Hedging in Beijing and Brussels: from waving to waffling
Can France unite Europeans against China’s mercantilist export flood?
“It will not be any European statesman who will unite Europe,” Charles de Gaulle once said. “Europe will be united by the Chinese.”
France’s current president has been working overtime to prove his predecessor right. For months now, Emmanuel Macron has been trying to shift the other 26 members of the European Union to adopt more robust collective responses to China’s existential geoeconomic threat. This month he got closer than ever, only to have Germany and Spain slow progress yet again due to fear of Beijing’s retaliation.
Efforts to balance China got off to a good start last week: France hosted a G7 Summit that launched a Critical Minerals Resilience and Production Alliance and set a target to cut dependence on any single non-G7 supplier of rare earths and permanent magnets below 60% by 2030. China wasn’t named, but everyone in the room knew which supplier they were talking about. The alliance effort will be backed by €64 billion in newly-announced projects. Donald Trump also seemed more willing to work with the EU to support Ukraine.
Then, as the June 18–19 European Council meeting of EU national leaders approached, there appeared to be a shift in the EU consensus: Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and Belgium lined up behind France’s proposal for a new trade-defence instrument — a European answer to Washington’s Section 301 — that would let the bloc impose tariffs quickly when one country’s dominance of imports (again, the unnameable China) starts to threaten economic security.
Machines of shoving space
China has become addicted to exporting the huge manufacturing surplus its unbalanced state capitalist economic policies generate. This has created a Second China Shock with a tsunami of cheap goods that’s rapidly eroding the West’s advanced industries. With Trump’s elevated tariffs deflecting a sizeable share of that trade away from the United States, Europe has become China’s market of last resort, which is putting crucial manufacturers there in jeopardy. Last year every EU member state ran a trade deficit with China for the first time, with the total EU-China deficit hitting €359 billion (yep, about a billion euros a day) — roughly double the pre-pandemic figure. China’s exports to the EU are up another 16% in the first half of this year. The Economist notes that bankruptcies are running at levels last seen in 2015. Germany, the industrial heartland, shed 143,000 manufacturing jobs last year. MERICS has a grim festival of new charts:
Compounding the problem for European leaders is that the Chinese Communist Party has demonstrated willingness to mete out punishment against countries that impose trade and investment barriers or otherwise frustrate its ambitions. It has a track record of weaponizing access to China’s market, squeezing dependent firms to influence government policy, and using control of supply chains for coercion. That’s why at the European Council meeting, the session in which leaders debated the threat was billed as focusing euphemistically on “global macroeconomic imbalances.” One is reminded of the dictum of another French statesman, Talleyrand: speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts.
Common threat vs. divergent tactics
= incoherent response
The second China Shock and second Trump Shock are the geoeconomic backdrop for the wave of Western leaders visiting China since early 2025. Read the Foreign Affairs essay where I began the analysis and Part I and Part II where I explained that these governments are trying to hedge an unreliable Washington by repairing ties with Beijing — in the process signalling accommodation of PRC power and interests.
When we apply the international relations typologies from Part II to the wave, here’s the composite picture: Paul Schroeder catches the dominant mix of bandwagoning (with Beijing) and hiding, plus Mark Carney’s rhetorical transcending. Tom Christensen and Jack Snyder supply the engine — a shared misperception that defence is dominant against Chinese economic statecraft, which results in buck-passing that pretends to be less-embarrassing hedging. Randall Schweller’s “jackal bandwagoning” catches the cases that aren’t hedging at all but rather offensive profit-seeking in a system those leaders perceive as tilting toward China. Glenn Snyder’s entrapment–abandonment dilemma explains why Trump has made bilateral Beijing channels look like prudent insurance even as they add up to collective weakness. And Fabio Figiaconi’s contingency test exposes how little of 2025–2026’s diplomacy qualifies as effective hedging, given the lack of any real institutional fallback.
States facing a rising threat decline to confront it and instead hope somebody else will bear the burden of doing so. For the EU, each member would be better off if the bloc collectively balanced against Beijing. But for any single government, the smart move, given that the others are hanging back, is also to hang back: let the U.S. and the European Commission absorb the retaliation, lost market access, protesting farmers, and lobbying CEOs. Since that logic holds for all 27 simultaneously, nobody moves first, and inaction becomes the stable resting point.
Let’s apply the composite framework to each visit (in the order they travelled):
New Zealand — Hiding, drifting toward buck-passing.
Australia — Bandwagoning on economics, balancing on security — a genuine hedge.
