EU's China policy reveals structural dependency and neoliberal blind spots amid global power shifts
Original framing: “Europe is blaming China’s economic rise for its own failures, think tank says” — South China Morning Post
Europe’s current anxiety over China’s rise echoes 19th-century fears of 'Yellow Peril' and 20th-century Cold War containment strategies, revealing a pattern of Western panic at rising non-Western powers. The 'China shock' narrative mirrors earlier moral panics about Japan’s economic ascent in the 1980s, which later proved overblown. Historically, Europe’s economic dominance was built on colonial extraction and industrial exploitation, a model now being challenged by China’s state-led capitalism. The Opium Wars (1839–1860) and the unequal treaties imposed on China set precedents for today’s trade imbalances.
The EU’s scapegoating of China reveals a deeper crisis of neoliberal governance, where decades of deregulation, austerity, and financialization have hollowed out Europe’s industrial base and left it vulnerable to multipolar competition.
This narrative obscures the historical continuity of colonial extraction and the complicity of European elites in shaping China’s rise as an export powerhouse. Yet the solution lies not in protectionism but in a radical reimagining of trade—one that centers green industrial policy, debt justice, and multipolar governance grounded in mutual accountability. Indigenous and Southern perspectives offer crucial correctives, framing economic systems as living relationships rather than zero-sum games. The trickster’s wisdom lies in exposing the absurdity of these rivalries, urging instead a collaborative unraveling of the systems that pit workers against each other across continents.