“Some say that the 2024 U.S. elections were not a transfer of power as much as a true regime change for the Europeans,” says Wang Yiwei. It’s not easy to decipher what China thinks of Donald Trump’s geopolitical whirlwind, but there are ways to gain insight. One can turn, for example, to the Academy of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. Wang Yiwei is its vice-president, in addition to being the director of the School of International Studies at the Renmin University of China. He’s also familiar with Europe, having spent several years there as a diplomat.
Wang welcomes EL PAÍS in the academy’s entryway, where there is a shelf full of books about Xi, crowned with a plate emblazoned with the official’s face. Books like Chronicle of the Eradication of Poverty in Villages Inspected and Guided by Xi Jinping are visible, and in the back, a corkboard displays articles written by the academy’s scholars. In September 2022, on another visit, it displayed a note about the war in Ukraine: “NATO exports turmoil and instability to the world.”
A month ago, Wang was at the Munich Security Conference when U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance delivered a harsh ideological attack on Europe. His words served as confirmation of the abyss that has formed between Washington and Brussels. The event’s chairperson Christoph Heusgen spoke at its closing event through tears, Wang says. “That has never happened,” he adds.
A regular attendee of the conference, Wang interpreted Vance’s diatribe as a direct message from Trump to the Europeans: “Take care of yourselves, I’m busy. Secondly, we no longer share common values.” Security and values, the two pillars that have sustained the bond between the United States and the EU, “have changed fundamentally,” Wang says. “This causes transatlantic relations to be historically undermined.”
The alliance’s rupture is perhaps the most relevant of the interpretations provided by Chinese academics who were consulted for this article. But there are others. Globalization, they say, is dead — “the Washington consensus has collapsed,” says Wang — we are entering a new world, and there is a historic opportunity for rapprochement between China and the E.U.
According to these academics, the E.U. must sit down at the negotiating table and the idea that Chinese peacekeeping troops must be sent to Ukraine is gaining strength. They also believe that Ukraine will have to cede territory to Russia. After all, China never returned the territories it annexed during the Qing dynasty to Moscow. “Not even now that China has become powerful,” says Wang.
The expert believes that achieving peace in Ukraine would be an opportunity to negotiate an “architecture of Euro-Asian security, from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” He adds: “It is the moment in which the E.U. must think in a new way about China. Considering that Russia is an enemy, and now the United States seems like an enemy — if China is also an enemy, everyone on the planet is an enemy.”
Trump’s plan, he continues, is to withdraw from Europe, pulling back to focus on internal challenges and to combat interests once aligned with Joe Biden’s administration, which he blames, among other things, for the war in Ukraine. According to Wang, Trump plans to stop the conflict in the short term and prepare for “war or competition” with China in the long term.
In coming years, Wang believes he’ll project Washington as a regional power on the American continents, hence his insistence on emerging victorious over the United States’ neighbors, from Canada to Greenland. In Wang’s opinion, the slogan “Make American Great Again” harkens a desired return to a 19th century United States. “It seeks to institute a new system of globalization with America at the center,” he says. The tariff war must be seen in this context: Trump firing shots at all parties, including China, the country that most benefited from the previous globalization system.
Beijing has responded with countermeasures, accusing Washington of maintaining a “two-faced” policy towards China, and presenting itself to the world as a haven of stability amid global turmoil. Trump and Xi have yet to meet, even via a conciliatory phone call, since the declaration of the new tariffs.
Waiting for the 100-day mark
“We are waiting out the first 100 days since Trump’s investiture to be clear on his true plans,” says Professor Li Lifan, sub-director of the department of Russian and Central Asian studies at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, one of the country’s most reputable think tanks, which receives municipal government funds.
Li is struck by the change in Washington’s treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Suddenly, he was being called a dictator, a title once “reserved for [Russian President] Vladimir Putin and [Belarusian] Alexander Lukashenko.” Biden called Xi a dictator, a charge that sparked a diplomatic situation.
On Zelenskiy’s tense meeting in the White House, Li adds, “In the end, J.D. Vance was very provocative. He brought up a lot of negative issues.” His takeaway is that “it’s very strange how U.S. policy has changed so quickly. In the next four years, there is going to be a big shift.” In his view, the planet is moving towards a “multipolar order” in which Washington no longer wants to exercise hegemonic power.
“Multipolar order” is an expression that China and Russia use as a synonym for one in which Washington no longer dominates. It’s the central idea behind a February 2022 joint statement signed by Xi and Putin that was emitted three weeks before Russian tanks invaded Ukraine. The same document established a “no-limits” friendship between the two powers. Three years later, Li believes that China could wind up sending peacekeeping troops to Ukraine, if the United Nations backs the move.
Wang says those soldiers would be a “security guarantee” in a ceasefire agreement that otherwise fails to inspire confidence on the part of Ukraine and the E.U. “They need China,” he says. “Russia doesn’t trust NATO troops, and the United States is not going to send soldiers. Who can send them? China.” The proposal — on which Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi did not comment when asked at a press conference last week — raises another issue, according to the specialist: “Psychologically, Europeans cannot accept the presence of Chinese soldiers on European territory.”
But “the world has changed,” Wang continues. The new geopolitical theater will be unforgiving, as indicated by Trump’s negotiations with Putin, which the academic characterizes as “You take Ukraine, I’ll take Panama and Greenland.” In this context, Wang sees a possible alignment forming between China and the E.U., to which he counsels leaving behind the view of his country as a “systemic rival.”
“We can cooperate on security matters,” says Wang. Although, when asked about the huge differences between the two when it comes to values like human rights, freedom of expression and liberal democracy, he replies, “We can talk about that in the future.”
“I’m very optimistic about E.U.-China relations,” says Li. He believes that Brussels will maintain its policy of harm reduction, but does see signs of it thawing, such as the lifting by the European Parliament of restrictions that block its legislators from meeting with certain Chinese officials. He says that’s a “very positive sign” and thinks that Beijing will respond in kind. With Trump withdrawing from international treaties like the climate change-focused Paris Agreement, Li adds, the environment could be one area of cooperation.
Navigating the new world will be complicated, with some “allies” turning their backs and “systemic rivals” offering to lend a hand. China also finds itself in complex times, and there are weak spots in the country’s positioning. On one hand, it has denounced Washington’s intensification of commercial and technological war. On the other, it maintains values associated with what Wang calls the “populist revolution.” Beijing and Moscow’s main ally in Europe is Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who considers Trump his “comrade in arms.” At the same time, in Beijing diplomatic circles, much is being said about the Chinese fear that the rehabilitation of Russia is a Washington plot to counteract China’s rise.
Perhaps these doubts will be resolved in upcoming high-level meetings. Xi and Trump could see each other in April, some media sources have reported. In May, Xi will visit Putin in Moscow for the 80th anniversary celebrations of the end of the Second World War. Will Trump also attend? Wang believes that the commemoration of the end of the war in China, which will take place in September, could be the setting for a meeting between Xi, Putin and Trump: the very image of the new world order.
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