China's efforts to understand Europe remain a work in progress

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We instinctively understand others through projection: assuming that they think and feel like we do. Countries often make the same mistake in their foreign policy. At the heart of China's relations with Europe over the past two years is a cognitive gap: its foreign policy elite underestimated the extent of European support for Ukraine. China's international relations experts, dominated by a streak of realism that emphasizes economic interests and power over values ​​and political culture, largely assumed that the Ukrainians would not put up much of a fight. When they did so, they assumed that Europe would not want to pay for it or reduce its energy dependence on Russia. As a result, Chinese elites also underestimated the damage caused by Xi Jinping's “unlimited” friendship with Vladimir Putin to Beijing's foreign relations.

These elites have since come to understand the depth of European support for Ukraine. But now they explain it through the “return of ideology” in Europe. “The extent of today's 'reideologization' is more serious Job Function Email Database than that of the Cold War,” Jiang Feng, party secretary of Shanghai International Studies University, warned in an essay last year, saying it had become a “ confrontation at any cost", so "Germany would prefer to break its own arm." The dominant Chinese narrative says that ideology has confused European abilities to evaluate their true interests. For example, Premier Li Qiang's comments on his first European tour last month suggested that he believes European companies would have no interest in de-risking their supply chains if it were not for the politicization of the issue. But one person's ideology is another's principled belief.



If there is, in fact, a driving ideology behind European support for Ukraine, it is the value of peace, sovereignty and collective self-defense. Europeans may call an invasion an invasion. China's historical suspicion of NATO means its narrative has to be similar to that of the Russians: NATO is the aggressor, threatening Russia's existence through eastward expansion and causing Moscow to enter a war of self defense. For the average Chinese, the salience of the 1999 US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the NATO operation against Yugoslavia is much greater than the salience of Ukrainian sovereignty. Since China reopened its borders in January following the end of its zero-Covid policy, a succession of political, diplomatic and academic figures (all three groups are often elided in China) have traveled to Europe in an attempt to learn about its thinking.  Last year, the Chinese narrative was that of Europeans sleepwalking into economic chaos. Now, Chinese observers believe they have a chance to weaken European alliances over Ukraine.