Consumer Policy in China

AEJ (2007) 5:171–179 DOI 10.1007/s10308-007-0117-3 E S S AY

China–EU: a new agenda

Etienne Reuter

Published online: 31 March 2007 # Springer-Verlag 2007

On 27th November 2006, Presidents Hu Jintao and George W. Bush had a telephone conversation. Hu had just returned from visits to India and Pakistan following the APEC summit in Hanoi a week before where the two Presidents had also met for bilateral talks. Bush was arriving at the Nato summit in Riga (Latvia). There was however no sign that the President of China was in any comparable direct contact with the leaders of Europe, of EU nations. China and the EU had had a summit meeting in Helsinki 6 weeks before. China’s Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao had attended and the EU was represented by the Prime Minister of Finland and the President of the European Commission. The joint statement emphasized the importance of high level political dialogue and consultations, but it is obvious that the EU does not talk to China at the same level as the US. And this is the case despite the fact that day to day relations between China and the US are much less serene than those between the EU and China. Diplomatic relations between the People’s Republic of China and the European Union as such started in 1975 with a visit to China by the then vice-president of the European Commission, Christopher Soames. The President of the Commission, Roy Jenkins visited China at the end of February 1979 and met with senior politicians, among them Deng Xiaoping, who was to emerge as the paramount leader. Deng, who had visited the US in late 1978, told Roy Jenkins that to him the European Community seemed to be coming together politically, economically, militarily, step by step. He wished to see a powerful, strong, united Europe which fitted into his concept of a world structured around specific poles of power. At that time the Soviet Union represented the central threat both to Europe and to China and he wondered whether the US was really...