De-risking: misguided loyalty pledge to Washington: China Daily editorial

Although EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has a distorted view of the Taiwan question as shown by his call for European navies to patrol the Taiwan Strait in the belief that the island is "part of our geostrategic perimeter to guarantee peace". He is at least clear-minded about the importance of economic and trade cooperation between China and the European Union, as well as risks that decoupling would pose to the closely interdependent economies.

In a recent interview with The Straits Times, Borrell elaborated on the infeasibility of decoupling Western economies from China. "Every day, our trade with China is around $2.7 billion. Every day! So, decoupling? Forget about it. If we tried to do that, we should produce a worldwide crisis".

The alternative the EU has now embraced in regard to its relations with China is "de-risking", a term put forward by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who in March called for reducing dependency on Chinese raw materials and green technology.

Yet how to put that concept into practice remains a question, given the move could be self-harming for the EU. Many Western companies have already suffered huge losses from the restrictions the US government has imposed on chip exports to China, which is the world's largest consumer of semiconductors. It is estimated that Europe's green transition will be impossible without China, which is by far the largest global producer of solar panels, batteries and the critical minerals that go into them. Even Borrell admitted in the interview that "where does de-risking end and decoupling begin? That is not clear".

All this makes the European rhetoric about reducing "excessive dependencies" on China sound more like a perfunctory pledge of allegiance to the US in its geopolitical game than a well-considered plan to best serve its economic interests.

The absurdity of the policy has been further revealed in recent findings published by the European Council on Foreign Relations, which show that a majority of Europeans see China as a "necessary partner" rather than a rival or adversary. This is in stark contrast to EU's strategic outlook which labeled China as a "systemic rival" and "economic competitor".

China and the EU are two major economies and massive markets, and both have gained immensely from their mutually beneficial cooperation over the past decades. Europe should exercise its strategic autonomy when handling its ties with China, rather than running Washington's erroneous errands to the detriment of its own interests.