The Cassandra of Brussels: Von der Leyen's Unheeded China Warning
Three years after a landmark speech, the EU's much-touted 'de-risking' from China remains a bureaucratic fantasy, paralyzed by national self-interest.
There is a particular kind of futility in being right too early, especially in Brussels. More than three years ago, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen delivered a remarkably lucid speech diagnosing the continent's hazardous economic relationship with China. She spoke of a new strategy of “de-risking” to counter Beijing’s distorting subsidies, coercive trade practices, and relentless push for global dependency. It was a clear warning, but one delivered to an audience seemingly incapable of listening.
The core of her message was economic realism. Von der Leyen pointed to China’s state-driven ambition to dominate key industries, its forced technology transfers, and its monopolisation of critical raw materials. The logic of free markets, she argued, was being superseded by an imperative for security and control. The speech was praised for its clarity, yet its primary targets—the EU’s own member states—appeared to treat it as little more than an academic exercise.
What followed was a masterclass in European inertia. The call to diversify trade was not just ignored; it was actively defied as the bloc’s trade imbalance with China deepened. By 2025, in a grim milestone, every single member state was running a trade deficit with Beijing. The concept of de-risking, so clear in theory, dissolved into a fog of competing national interests, with some governments simply shifting responsibility to private companies that had no financial incentive to abandon the vast Chinese market.
The few attempts at collective action exposed the Union’s deep fractures. The Commission managed to push through tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, but only after a bitter fight that revealed the EU’s disunity. Germany, ever protective of its car industry’s access to China, aggressively worked to build a coalition against the measures. Spain, after a prime ministerial visit to Beijing, conveniently flipped its position from support to abstention.
Other ambitious proposals met a quiet death in the corridors of power. The Commission failed to convince capitals to grant it more authority over sensitive exports, a power they jealously guard. An economic security strategy came and went, and a plan for screening outbound investments was abandoned after political backlash. Even the Anti-Coercion Instrument, a tool designed with China in mind, has sat unused, gathering dust while Beijing’s economic pressure continues unabated.
The paralysis stems from a simple, overriding fear: retaliation. Beijing has made it clear it would respond to any robust European measures, and the memory of China’s curbs on rare earth exports serves as a potent deterrent. This fear of a tit-for-tat trade war is what truly unites the 27 member states, leading them to avoid even mentioning China by name in their summit conclusions. They prefer to send the Commission to do the “dirty work,” then undermine its efforts when their own commercial interests are threatened.
The diagnosis of the China problem was never the issue. The illness lies within the European Union itself, an entity so fundamentally divided that it cannot muster the collective will for consequential action. One is left to wonder if an institution built on consensus and compromise is structurally capable of confronting a strategic rival who plays by an entirely different set of rules.
Written by Martina Kirchner martina.kirchner@alpineweekly.com