China has failed to rethink its approach to managing relations with the European Union ahead of a key summit this week, says National Dong Hwa University assistant professor Zsuzsa Anna Ferenczy.
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00:00 If we're going into this summit already expecting that nothing concrete is going to come out of it,
00:05 why hold a summit at all?
00:07 It is important to hold a summit and to keep channels of communication open in order to
00:13 keep trying to get the message across. Whether the message gets across does not really depend
00:19 on China as much as it depends on us and how consistent we are with our messaging.
00:24 It's really thanks to China to a great extent that we are able to move closer together because
00:30 we are frustrated on the European side with how little China has done to address our grievances.
00:37 Do you think that the EU has understood China's concerns?
00:42 That's a good question. What are China's concerns? Because what we've seen coming out of China is a
00:48 very assertive approach. I fail to see how the two sides can actually converge having such different
00:56 language and such different expectations from each other. So I believe that the European side
01:02 has been trying to adjust and recalibrate its approach. I fail to see how China is rethinking
01:09 its approach towards Europe and I completely fail to see how China has understood how important
01:17 the Ukraine issue is for Europeans. So not only does China not play a constructive role in that
01:24 sense, but China has been refusing to even talk about it.
01:28 You mentioned how Ukraine is one of obviously the major grievances the EU has in this relationship.
01:35 How big of a role will Taiwan play in these talks?
01:41 Taiwan remains a difficult issue to discuss with China because China refuses any dialogue
01:48 on issues that it considers of core national interest. Given how different the two positions
01:57 are, I don't expect Taiwan to really be prominent on the agenda, but I do expect for the European
02:05 side to maintain that position that Taiwan is important, that strategically speaking,
02:12 the EU needs to take into consideration the impact of tension growing in the Indo-Pacific.
02:20 [BLANK_AUDIO]