Conference Agenda

The EU and China have contrasting human rights and development paradigms. The EU champions liberal, rights-based approaches that embed human rights in its domestic policies and global initiatives. Instruments like the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D) aim to integrate human rights into global supply chains, while initiatives such as the Global Gateway (GG) extend this strategy to infrastructural development. In contrast, China prioritises collective welfare through the "right to subsistence" (shengcun quan 生存权) domestically and emphasises non-interference and economic growth in its external development agenda, as exemplified by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). These ideological differences shape their external engagements and development strategies, particularly in Africa, Southeast Asia, and other regions. This study examines the external relations of the EU and China, analysing their distinct development strategies and their influence on partner regions. Focusing on the EU’s GG and China’s BRI, this study explores the role of human rights and sustainability in their infrastructure projects, highlighting their contrasting approaches. Using critical and comparative international law perspectives, with an emphasis on law and development, this paper evaluates external enforcement mechanisms for human rights. Ultimately, the study explores the broader implications of these divergent approaches to global governance frameworks, development policies, and EU-China relations. Using the context of geopolitical competition as a background to their evolving development paradigms, this analysis contributes to the literature on the EU’s role as a global development actor and the trajectory of its policies under its broader human rights frameworks.

EU-China relations are seeing it’s 50^th anniversary this year with the past ten years seeing drastic changes in the relations. The trust between the two entities has been going downwards ever since the EU defined China as systemic rival, partner and competitor at the same time. This positing has been seen by China on the higher level as unfriendly and threatening.

This paper reviews the official and media discursive interactions between China and the EU during 2014 and 2024 on the topic of EU and China’s role in the eyes of self and the other with content analysis and textural analysis to show the relations between the discourse positioning of EU on China and the Chinese responses. It then compares the discursive interactions with the general trends of economic vibrance and trends of cultural and people-to-people communication between China and the EU so that the impacts of discourse on the relations are examined.

This paper argues that there is an unneglectable gap between the Chinese interpretation of the EU’s discourse of China’s role and the EU’s real intention of this discourse. While the EU takes it for granted that verbalising and clarifying all layers of China’s role “logically” should be in a sense helpful for the relations as it offers clearer guides and categorization and separates the sensitive aspects with the zones for cooperation, in the Chinese diplomatic, linguistics, cultural and discursive context, the EU’s positioning of China conveys more hostile and aggressive messages in a more generalised sense, the “rivalry” sense “stands out” and caught attention of the audience and thus covered all aspects of EU-China relations. In another words, the speech space has played the trick in the relations and magnified the reserved attitudes of the EU on China to an extend that the bilateral relations have been harmed detrimentally.

This paper calls for more nuanced and timely adjustment of discourse and relevant policies, as well as legislation to coordinate the strategies, policies and discourse between China and the EU so that the two talks, acts and plans more in line and less against each other.

The EU has long positioned itself as a leading global development actor, emphasising its values- and rules-based approach and partnerships. Central to the EU’s external action are regions like its southern neighbourhood, including countries of the MENA region, where the EU seeks to promote its values and interests through initiatives such as the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and, more recently, the Global Gateway initiative. However, the EU, certain of the righteousness of its policies, tends to overlook critical challenges in their implementation, such as the conditionality, export of regulations, and colonial history attached to the EU’s relations with its neighbours and how this reflects on its role as an external and development actor abroad.

Hubris, defined as the blinding overconfidence in one’s own beliefs, offers a critical framework to better understand why the EU’s development policies and actorness are questioned at best and perceived as Eurocentric at worst, and how it opened the door for other development actors to step in. Among them, China has emerged as a regional player, offering development models that emphasize “win-win cooperation” based on bilateral agreements and infrastructure investments, such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This dynamic challenges the EU’s image as a rules-exporting development actor and highlights the limitations of its approach in addressing the priorities of its southern neighbourhood.

This contribution will examine how the EU’s hubristic tendencies have inadvertently created opportunities for China to promote itself as a development actor in the EU’s southern neighbourhood, exploring key areas where the EU’s approach contrasts sharply with China’s more egalitarian narratives and infrastructure-driven strategies. Drawing on case studies from the EU’s southern neighbourhood, the contribution evaluates the implications of this shifting dynamic for regional development, local governance, and broader geopolitical competition. It contends that China's pragmatic and investment-focused development approach resonates with regional actors who prioritise tangible economic outcomes rather than the EU’s value-based conditionality, which allowed China to increase its presence as a regional development actor. This shifting dynamic not only undermines the EU’s credibility as a development actor but also raises questions about its capacity to address the strategic and economic challenges its southern (and eastern) neighbours are confronted with in an era of intensifying geopolitical rivalry.