China abruptly cancelled two high-level meetings with the European Union this month, a diplomatic snub that underscores how badly relations between the world's second- and third-largest economies have deteriorated. The cancellations, first reported by the Financial Times, were made at short notice and without a public explanation from Beijing.
The scrapped talks were not minor. One was a ministerial-level dialogue on digital policy — an area where the EU and China have clashed repeatedly over data, technology standards and market access. The other involved Olof Skoog, the deputy secretary-general of the EU's diplomatic service, the European External Action Service.
Neither Brussels nor Beijing has spelled out why the meetings fell through, but the backdrop is hard to miss. The European Commission has described the EU's trade relationship with China as "unsustainable," pointing to a goods deficit that has ballooned to nearly €360 billion in 2025, up from €305 billion the year before — the equivalent of roughly a billion euros a day.
Brussels has signalled it is prepared to act, floating new tariffs on Chinese goods and complaining about manufacturing overcapacity that floods European markets with cheap exports, from electric vehicles to steel. Beijing has hit back with its own trade-defence cases targeting EU brandy, pork and dairy, and has tightened export controls on rare earths and permanent magnets — materials European industry cannot easily source elsewhere.
Both sides moved quickly to play down the rupture. The Commission said the cancelled meetings were "in the process of being rescheduled." China's foreign ministry spokesperson, Lin Jian, told reporters that "China and the EU are maintaining communication on relevant dialogues."
The reassurances only partly mask the strain. 2025 marked 50 years of EU-China diplomatic relations, and last summer's anniversary summit in Beijing was pointedly cut to a single day — a sign of how little either side expected to achieve. Cancelling working-level meetings outright, rather than letting them proceed and papering over differences, is a sharper signal still.
For the EU, the cancellations are a reminder of how little leverage it sometimes has over a partner it cannot afford to alienate. China is indispensable to European supply chains and to the green transition, yet it is also the source of the trade imbalance and industrial competition that Brussels increasingly frames as a threat. The pulled meetings suggest Beijing is willing to use access to its leadership as a bargaining chip — withholding engagement to register displeasure. With tariffs, rare-earth controls and a yawning deficit all unresolved, the relationship is drifting toward confrontation, and the diplomatic channels meant to manage that drift are the first thing to be switched off.
