Of all the questions one could ask of president Xi Jinping’s first visit to Europe since the pandemic, the overarching one is: are China-EU relations better at the end of it than a week ago? The answer is no, on any sensible definition of what improvement would consist of. But it makes sense, too, to ask what improvement it could in principle have brought, in order to understand what opportunity was missed. 

Understanding Xi’s primary purpose is easy enough. His visits to Serbia and Hungary after France illustrate a desire to drive wedges between Europeans to forestall any consensus in favour of a tougher stance against China. Straightforward, too, are Belgrade’s and Budapest’s reasons for hosting Xi. Chinese attention offers another diplomatic leg to stand on in the face of EU pressure against their warm links with Russia. Hungary, in particular, is benefiting from Chinese investments in battery and other green tech manufacturing for the EU market.

But what did Emmanuel Macron want to achieve? Xi’s meetings in France featured pleas for the protection of automakers against Chinese “overcapacity” in electric vehicles — evidently the EU anti-subsidy investigation launched at French behest is not seen as enough. Paris managed to stave off, for now, tariffs on cognac threatened by Beijing in response. But there was no perceptible change on the divisive issue of Beijing’s supportive stance towards Russia despite its war against Ukraine.