Portugal — Bandwagoning with elements of specializing.
Slovakia — Jackal bandwagoning.
Ireland — Buck-passing masked as hiding.
Finland — Hiding on China while balancing on Russia.
South Korea — Shifting from balancing toward bandwagoning for profit.
Canada — Transcending in doctrine, buck-passing in conduct.
United Kingdom — Hiding from trade-offs, drifting toward bandwagoning.
Germany — Balancing in rhetoric, bandwagoning in substance.
Spain — Bandwagoning for profit, fused with buck-passing.
Thus, the wave of visits has been formed by buck-passing equilibria reinforcing each other, with plenty of encouragement from Beijing’s strategists. The aggregate effect has been to dissipate the West’s collective leverage, because leaders can’t agree on what they’re trying to do, much less how to do it together. Don’t any of these guys know how to balance?
Astute readers will notice one leader missing from the above list: Emmanuel Macron, whose fourth state visit to China in December 2025 came closest to balancing and showcased both the limits of engagement and the possibility of disciplined post-visit conduct. Examining in retrospect what he did differently illuminates the dynamics of the current phase of the geoeconomic struggle between the CCP and the West.
Macron strikes a balance
The French president’s trip was conventional in form, with nearly 40 CEOs in tow, ten sectors identified for “crossed investments,” and letters of intent signed. He accepted the Party-state’s full choreography, including a rare courtesy escort by Xi Jinping to Sichuan, a ping-pong photo-op, and Brigitte Macron at the panda centre. As Le Monde’s Harold Thibault drily observed, the Macrons “willingly indulged in two classics of Chinese diplomacy — at the cost of entering a game where Beijing holds the cards.” A French diplomat quoted by Le Point on the eve of the visit grumbled that “we have the feeling of being a simple variable of adjustment in the Sino-American relationship.”
Macron returned with no Airbus order — a 500-aircraft package had been on the table for months but Beijing held it back, with French analysts correctly inferring it would be kept in reserve for leverage in trade negotiations with Trump — and no relief on European brandy or pork. But France’s president did some things differently both on Chinese soil and at home after. The Élysée said the goal “wasn’t to stack contracts, but to do politics — that is, to deliver messages.” A presidential adviser framed the substantive ambition more precisely: to “clarify the rules of the game” directly with the CCP’s General Secretary.
In Beijing, standing beside Xi at the joint press appearance, Macron warned of the risk of “disintegration of the international order.” He told Xi that such global trade imbalances “are not sustainable — they carry the risk of triggering a financial crisis.” Macron also pressed Xi to rein in Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. The Chinese leader bluntly refused. Publicly, Xi rejected “any irresponsible and discriminatory accusations” and, in a sharper register, told Macron to “stand on the right side of history.” That’s Party-speak for “we’re now powerful enough we can ignore your lectures.” French readouts say that privately, Xi claimed China lacked the means to push his fellow autocrat toward a ceasefire — dubious, given that NATO considers the PRC the “decisive enabler” of the war.
None of those were concessions. But Macron did extract clarity, and that has utility: it makes the Chinese position legible in a way the usual fog of “constructive role” boilerplate doesn’t.
The clarity matters all the more because the substantive picture had grown sharper just before the visit. Ukrainian intelligence said Chinese Yaogan reconnaissance satellites had overflown western Ukraine during a major Russian barrage in October 2025, with their data passed to Russia for targeting strikes inside Ukraine. We now know that around the time of the French state visit, China was training Russian troops that were then sent to Ukraine. The “neutrality” Xi continues to invoke is a fiction Macron rightly declined to dignify.
Then in Chengdu, standing at a podium at Sichuan University in front of Chinese state media the day before flying home, Macron urged Chinese students not to “yield to divisions” and autarky. He named and rejected the framing Beijing has spent years cultivating: “Many people will explain to you that Europe is old, arrogant, rich, and despises the Global South. But all of that — these are inventions, theories.” And then a line that shouldn’t have been deliverable in that room: “One is only free if one is free to know oneself. Academic freedom must be cherished, the freedom of teaching and research… let us not yield to the sirens of prohibition.” He told Chinese students to read Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo, even as their universities grow ever more controlled and censored. This was a Western leader using a CCP-controlled platform to contradict three of its central narratives. It’s rare.
While Macron was in Beijing, the Party-state dispatched a Xinjiang delegation to Paris to spin a “return to normal” in the Uyghur region — the kind of choreography that usually works, but that Macron’s Chengdu speech ran directly against.
