The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said Thursday that Europe’s relations with China have become more difficult and stressed that their ties will determine Europe’s prosperity and security.

“Our relationship with China is one of the most intricate and important anywhere in the world. And how we manage it will be a determining factor for our future economic prosperity and national security,” she said in an event on China organized by the think-tank European Policy Centre in Brussels today.

“It is clear that our relations have become more distant and more difficult in the last few years. We have seen a very deliberate hardening of China’s overall strategic posture for some time. And it has now been matched by a ratcheting up of increasingly assertive actions” she said, ahead of her visit to Beijing next week together with French President Emmanuel Macron.

She was highly critical of China’s growing and close ties with Russia.

Referring to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow last week she said “far from being put off by the atrocious and illegal invasion of Ukraine, President Xi is maintaining his ‘no limits friendship’ with Putin’s Russia.” With reference to China’s 12-point peace plan to end the war in Ukraine, von der Leyen, a former German Defence Minister, said “any peace plan which would in effect consolidate Russian annexations is simply not a viable plan. How China continues to interact with Putin’s war will be a determining factor for EU-China relations going forward.” The chief of the EU’s executive body expressed concern over China’s growing global influence.

“We have seen it with China’s set of global initiatives and by how it positions itself as a power and peace broker, for instance through the recent Saudi Arabia and Iran agreement. And we have seen the show of friendship in Moscow which says a thousand words about this new vision for the international order,” she stated.

“The show of military force in the South China Sea and East China Sea, and at the border with India, directly affect our partners and their legitimate interests. We also underscore the importance of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait,” she said.

“China has now turned the page on the era of ‘reform and opening’ and is moving into a new era of security and control. And we can expect to see a clear push to make China less dependent on the world and the world more dependent on China,” she warned.

However, von der Leyen clarified that Europe does not want to” decouple from China” or break ties.

“The point here is that we do not want to cut economic, societal, political and scientific ties. China is a vital trading partner – accounting for 9 percent of our goods exports and more than 20 percent of our goods imports,” she said.

Source: Kuwait News Agency