This week, Xi Jinping embarks on his first European tour in five years, visiting France,

Serbia and Hungary.

Unsurprisingly, his trip and his choice of host has become a source of contention, with the CCP and its European sympathisers claiming that Xi is just trying to repair EU-China relations following months of escalating trade tensions, while more sceptical commentators claim that Xi aims to divide the continent further and exploit intra-European fractures.

So we thought that now would be a good time to take a look at how European attitudes towards

China differ, by looking at a couple of the most pro and anti-China countries in Europe, as well as where the two main European heavyweights, France and Germany, fall on this spectrum.

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Let's start with the most pro-China countries in Europe, Hungary and Serbia, two of the three countries that Xi is visiting this week.

Now, Vucic and Orban like China for two reasons.

Firstly, unlike the EU, which insists on members upholding rule of law to receive funds, the CCP doesn't impose any conditions on investment, thanks to China's stated policy of non-interventionism.

This simultaneously allows Vucic and Orban to receive copious amounts of investment and legitimises their illiberal policies.

And perhaps as a result, the Hungarian public is one of the most pro-China in Europe.

But Hungary actually became the first EU member state to join China's Belt and Road

Initiative back in 2015, which includes the development of a high-speed railway that connects

Belgrade and Budapest.

And only a few months ago, BYD, China's biggest electric vehicle company, announced its intention to build its first European factory in Hungary.

Similarly, Serbia received nearly 20 billion euros in investment from Chinese companies in 2021 alone.

And Chinese state-owned banks have provided billions more in infrastructure loans.

In fact, the Balkans in general have received a lot of investment from Beijing and are sometimes framed as the front door into Europe from the East.

It's not just the money, though.

Both Orban and Vucic opportunistically play off their relationship with China against the EU, by foregrounding China as a viable alternative.

For example, with Serbia's EU accession talks stalled, last October Vucic and Xi signed a free trade agreement.

Here, Vucic explicitly argued that Serbia needed to ensure its economic survival and consider its future before becoming an EU member.

Serbia also received an invitation to the next BRICS summit, and there's some speculation that Xi's visit this week may include a formal invitation to join BRICS.

Both Serbia and Hungary also support China when it comes to the One China policy, i.e.

Taiwan.

Hungary's motivation here is apparently economic.

In 2022, days after Hungary's foreign minister declared its support for the One China policy, the Chinese battery maker CATL announced that it will be building a 7.3 billion euro battery plant in the Hungarian city of Debrecen, the largest industrial investment in Hungary's history.

Vucic, on the other hand, apparently sees parallels between Taiwan and Kosovo, as illegitimate breakaway states that have unilaterally moved towards independence with the encouragement of the West.

So in the same way that Vucic thinks that Serbia should be able to reclaim Kosovo, he thinks that China should also be able to reclaim Taiwan.

Anyway, let's move on to the two most anti-China countries in Europe.

As we see it, two plausible candidates are Lithuania and the UK.

Lithuania is an interesting one.

In the 2010s, Lithuania and many other Central and Eastern European countries were actually pretty pro-China and very keen on Chinese investment, which was, in turn, facilitated by China's 17 plus 1 initiative.

However, the mood soured during the pandemic, both because Europe was generally becoming more China-sceptic, but also because of China's hyper-Bellacose wolf-warrior diplomacy.

And Lithuania ended up on the receiving end of a lot of this in 2022, when it pulled out of the 17 plus 1 initiative and then invited Taiwan to set up an office in Vilnius under the name of Taiwan.

For context, to avoid violating Beijing's one-China principle, most governments require

Taiwanese entities to operate under the name Chinese Taipei.

This didn't amount to Lithuania recognising Taiwan as a state, but it nonetheless annoyed

China, who responded by recalling their ambassador to Lithuania and ordering Lithuania's ambassador to leave Beijing.

And when Lithuania refused to back down, China upped the pressure, banning export permits for Lithuanian producers and warning French and German firms that they wouldn't accept imports with Lithuanian components.

China's foreign ministry then accused Lithuania of anti-Semitism and children's rights abuses, and the state-run Global Times penned an editorial describing Lithuania as just a mouse or even a flea under the feet of a fighting elephant.

Unsurprisingly, Lithuania has probably been the EU's most vocal China critic since.

And last year, Lithuania was basically the only European country calling for a total economic decoupling with China instead of so-called de-risking.

Now it's worth noting that the Baltics are generally pretty anti-China these days.

But that's probably because they sense that China is tacitly supporting Russia's campaign in Ukraine, which they obviously don't like.

When it comes to the UK, we've done a whole video on this over on our UK channel, which is linked in the description.

But the TLDR is that the UK has gone from being one of the most pro-China countries in Europe in the 2010s to one of the most anti-China today.

Now there are a whole variety of reasons for this, but one of the biggest reasons is China's crackdown in Hong Kong.

For obvious historical reasons, this had more of an effect on China's image in the UK than it did in the rest of Europe, and turned then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who previously described himself as fervently Sinophile, into one of the most anti-China politicians in Europe.

And the UK was even the only big European country to boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics.

Finally, let's talk about France and Germany.

France and Germany are probably both more pro-China than the European median, but for very different reasons.

Macron thinks that Europe needs to maintain good relations with China for geopolitical reasons.

Namely, to maintain distance with the US, and avoid getting dragged into the escalating

US-China Cold War.

Scholz on the other hand wants to maintain good relations with China for economic reasons.

German companies, especially German car companies, have developed deep commercial interests in

China, and a full on decoupling would seriously exacerbate Germany's already serious economic woes.

And this divide has been fundamentally bad news for European cohesion.

Many European countries are irritated by both Macron's apparent affability toward Xi, and by Scholz's resistance to any substantial de-risking.

But on top of that, France and Germany themselves are constantly bickering over the EU's China policy.

The most recent point of tension is over-protectionism.

That's because Macron wants to spend European money protecting industries from cheap Chinese alternatives, especially electric vehicles.

Scholz resists this though, in part because he's worried that this could be the start of a slippery slope towards a full on EU-China trade war, which will be bad news for a number of big German companies.

Anyway, the point we're trying to make here is that even if Xi is trying to divide and conquer Europe with his trip, the best way for Europe to safeguard against this would be just better cohesion in the first place.

There's definitely going to be new developments with this story though, so keep an eye out for future changes.

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