China Wants to ‘Divide and Conquer’ Europe

On Sunday, Chinese President Xi Jinping began his first visit to Europe in five years. One can glean a sense of his motivations by examining the policies of the countries he has chosen to visit: France, Serbia, and Hungary. In each case, to varying degrees, there is significant daylight between the foreign-policy objectives of leaders in Brussels—the seat of the European Union—and those in Paris, Belgrade, and Budapest. 

According to Evan Medeiros, a former senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council during the Obama administration, Xi’s plan is to “divide and conquer” Europe. Will he succeed? And how might the White House respond? I spoke with Medeiros, now a professor at Georgetown University, on FP Live. Subscribers can watch the full discussion in the video box atop this page, or follow the FP Live podcast. What follows is a condensed and lightly edited transcript. 

Ravi Agrawal: What do you think Xi Jinping will try to achieve on his visit this week?

Evan Medeiros: This trip by Xi Jinping is perhaps one of the most aggressive attempts on the part of the Chinese to actively foment disunity, both within the European Union and within NATO. Look at the countries Xi chose: France, Serbia, Hungary. These are all countries that are skeptical of NATO (in the case of France), not in the EU or NATO (in the case of Serbia), or actively trying to undermine both institutions (in the case of Hungary). So the design of this trip is about advancing Chinese interests in ways that undermine the priorities of both the European Union and NATO. 

RA: How much of a divide is there between Brussels and Washington when it comes to China policy?

EM: They’re closer than ever before. And that’s been a source of substantial concern within Beijing, because after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, after China adopted a series of more nationalist and mercantilist economic policies, Europe simply became more active on the China question.

But that’s why he’s visiting France, Serbia, and Hungary. Xi doesn’t want to deal with Brussels. He wants to undermine Brussels. He’s doing what the Chinese have always done, which is to try and divide and conquer, to appeal to the leaders and to the bilateral relationships, to ignore and marginalize Brussels. Xi’s visit comes on the back of trips to Beijing from both the Dutch prime minister and the German chancellor. Xi is trying to focus more on those bilateral relationships, to encourage them not to support EU actions. 

RA: Xi also met with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen. What is her goal when it comes to China?

EM: Her number one goal is to say that the EU has an enormous number of concerns about Chinese economic practices and that the EU is united. Now, of course, [French President Emmanuel] Macron, on the security front and on questions of strategy, is probably more aligned with China than with Washington. But on economic questions, France has really strongly backed a variety of EU actions, most specifically the recent anti-subsidy investigation on Chinese EV exports to the EU. I’m hearing those may actually result in tariffs. 

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RA: Macron spoke to the Economist last week, and he continues to be angry at Washington about the Biden administration’s use of subsidies in key industries like semiconductors and clean energy. Some of what he’s saying comes from a realization that Europe can’t compete at the same level on subsidies. Do you think China is going to try and exploit Macron’s sense of anger about this?

EM: Xi began with France precisely because, as you suggest, he feels like Macron is a very welcome audience, that he can lean into Macron’s strong sense of strategic autonomy, his concerns about American economic practices and his ambivalence about NATO. He can use these to forge a relationship with France in which it continues to be a brake on EU actions and NATO actions of concern to China. 

For example, France was one of the countries that opposed NATO opening an office in Tokyo several months ago. That’s something that the Chinese warmly welcomed. China looks at Macron’s speech just last week where he said France needs to double down on strategic autonomy, in large part because it faces a variety of threats. And in his speech, Macron treated threats from China as equivalent to threats from the United States. 

Now, of course, in the back of Macron’s thinking is concern about [former U.S. President Donald] Trump being reelected in November, but for Xi, that’s all strategic catnip. He can lean into all of that to actively foster disunity, again, within both the EU and NATO.

RA: How do you think China policymakers in the White House are looking at this week’s meetings?

EM: Washington’s frustration does not just begin today, or Sunday when Xi arrived in France. Go back to last month, when Chancellor Olaf Schotz of Germany visited Beijing. His approach was to focus on the Germany-China bilateral relationship. He didn’t focus on the concerns stemming from the EU. He didn’t talk about Chinese overcapacity. He pursued limited market access for, I’m told, beef and apples, and didn’t spend a lot of time talking about Chinese support for the Russian war machine in Ukraine.

So for Xi, this is just an open-door opportunity to actively foment additional divisions. And, of course, Washington views all of that with concern. For example, Xi is going to be in Belgrade, Serbia, on the 25th anniversary of NATO’s accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy there in 1999 during the war in Kosovo. Xi undoubtedly will use this as a platform to trash NATO. 

