Giorgia Meloni and Europe’s incoherence over China

Chinese leaders must be either confused or delighted by the stream of visits they have been receiving from European heads of state and government. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni may think that her five-day visit to China was something special. To the Chinese, however, it will have felt quite routine.

China does, after all, describe itself as “the Middle Kingdom,” the place around which the world revolves, just as in ancient Roman times the Mediterranean was named as the sea in the center of the Earth. So Chinese governments have always expected visitors to come and, to use their own old word, “kowtow” to them or bow at their feet. To them, a flow of Europeans kowtowing perhaps seems natural.

And it has been quite a flow. Just counting from the beginning of April, President Xi Jinping and his colleagues have received visits from Olaf Scholz, chancellor of Germany; from Andrzej Duda, president of Poland; from Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary; and now from the prime minister of Italy.

The peculiar additional fact is that on June 13-15, partway through this stream of European visits, Meloni hosted the annual summit of the Group of Seven, comprising Italy, Germany, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Japan and Canada, at the lavish Borgo Egnazia resort in Italy. At that summit in Puglia, the West’s leaders were nowhere near as friendly to China as this stream of European visitors to Beijing might imply.

In the summit communiqué, the G7 leaders declared their opposition to “actors in China” that “materially support Russia’s war machine” in its war against Ukraine, and expressed their “concerns about China’s persistent industrial targeting and comprehensive non-market policies … undermining our workers, industries,