What does Europe want from China? The answer can no longer be deferred.
The European Union spent six years building a case against China, only to fall silent when its position was most fragile. In September 2025, Ursula von der Leyen's State of the Union address barely mentioned Beijing, a striking retreat that marked the collapse of a project meant to define Europe's stance. The omission exposes what Brussels refuses to admit: Europe has no coherent strategy toward its largest import partner and remains paralyzed.
The incoherence runs through every layer. Brussels issues texts that call China partner, competitor, and systemic rival in the same breath, without explaining how these roles coexist. Member states pursue clashing agendas: Germany and Spain court Chinese investment while Lithuania picks fights over Taiwan, France pushes autonomy while Hungary and Slovakia embrace Belt and Road projects. Most telling, only six EU states had formal China strategies by 2025; the rest, including economies heavily exposed to Chinese trade, operated without structured plans. This vacuum allows Beijing to exploit European divisions through bilateral deals that splinter any collective response.
Von der Leyen tried to impose order through yearly addresses that grew sharper until they abruptly collapsed. In 2020 she warned of unfair market access, lack of reciprocity, and overcapacity, stressing that Europe and China represented “very different systems of governance and society.” She personified the formula first adopted by their predecessors in March 2019: “From the outset I have said China is a negotiating partner, an economic competitor and a systemic rival.”
In 2021, she defied China on climate leadership and scolded Xi Jinping on coal, even as member states revived it later on at home: “The world would be relieved if they showed they could peak emissions by mid-decade - and move away from coal at home and abroad.”
In 2022, the Commission launched Global Gateway as a counterweight to the Belt and Road Initiative, because “it does not make sense for Europe to build a perfect road between a Chinese-owned copper mine and a Chinese-owned harbor. We have to get smarter.” Meanwhile, the Commission was equipping itself with new trade defenses such as foreign subsidies rules or investment screening.
The confrontation peaked in 2023. Von der Leyen denounced Chinese electric vehicles having “huge state subsidies” and launched a probe into them (in 2023, Chinese brands alone accounted for 8% of all EVs sales in the EU respectively).
The new doctrine compressed in a new mantra: “de-risking, not decoupling.” The phrase was perfect Brussels compromise—firm enough to suggest action, vague enough to mean nothing specific. It spread through EU institutions, justified new regulations, and suggested Europe might move from complaint to enforcement. However, trade with China continued to grow, with European industry increasingly dependent on Chinese capital goods, while autos and other consumer goods remained a small share of EU imports.
Implementation came in 2024. Tariffs hit Chinese EVs, supply chain laws took effect, and Beijing finally felt European pressure. Chinese officials protested; European firms feared retaliation. Brussels applauded itself, convinced it had cracked the code for handling China without sparking economic retaliation. During hearings, EU's top “diplomat” Kallas called China “partly malign,” linking it with Iran, Russia and North Korea—a deliberate marker of the new Commission's stance.
Then 2025 revealed the hollowness of this approach. At Davos, von der Leyen spoke of “finding the right balance” with China. At the Beijing summit in July, she cited a €305 billion deficit and Chinese overcapacity but proposed nothing beyond “real solutions”—as if she hadn't presided over six years of the same problems.
By September's State of the Union, China vanished from her speech. The only reference was a theatrical image of Xi flanked by Putin and Kim Jong Un, chosen for effect but stripped of policy substance. Missing was the equally real picture of Xi with Modi and Putin the day before, discarded because it complicated Europe's narrative that condemns China for its Russia ties while ignoring India's identical relationships.
This retreat cannot be dismissed as prudence. The State of the Union had been von der Leyen's platform for launching probes, coining doctrines, and signaling direction. To go silent when the regulatory arsenal was finally assembled was the true expression of an admission of defeat. Beijing received the message clearly: Europe legislates and threatens, but at decisive moments it lacks courage. Chinese subsidies continue, European industries weaken, and the watchwords—overcapacity, reciprocity, de-risking—dissolve shrink into rhetoric without the slightest deterrent effect.
The trajectory reads like satire when traced chronologically. 2020: “fair market access... reciprocity... overcapacity... different systems.” 2021: scolding China on coal while Germany and Poland quietly restored it to their energy mix. 2022: Global Gateway—an absolute failure four years later—and new defenses against distortions. 2023: “assertive China,” markets “flooded with cheaper Chinese electric cars,” “de-risking, not decoupling.” 2024: tariffs, bans, rules, “partly malign.” Early 2025: calls for “balance” and “inflection points.” September 2025: nothing.
Von der Leyen's legacy is a fiasco. She armed Europe with the language of confrontation and the semblance of enforcement, only to watch them collapse into theater. Her team solved nothing regarding China since 2019—not market access, not the trade deficit, not political unity. When the case against Beijing seemed clearest, the retreat exposed the folly in building an anti-China policy without knowing what Europe actually wanted to achieve.
This failure coincides with Europe's broader geopolitical confusion. Since Biden replaced Trump, Brussels has limited itself to copying American China policy: semiconductor export controls, 5G restrictions, investment screening, and technology transfer rules. Europe mirrors U.S. pressure campaigns without defining its own objectives, imposing measures that disrupt its own firms while leaving Beijing largely untouched.
Paralysis deepens under Trump 2.0. Europe is coerced into spending 5% of GDP on NATO defense while absorbing unreciprocated tariffs to fund American weapons, energy, and investments. The August 2025 U.S.-EU trade “Framework Agreement” codifies European acceptance of American economic dominance and the language of threat and risk. Brussels now bankrolls Washington's ambitions while lecturing Beijing from a position of dependence.
The irony is stark: Brussels scolds the rising power it cannot influence while subsidizing the power that coerces the bloc. European policy has become a performance of leverage—financed, constrained, and consistently outmaneuvered. Von der Leyen asked in September 2025, as if detached from the record: “The central question for us today is a simple one: does Europe have the stomach to fight?”
The answer is that the structural problem remains unchanged. Europe depends on Chinese goods from solar panels to pharmaceuticals. The trade deficit risks becoming permanent. Chinese firms enjoy access to European markets while many European companies still face barriers in China. Political unity fragments whenever economic interests diverge. The unresolved question is whether Europe wants confrontation, accommodation, or something else entirely.
Since Europe wanted a fight only when it seemed cost-free. In 2025, facing Trump's aggression and China's rise, it discovered it lacked both the unity for confrontation and the will for accommodation. Instead, it defaulted to what it does best: produce documents, coin phrases, show indignation, and pretend that words substitute for choices—the latest version of the “Brussels effect.”
The path forward demands what the EU should deliver: a real China policy backed by political will. This requires alignment between institutions and member states, an end to bilateral deals that let Beijing divide Europe, and instruments matched with sustained commitment rather than plays. It requires independence from Washington's oscillations and Beijing's inducements.
Without this, Europe remains what it has become: an object of other powers' strategies rather than an author of its own. Von der Leyen's masterwork in September 2025 was not only omission but admission: after six years of preparation, Europe still does not know what it wants from China. And in geopolitics, not knowing what you want guarantees you will not get it.