RA: Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Beijing last month. He met his counterpart, Wang Yi. Both sides characterized the meeting as “substantive and constructive.” I was also struck by Xi’s call for the relationship between the United States and China to be that of “partners rather than adversaries.” What do you make of all of that? 

EM: It’s interesting to me that, on the one hand, the structural challenges at the heart of the U.S.-China relationship are substantial and growing. Whether it’s Chinese support for the Russian war machine or Chinese assertions in the South China Sea, or macroeconomic policies that lead to industrial overcapacity or the Taiwan question, none of those issues are on the trajectory to being well-managed or resolved.

And yet, both sides are bending over backward to promote stability in the relationship and to promote the image of carefully managing this complex, long-term strategic competition, even though the Chinese don’t like that term. So, we’re at this interesting moment where both sides are on their best behavior, but neither has any illusions about how challenging this relationship is and how it’s only becoming more competitive.

The trips by Blinken and [Treasury Secretary Janet] Yellen were an important way for the United States to communicate its priorities. Especially Chinese support for the Russian military and the potential costs that the White House is going to be willing to impose on China in the form of sanctions, including possibly banking sanctions, if the Chinese don’t pare back their support. So that’s important. But to me, this is very much a result of both sides wanting stability right now. I don’t take any reassurance from it. If anything, it’s just kicking the can down the road. 

RA: When Blinken was in Beijing, he said that China was providing components that are “powering Russia’s brutal war of aggression.” What was Blinken trying to accomplish by saying that publicly?

EM: He was trying to signal that this is a very high priority, perhaps the most important priority in the U.S.-China relationship. He was trying to signal that this is not just about America and China, but also about European security. In other words, it implicates China’s interests because war in Europe is problematic for China as well. Blinken tried to communicate that, because the interests for the United States are both bilateral and regional in Europe, the Americans are willing to impose sanctions on the Chinese. But the Chinese response was sort of a shrug of the shoulders.

I think Xi is going to use his visit to Europe this week to demonstrate that China is managing its relations with European countries well, that European security is not at risk, and European leaders don’t seem to be nearly as concerned as American leaders are. In many ways, Xi’s diplomacy is an effort to undercut or diminish the credibility of American arguments.

RA: Stepping back a bit, what’s your sense of the current temperature of the U.S.-China relationship? Six months on, how influential was that Biden-Xi meeting in San Francisco?

EM: That meeting was consequential because it stopped the freefall in the relationship and diverted the energies of both sides in a more productive direction. That couldn’t have happened without both [President Joe] Biden and Xi deciding that they want to pursue a more stable relationship. I think they’re doing it for different reasons. The Chinese, in particular, have a variety of domestic economic and political challenges, so they don’t want a highly disrupted U.S.-China relationship. 

The meeting was important. Perhaps the best evidence of that, Ravi, is that the Chinese opened up dialogue channels that have been closed for a long time, especially the sensitive military-to-military channels. And the Chinese agreed to help the Americans with one of the things of greatest importance to them, which is the Chinese exports of fentanyl precursors to countries that then make illegal fentanyl and export it to the United States. 

We’re in a funny moment. On the one hand, the sources of tension and competition in the relationship are hot. They’re front-burner. But yet, both sides are doing their best. They’re trying to keep the relationship on simmer. They’re trying to manage these problems. But if we were to wake up tomorrow and there was a crisis in the U.S.-China relationship, I wouldn’t be remotely surprised.

RA: Things could change on that front if there’s a change in administration. Matt Pottinger, a former top China official in the Trump administration, seemed to effectively call for a U.S. strategy that would lead to regime collapse in Beijing in an interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN. What did you make of that?

EM: Pursuing regime change is an incredibly difficult thing to do. I don’t know how we would bring it about. It’s not clear to me why it’s immediately in our interest, given the fact that China is the second-largest economy in the world and we don’t know who would come after Xi. There’s no apparent alternative power center in China. This assumption that a Jeffersonian democracy would emerge in the rubble of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party], there’s just not a lot of evidence for it. So you have to be very careful what kind of regime change you pursue, because the successor to the current regime sometimes could even be worse.

But more importantly, a challenge at the heart of the Pottinger argument is that none of our allies would follow us down the pathway that they prescribed. The United States, by pursuing that strategy, would lose all our partners and allies, none of whom are willing to run the risks or pay the costs associated with that highly confrontational approach.

