As the EU navigates an increasingly Sino-American world, it finally sees the need to stand together, even against Beijing.
China’s diplomats were already having a terrible year in Europe, but this week they managed to make it even worse. At this rate, Chinese President Xi Jinping may achieve the dubious feat of alienating the Europeans faster and further than even U. S. President Donald Trump is doing. Xi’s overarching objective in the region is to prevent the European Union and the U. S. from ganging up against China. He was hoping for a breakthrough at a summit with EU leaders scheduled for Sep.14. Originally slated to take place in Leipzig, it’ll be a video conference instead, owing to the pandemic. But the stakes are high. So Xi this past week dispatched his foreign minister, Wang Yi, to five European countries for some preparatory sweet talk. Talk there was; it just wasn’t sweet. Wang showed up hoping to hear the softer tones to which he’s accustomed from Europeans, who remain more eager than the Americans to keep trading and doing business with China. Instead, he was surprised at the amount of resistance he was picking up underneath the formal niceties. But those dissonances were as nothing compared with his stopover in Berlin. Speaking to German reporters, Wang lashed out at the president of the Czech Senate, Milos Vystrcil, who had taken a delegation to visit Taiwan, which China considers part of its territory. Vystrcil would “pay a heavy price,” threatened Wang, fuming that the Czech’s “betrayal” made him “an enemy of 1.4 billion Chinese people.” This elicited a prompt response from Heiko Maas, Germany’s foreign minister.
