Policy and discursive shifts in China's economic diplomacy amid rising geopolitical tensions

China seems to have entered into a new global leadership phase of economic diplomacy where its actors increasingly resort to new resources, tools and strategies serving well-defined national interests, such as the Made in China 2025 initiative, the Dual Circulation Strategy (DCS) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This has intensified the interrelated challenges to the EU's economic security, industrial competitiveness and strategic autonomy, contributing to increasing supply chain vulnerabilities and dependencies. This increased economic challenge resulted in more assertive multi-layered EU-level policy approach, characterized by the de-risking strategy with four complementary policy goals.

We used deductive coding of meticulously selected leadership speeches by Chinese top policymakers between 2013 and 2022 to assess whether this shift in EU-China economic diplomacy relations had an impact on the key narratives within the official Chinese high-level policy statements. The coding focuses on the significant and meaningful representation of the EU by China and vice versa, and on particular positive or negative descriptions of the EU by China and vice versa.

Our main findings entail that, despite the more grounded EU approach towards China, no significant alterations are apparent in Chinese leadership discourse which remains at a pragmatic level focused on mutual benefits as long as economic engagement affairs are not interlinked with Chinese governance or territorial issues.

These findings suggest that China needs the EU as a reliable economic partner amid the growing geostrategic tensions towards the US or Japan, which provides the EU with a strategic room for manoeuvre towards open strategic autonomy. Such autonomy could be strengthened by re-negotiating core aspects of economic links with China, such as the relocation of more productive facilities of Chinese green technologies to Europe or pushing for a more open attitude from China towards European investments in critical economic sectors.