Borrell's visit expected to dispel EU's misgivings: China Daily editorial

European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell's scheduled visit to China from Thursday to Saturday, as reported by the media, will help Beijing and Brussels to address the issues hindering the growth of Sino-EU economic and trade relations, and make preparations for this year's EU-China Summit.

Borrell's earlier visits to China had to be canceled for unexpected reasons. While in April, he was forced to defer his visit after testing positive for COVID-19, he canceled his visit scheduled for early July at the last minute.

Borrell's visit to China comes at a time when the EU has launched an investigation into China's subsidies for manufacturers of electric vehicles, saying they are responsible for keeping down prices of Chinese EVs in Europe, which has strained Sino-EU trade relations.

It is therefore hoped that Borrell, whose stance on the EU's China policy can be described as pragmatic but indefinable, will use his visit to gain an objective view of China and help the bloc's policymakers to avoid strategic misjudgments about China. Which is crucial because China is one of the EU's most important partners in multiple fields including trade and climate change, rather than being a threat.

That China and the EU have maintained communication over the past few months despite their differences shows they want to resolve bilateral disputes, instead of making them the defining features of their ties. They want to properly handle their differences also because they are aware of the United States' attempts to drive a wedge between them and the immense damage "de-risking", which is essentially "decoupling", could cause to their economies. They are also aware of the fact that their common interests far outweigh their differences.

Paradoxically, their differences, including their different development phases, economic structures and systems, can be traced to their economic complementarity and are the reason why they have been learning from each other's cultures and civilizations. Yet their differences did not prevent them from learning from and cooperating with each other in the past and should not do so now.

It is noteworthy that the two sides have begun working together to resume strategic dialogues in various fields and set the stage for a meeting between senior Chinese and EU leaders later this year.

Thanks to their concerted efforts, the China-EU high-level exchanges have largely maintained a sound momentum in spite of some brief interludes, and both sides now believe cooperation is the most important feature of China-EU relations.

As Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Borrell, on the phone in August, China and the EU should hold more institutional dialogue to make up for the lost exchanges during the three years of the COVID-19 pandemic, and inject new impetus into China-EU comprehensive strategic partnership.