Then came the post-visit escalation. In an interview with Les Echos, Macron said the quiet part out loud. He described China as “striking at the heart of the European industrial and innovation model” and said Europe was “caught between” Trump’s tariffs and Chinese overcapacity — “a matter of life and death for European industry. We have become the adjustment market.” He said he told Xi that without movement on the surplus, “we Europeans would be forced, in the very next months, to take strong measures and to de-cooperate, like the United States, for example tariffs on Chinese products.” He then amplified those French-language messages in a Financial Times op-ed: “Protection against unfair competition is the foundation of resilience… We must not be naive: a credible protection strategy requires that we have the means to defend ourselves against those who break the rules.”
Shifting Europe from dithering to defending
Macron has a crucial institutional ally in European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Trade is an exclusive EU competence, so the tough calls on China fall to the Commission, which also makes it the buck-catcher of choice for member states. At the EU-China summit in July 2025 — shortened to a day at China’s request — she told Xi to his face that the relationship had hit “a clear inflection point” and that trade “must become more balanced.” To his credit, Macron noted he had coordinated his messages in Bejing and after with Von der Leyen, who Chinese officials have been trying to sideline.
EU timing has reinforced Macron’s framing of the China challenge. The day he arrived in Beijing, the Commission published its new economic security doctrine. The week after he left, Brussels released the positive arm of its “Made in Europe” Industrial Accelerator Act, including local manufacturing quotas for foreign investment designed to prevent “screwdriver factories.” Macron’s post-visit tone slotted into that institutional rhythm rather than against it.
It’s an indicator of how far Europe-China relations have deteriorated that Macron himself has shifted to this stance. Back in 2024, Member of the European Parliament Raphaël Glucksmann penned a prosecutorial open letter on Macron’s previous seven years of engaging China, asking: “what have you obtained from your accommodation strategy? Nothing but symbolic homages flattering your pride.” That still stings. France’s bilateral deficit with China has nearly doubled over the decade of Macron’s presidency, to €47 billion, accounting for nearly half of France’s total trade deficit. “For China, France today appears as a ‘has been’ country,” wrote Emmanuel Lincot in Le Figaro the day Xi met Macron.
While he’s a recent convert to the firmer response that European China analysts and the Commission have been pushing for years, Macron’s post-visit performance nonetheless helpfully shows the prescription is operationally possible. A leader can accept the protocol and still refuse the script — take the panda lunch and the ping-pong photo, still tell Chinese students to cherish academic freedom, then warn that tariffs are coming if nothing changes.
That makes Macron the only European national leader who’s tried to convert hedging into balancing at the collective level. As his predecessor De Gaulle said, “deliberation is the work of many men. Action, of one alone.” But Macron alone lacks the power to balance China, so his viable action is coalition entrepreneurship: to manufacture balance out of 27 reluctant hedgers, with France, the European Commission and likeminded states as agenda-setters. His objectives, in ascending ambition, are to:
reframe China as a systemic rebalancing challenge;
re-tool the EU with fast-acting, more potent defensive instruments;
protect vulnerable French sectors that are typically first to taste PRC retaliation; and
ultimately use China as a lever to push forward European strategic autonomy.
Escape from a buck-passing equilibrium requires changing the perception that produces it. If Europe can absorb the costs of accommodation indefinitely, buck-passing is rational; if the threat is urgent and existential, balancing becomes the bitter pill everyone’s got to swallow. The cognitive preconditioning that the Commission, Macron and transatlantic China hands have been working on for years has finally yielded a unanimous diagnosis. As ECFR’s Andrew Small framed it before this month’s Brussels summit, the question for leaders is no longer whether China is a systemic challenge, but whether Europe will act at the scale and speed the threat demands.
With nobody at the European Council table last week still arguing the trade imbalance is benign, perceptions have flipped toward offence-dominance — the necessary condition for balancing. But the collective-action problem that produces buck-passing remains unsolved. And Macron may lack the power to finish the job: he’s running European grand strategy from domestic survival mode, his ideas outrunning his authority, with a plausibly hostile National Rally (Rassemblement national) succession raising uncertainty over whether the strategic autonomy project will survive him.
What to do? A future article will dive into the details. For now, to illuminate the path, let us return to De Gaulle:
“Always choose the hardest way, on it you will not find opponents.”
With the assistance of Patricia Xavier and Joseph Widacki.
For more on the brewing EU-China storm, read Noah Barkin:
