Europe's ambassador in Beijing and the EU's 27 ambassadors co-wrote an opinion piece titled ‘EU-China ties vital amid global crisis’ to mark the anniversary of the relations
LONDON/BRUSSELS - Earlier this month, Europe’s ambassador in Beijing submitted to Chinese censorship.
Chapuis told a news conference the omission was “regrettable;” his boss, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, subsequently spoke out against censorship by China’s state controlled media. Borrell also said that accepting the cut “was not the right decision to take,” though Chapuis kept his job. In a campaign of increasingly assertive and at times aggressive diplomacy, China has sought to pressure European countries that criticise its handling of the outbreak, Reuters found. At a time when Europe’s ties with the United States are already strained by President Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ policy, the fallout from the coronavirus underscores how the EU is caught between two powers - needing both, but reluctant to side with either.
China’s foreign ministry and its officials declined to respond to questions posed by Reuters for this story. The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, declined to comment on the diplomatic contacts.This year was meant to be an important one for Sino-EU ties. Until the virus emerged in Wuhan in December, the EU had started to make progress with Beijing after tense summits in 2016 and 2017 ended without any joint declarations.
Spurred by Xi’s calls for the country to be more imposing, Chinese diplomats have pushed back against criticism of its handling of the outbreak, in every forum from social media to TV, newspaper op-eds, and diplomatic correspondence. Janka Oertel, head of the Asia programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said China is transferring its domestic approach to controlling public perception to the diplomatic arena.
The internal version of the report, dated April 20 and reviewed by Reuters after parts were previewed by Politico, noted as a main finding that “China has continued to run a global disinformation campaign to deflect blame for the outbreak of the pandemic and improve its international image.” China’s close relationships with such states make it harder for them to stand up to Beijing when Brussels wants them to, EU officials and diplomats say.
China’s ‘mask diplomacy’ also spurred a dramatic change of tone from Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis. Before the pandemic, he had called for the removal of the Chinese ambassador after a threatening letter from the embassy over a Czech lawmaker’s planned visit to Taiwan.
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