Negative thinking not good for China-EU ties

Four months ago, when the property management company announced that the rooftop of my apartment building in Brussels would undergo renovation for the next 10 months, excluding rainy days, I wondered why it would take so long, because in China it would just take a few weeks to complete the job.

It turned out that only a few workers showed up twice a week, and none came to work even on quite a few sunny days.

That to me is like a microcosm example of why the European Union has become less competitive today compared with the United States or China — as detailed in the EU competitiveness report by Mario Draghi, former Italian prime minister and European Central Bank president.

The eurozone economy is not doing that well. The International Monetary Fund has forecast that the eurozone will grow by only 0.8 percent and 1.2 percent in the next two years, compared with 1.8 percent and 1.7 percent by the US and about 4 percent by China.

To find a scapegoat, some EU politicians have started blaming China for the EU's economic woes, whining about everything from trade deficits to export controls to market access. In doing so, they forgot that the EU had enjoyed consecutive trade surplus with China for 20 years before 1996 and still has a surplus in service trade.

The EU was totally comfortable with that, and China never complained about the deficits.

That's why it was especially ironic for the EU to point fingers at China for its trade surplus when it tried to convince the Donald Trump administration that the EU's trade surplus with the US should not be a concern.

It is also no secret that for decades, European and other Western companies pocketed the lion's share of the profits from the trade and investment partnerships with Chinese companies. And the Chinese companies never complained about that.

The EU is not as open as it claims to be. It has built many trade and investment barriers for Chinese companies, from arms embargo to banning Huawei 5G to restricting ASML from selling its advanced chip-making equipment to China, not to mention the many screening mechanisms it has introduced in recent years to target Chinese companies.

China has warmly welcomed European, US and Japanese carmakers to "flood" the Chinese market with their "overcapacities", to borrow the latest catchphrase of some EU politicians.

However, when Chinese-made electric vehicles (EVs) debuted in the EU market, EU politicians immediately began fearmongering about Chinese products. Some described Chinese-made EVs as national security threats while one member of European Parliament claimed on Euronews on the weekend that Chinese-made EVs are of poor quality, something that even Tesla founder Elon Musk would disagree with.

China has proved wrong the curse that developing countries such as China are condemned to low-end and labor-intensive industries. More developing economies, from Asia to Africa to Latin America, are likely to follow suit.

I think EU politicians are obsessed with the few negatives in EU-China relations. Therefore, they refuse to see the big picture, and end up squandering huge opportunities to achieve great economic success through deepened cooperation with China.

The EU's latest "de-risking" from China strategy could very well be shooting itself in the foot, because China could contribute so much to the growth of the EU's economy and help it achieve green transition. By repeating that toxic rhetoric day and night over the past few years, the EU stands to lose a lot.

I once told some Europeans, in a lighter vein, that problems exist in any relationship, between best friends and even husbands and wives, but if you keep bringing up the negative aspects every day, the friendship and marriage might not last very long.

China and the EU should focus on the positives by deepening cooperation. Successful cooperation has overwhelmingly been the big picture in EU-China relations over the past 50 years. Yes, you could and should talk about the other issues but based on mutual respect, and should never let those issues derail the overall relationship.

That is what China and the EU should do.

The author is chief of China Daily EU Bureau based in Brussels.