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The European Union has done something it spent two decades avoiding: it has put in writing that China is a threat. Not merely a competitor, not just the "systemic rival" of careful diplomatic vintage, but a "critical long-term strategic challenge" to Europe's economy and security alike.
The verdict landed in a document adopted on 13 July by the bloc's 27 foreign ministers — passed without a press release, without a headline, the sixteenth of twenty-two items on the last Council agenda before the summer break. Titled the "Assessment of the EU's Strategic Environment," it is meant to feed directly into a new European Security Strategy. Its language is unusually direct. Beijing, the ministers warn, holds "asymmetric advantages" over Europe — in trade imbalances, critical raw materials and technological dominance — and is ready to deploy them as leverage in pursuit of its own vision of the global order.
The paper goes further than any previous EU consensus on Beijing. It casts China as a "key enabler" of Russia's invasion of Ukraine — a phrase borrowed from NATO — and catalogues the Kremlin's hybrid campaign against Europe: sabotage of critical infrastructure, cyberattacks, espionage, satellite interference and information manipulation designed to erode public support for Kyiv.
The awkward truth sitting underneath the document is Europe's own entanglement. Days before ministers signed off, it emerged that Ukraine would be permitted to spend some €6 billion of its EU support loan on Chinese-made components for its drone fleet — meaning Beijing profits from both sides of the war it stands accused of enabling. China's dominance of the drone supply chain is near-total, and Europe has no quick alternative.
Where the strategy paper diagnoses, France and Germany want to act. Appearing together on 17 July, President Emmanuel Macron and Chancellor Friedrich Merz said they would draw up a common "roadmap" — targeted for the autumn, ahead of the October European Council — to confront China's trade practices. Macron declared that the two governments had "never been so convergent on China."
The numbers explain the urgency. The EU's goods-trade deficit with China reached roughly €360 billion in 2025. Merz went after the mechanism he blames: a yuan he says Beijing has held undervalued by 25 to 30 percent for years, subsidising Chinese exporters on top of vast state support. If the currency is fairly valued, Merz argued pointedly, there is no reason not to let it trade freely. Macron pressed for a tougher mandate for the European Commission to move faster on market investigations and to wield trade-defence instruments to protect European chemicals, machine-tool and automotive industries.
Brussels is adjusting its own machinery to match the rhetoric. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has tasked Denis Redonnet — a deputy director-general in the trade department and the Commission's chief trade enforcement officer — with steering the China response, a tacit admission that DG Trade was built to open markets, not defend them. Von der Leyen has also asked EU leaders for a clear mandate to rebalance the relationship, setting an October deadline to show results through dialogue before harder measures follow.
The difficulty is that Beijing can squeeze back. China controls the rare-earth supplies on which Europe's defence industry and green transition depend, and it has shown it will restrict them. The point was underlined this month when China imposed a sudden, temporary ban on helium exports — a gas vital for semiconductor manufacturing — as conflict in the Middle East tightened global supply. Because China re-exports Russian helium that the EU itself banned in 2024, the move lands squarely on European chipmakers. Nearly every instrument Brussels reaches for to protect its market invites a Chinese threat of retaliation.
For years, Europe's China policy was a study in strategic ambiguity — a hedge that let Germany sell cars and France sell luxury goods while Brussels issued position papers. That era is ending. Naming China a strategic threat in a formal, ministers-approved document shifts the political baseline: it is now the EU's official position, not the view of a hawkish minority. But a diagnosis is not a cure. The Franco-German roadmap is still unwritten, the Commission's new mandate still unagreed, and Europe's dependencies — rare earths, helium, drone parts — are real today while any industrial answer is years away. The test this autumn is whether Brussels can convert tough language into leverage before Beijing reminds it, once again, who controls the supply chains.
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