Is the EU-China investment deal dead? It was last week sunk down by 599 votes to 30 in the European Parliament, but that’s not being taken very seriously in Beijing if the national press is anything to go by. China’s state media is a fair proxy for what the famously opaque ruling party is thinking, and it has been calm in its analysis. All this offers an interesting insight into how China sees Europe.
For China’s press, European protests – even the vote – are just hot air. It points out that background work on the deal continues to go ahead. So the legal text for the supposedly dead EU-China deal is still being reviewed, finalised and translated into the EU’s 24 official languages – which will be early next year. By which point, Emmanuel Macron will be holding the European Council presidency. ‘I expect that the conversation surrounding the deal will return to impartiality and rationality’, said Zhou Xiaoyan, an Tsinghua University academic commented to Xinhua News Agency.
The feeling in China is that, for all of the drama in the European Parliament, the French and Germans want this to go ahead – and will get their way in the end.
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