For years, the European Union has struggled with a peculiar contradiction in its dealings with China. The EU is one of the largest and wealthiest trading blocs on earth, capable of determining access to a market of some 450 million relatively affluent consumers, yet it frequently conducts foreign policy as though it were the supplicant.
Hilde Vautmans, the Belgian Renew Europe MEP and European Parliament rapporteur on EU-China political relations, is right to challenge this timidity.
Her report, debated this week in Strasbourg, does not advocate severing relations with Beijing. Nor should it. China is too economically important and too influential on questions ranging from climate change to international security for Europe simply to close the door.
But dialogue must not become an alternative to action.
“Europe has economic power. It’s time to use it,” Vautmans told Parliament ahead of the vote. That sentence ought to be pinned above every desk in the European Commission dealing with China.
The figures make the case brutally clear. In 2025 the EU imported €559.4 billion of goods from China while exporting just €199.6 billion in the opposite direction. The resulting deficit was €359.8 billion — almost €1 billion every day.
As EU Today reported recently, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has herself warned of a potential “second China shock”, with subsidised Chinese industrial production threatening European manufacturers.
Fine words. But Beijing has heard fine words before.
The Commission’s preferred formulation remains “de-risking, not decoupling”. There is sense in that distinction. Nobody seriously proposes shutting down trade with the world’s second-largest economy. But de-risking becomes meaningless if every risk identified is followed by another dialogue, another working group and another opportunity to postpone difficult decisions.
Indeed, the Commission acknowledges that European companies operating in China face regulatory obstacles, inadequate intellectual-property protection, restrictions on data flows and pressures associated with technology transfer.
Europe possesses formidable weapons with which to respond: anti-dumping duties, anti-subsidy measures, foreign-investment screening, the Foreign Subsidies Regulation, the Anti-Coercion Instrument, procurement restrictions and controls on strategically sensitive technologies.
These instruments should not be deployed indiscriminately. But neither should they sit polished in the armoury while Beijing exploits European openness.
Vautmans is particularly right to connect economics with security and values. China cannot reasonably expect privileged access to European markets while helping sustain the Russian war machine. The European Parliament’s own research service describes Beijing as a “decisive enabler and dual-use provider”, including through goods entering Russian weapons and drone supply chains.
If Chinese companies materially assist Russia’s ability to wage war against Ukraine, Europe should be prepared to impose a direct economic price. The same principle should apply to human rights.
EU Today has warned repeatedly that Brussels’ ritualised engagement with Beijing risks becoming precisely that: ritual.
We reported earlier that the EU-China Human Rights Dialogue risks losing credibility, pointing to the continuing imprisonment of Swedish citizen Gui Minhai and Uyghur academic and Sakharov Prize laureate Ilham Tohti. After round upon round of discussions, Beijing has learnt that European expressions of “deep concern” are inexpensive things to endure.
The problem is hardly new. Years ago, EU Today highlighted calls for concrete EU action over goods associated with forced labour in China, including demands for tougher restrictions on entities implicated in abuses against Uyghurs.
Yet repression continues. In March this year China adopted its new Law on the Promotion of Ethnic Unity and Progress. The European Parliament subsequently condemned what it described as intensified repression and assimilation affecting Tibetans, Uyghurs and other minorities, by the overwhelming margin of 439 votes to 52.
Europe therefore faces a straightforward question. What is the purpose of economic power if it is never translated into political influence?
The EU should not attempt to bully China. Nor should it abandon diplomacy. Vautmans is correct that channels of communication must remain open. But reciprocity must become something more than a word appearing in communiqués.
Where China closes markets to European companies, Europe should be prepared to restrict equivalent access. Where state subsidies distort competition, Brussels should respond rapidly with trade-defence measures. Where strategic dependencies expose Europe to political coercion, alternative supply chains must be built. Where Chinese entities support Russia’s military-industrial complex, sanctions should follow. And where companies benefit from forced labour or serious human-rights abuses, access to the European marketplace should carry consequences.
That is not protectionism. It is leverage.
Totalitarian states understand leverage perfectly well. China routinely uses access to its enormous market as an instrument of statecraft. Europe, by contrast, too often behaves as though exploiting its own commercial strength would somehow represent a failure of diplomacy. It represents precisely the opposite.
The European Commission has spent years discovering that China is simultaneously a partner, competitor and “systemic rival”. It is time to move beyond discovering the obvious.
Vautmans has identified the essential point. Europe already possesses economic power on a scale few countries can ignore. What it appears to lack is the political confidence to use it.
Main Image: by Valentine ZELER, © European Union 2026 – Source : EP
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