RA: It’s become almost conventional wisdom that the Biden administration did not shift China policy that much from the Trump administration’s approach. But you see a fair bit of difference between the two administrations’ China policies, right? 

EM: There are both similarities and differences between Biden and Trump. On the core questions, the core policy preferences, the differences between Biden and Trump outweigh the similarities. Biden is not pursuing a regime-change strategy. Biden is not taking actions that deliberately alienate America’s allies and partners. Biden is very deliberately investing in America’s own domestic, economic, and technological capabilities—the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act immediately come to mind.

Yes, Biden kept the tariffs in place. So that is a similarity. Biden is concerned about Chinese military aggression and assertion in the South China Sea. So that’s a similarity.

RA: If you were Xi, would you prefer that Biden gets a second term or that Trump comes back to power?

EM: I’m not going to play the role of Xi Jinping, but as a longtime China analyst, I will say that the Chinese Communist Party leaders prefer predictability. They do not like surprises, especially big surprises from the United States, which can wreak geopolitical havoc in both Asia and globally. When they look at Trump, increasingly they see him as unbelievably unpredictable, in a confrontational direction, and potentially very, very disruptive globally. But perhaps the heart of Beijing’s concern right now is this idea that Trump may reach out to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, normalize relations with Putin, basically do a reverse Nixon-Kissinger 1972, as a way to bring Russia close in order to balance Chinese power. And I think collectively, all of those areas of concern are at the heart of Chinese perceptions about Trump.

RA: You wrote an essay recently, saying that it was a delusion to think of China as having peaked. What’s the crux of your argument?

EM: There are two basic arguments I make. Number one is that if China’s peaking, China’s leadership doesn’t see it. As Hal Brands and Michael Beckley argue, China is peaking and it knows it’s peaking. And as a result, it’s going to start lashing out before its strength declines. And I argue that there’s very little evidence that the Chinese think that they’re peaking. But perhaps more importantly, I argue that even if China may be peaking economically, it’s not peaking geopolitically. Its military influence and its diplomatic influence are growing. Even in terms of economics. So Chinese GDP will probably never get back up to 8 percent or 10 percent. But this is a $20 trillion economy at market exchange rates. And so even a Chinese economy that grows at 3, 4, or 5 percent, especially one that’s allocating resources very substantially to industrial policies to compete with the United States and its allies, will be an enormous challenge for the United States.

What concerns me about the “peaking China” argument is that it really undercuts and undermines our ability to see the nature of the China challenge over the long term. We really can’t afford that kind of distraction. We need to make sure that we have a clear-eyed view of how China will remain a persistent and consistent challenge economically, technologically, strategically, and even ideologically.

RA: The counterargument is that the “i-n-g” in “peaking” is key. China is slowing down, so it might at least be acting as if it’s a little bit more constrained. And perhaps that is partly why it seems to be seeking calmer relations with the United States. What’s your sense of that? 

EM: Because of a cascade of economic problems and political challenges at home, the Chinese have sought to stabilize their relationship with the United States and other major powers. Like the charm offensive by Beijing in Europe. So that’s happening in 2024.

But beyond 2024, I think it’s an open question. I think this is a short-term cyclical adjustment in Chinese foreign policy that’s about creating the conditions for long-term technological superiority, long-term economic prosperity, and for the Chinese to position their military to accomplish all of its goals in Taiwan, the South China Sea, etc. So, a temporary adjustment that’s meant to suit a long-term strategy of regional preeminence.

RA: Given what you’re arguing, what should the Biden administration be doing regarding China right now that it isn’t currently?

EM: Well, I think the big weakness of Biden’s Asia strategy is that there’s no trade strategy. For the United States to maintain geopolitical influence, especially in Asia, the United States needs to signal to countries all over the world that we’re not just a strategic partner or a security partner, but we’re a strong economic partner as well. And so the administration has the IPEF strategy, but it doesn’t come with any of the goodies. It’s all about rulemaking and disciplines, which tend to be very costly, especially for emerging market economies. The United States needs to get back in the game of negotiating trade and investment deals, so countries feel as if their economic future is strongly tied to the United States.

And I think that only through action on trade and investment will we really begin to position ourselves for effective long-term competition. Because the Chinese economy is large, even as it’s slowing, and still offers countries lots of opportunities. And the American response can’t be “don’t partner with China” if America doesn’t offer something else, right? You can’t beat something with nothing. America needs to do a better job of offering more and more diverse choices for trade and investment if we’re going to succeed in this long-term competition against China. 

[For more of this discussion, including on whether China might invade Taiwan, watch the full interview on video or follow the FP Live podcast.]