EU-China Relations and the War in Ukraine: A Reappraisal

One year after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Chinese scholars assess its impact on EU-China relations and take a look at the future.

Dear Everyone,

Last week, Sinification examined a piece by Zhang Jian that discussed the economic and political impact of the Russo-Ukrainian war on the EU. Its assessment was particularly bleak (I have included a summary of his piece at the end of this post). EU-China relations were written all over Zhang’s analysis of European strategic autonomy but he refrained from discussing these ties in direct terms. Today’s edition provides a brief rundown of four commentaries that complement Zhang’s piece well. They were chosen on the basis of two relatively loose criteria: having been recently published (≤ 2-3 months); and providing a fairly comprehensive overview of the recent and future trends in EU-China relations and/or European strategic autonomy. As one might expect, EU-China relations do not attract as many heavyweight scholars as the analysis of US-China relations does. What’s more, recent analyses by some of China’s more senior EU specialists have tended to remain fairly superficial…