Opinion | EU-China engagement shouldn’t be reduced to a couple’s therapy session

Although the 25th EU-China summit offered little by way of substance or style, both sides clearly realise the relationship is too big to fail

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Published: 5:30am, 2 Aug 2025Updated: 8:04am, 2 Aug 2025

The 50th anniversary of diplomatic ties between the European Union and China should have been a celebratory occasion to reflect on the past and chart the course for the future. The 25th EU-China summit should have provided a space for such a commemorative moment, allowing both sides to display diplomatic pageantry and the symbolism of a forward-looking relationship.

Instead, an initial two-day summit was watered down to a single-day event in Beijing on July 24, where President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang met European Council President Antonio Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

There was no joint EU-China summit communique, a standard diplomatic practice to show that a summit concluded successfully. Mired in tensions and seemingly irreconcilable differences, EU-China relations have entered a midlife crisis.

To be fair, even during better days, relations were never particularly cosy. Rather, it was a relationship built upon necessity: despite ideological differences, choosing each other was a geopolitical and strategic choice – a necessary evil – to safeguard multilateralism and multipolarity.

China’s diplomatic tradition has long valued symbolism and protocol. The toned-down summit ensued after a string of meetings between Chinese diplomats, including Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and their European counterparts over the past month to carefully craft and control messaging – a foreign ministers’ strategic dialogue on July 2, the seventh China-France high-level dialogue on people-to-people exchanges on July 4 and the sixth EU-China high-level climate dialogue in Beijing on July 14.

The 25th EU-China summit nonetheless served more as a face-saving event for China and a damage control mechanism for the EU. Despite the EU’s acknowledgement of “the importance it continues to attach” to its relationship with China and “its commitment to deepen engagement”, the summit was akin to a couples therapy session. EU leaders vented a list of grievances and expectations to China without proposing concrete solutions.

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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Although the 25th EU-China summit offered little by way of substance or style, both sides clearly realise the relationship is too big to fail

Although the 25th EU-China summit offered little by way of substance or style, both sides clearly realise the relationship is too big to fail