EU to unveil new China relations
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European Union leaders convened on Thursday to iron out the EU's long-awaited new strategic goals toward China and other emerging economies.
The summit was held amid the bloc's appointment of the new head of its mission in China on Wednesday and approval of entering into a Free Trade Agreement with South Korea.
The actions, ahead of a string of summits between European and Asian leaders, have signaled that the EU has already taken actions to set up stronger and closer ties with Asian economies.
As of late Thursday, the debates on external policies were still under way. Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, is expected to announce the results at the end of the summit.
On Wednesday he said that the EU was "punching now below our weight of 500 million people, and 22 percent of world GDP."
Van Rompuy believed that the power is now shifting with new emerging players, and new interests coming into the arena. "We have strategic partners, and now we need a strategy," the president said.
While some had advocated earlier on that the EU should take a tougher stance toward the new players including China, Serge Abou, the EU ambassador to China ruled it out.
"The EU's upcoming strategy does not mean the bloc will employ a tougher stance to newcomers, but rather listen to different voices to identify solutions to our common challenges," Abou said on Thursday.
At the beginning of this month, the bloc's foreign envoy, Catherine Ashton, spent a week in China holding strategic dialogues with her Chinese counterparts.
Abou said this strategy will focus more on "multi-lateral solutions" such as the emergence of economies like China, India, Brazil and others and the opportunities and challenges they face along with EU member nations.
But Jin Ling, an expert on EU studies at the China Institute of International Studies, noted that the evolving Sino-EU relations will neither be harmonious - as in the "honeymoon" during 1995 and 2005 - nor be filled with so much conflict and competition like what the EU thinks after 2006.
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