makers. Whilst such narratives hold validity for the first half of the 2010s, this paper argues that a more nuanced approach to PRC foreign policy post-2016 is required. Content analysis of three leading Chinese state media – People’s Daily, China Daily and ECNS – as well as PRC policy papers and EU-China joint declarations reveals that the European Union has become central to recent Chinese attempts to defend an international status quo. This status quo has in turn increasingly come under threat by US unilateralism, most evident in the Trump administration’s retreat from free trade principles. In order to counter such disruption Chinese authorities employ relations with the inherently multilateralist European Union in order to secure an international institutional landscape that has traditionally benefited the PRC’s economic and political priorities. Tracking this new appreciation for the European Union in Chinese state media allows us to show how unilateralist shocks have engendered a new form of multilateralist rebalancing: The existential threat delivered to international institutions by the retreat of key players essentially divides major polities into defenders and critics of existing institutional frameworks. This bifurcation of global politics in turn intensifies the search for (non-traditional) allies seeking to secure existing arrangements. Our empirical analysis, based on more than 800 EU-related articles in PRC state media over a period of six years (2013-19), accentuates two developments: The practically non-existent level of EU coverage in PRC news publications before 2017 confirms existing narratives concerning the side-lined status of the EU in early 2010s Chinese foreign policy. On the other hand, while publication increases in 2017 already indicate an initial search for allies against a more aggressive US trade rhetoric, the extreme spikes of EU coverage we can witness in 2018 and 2019 clearly mark a complete reconfiguration of Chinese foreign policy priorities. Both thematic and discursive analysis of this increased coverage confirm the centrality of an exogenous US shock to increased PRC appreciation of the EU. By 2019 this direct, knee-jerk response to an increasingly aggressive American trade policy abates. Our content trends however show that such narratives are replaced by a greater promotion of the strategic partnership and EU-China bilateral cooperation. This paper thus not only sheds light on shifts in PRC discursive framing in the late 2010s but also delineates patterns of rebalancing in international politics when great powers call existing multilateral initiatives into question.