For the first time in seven years, the EU-China Interparliamentary Meeting took place on Oct. 16, following friendly decisions from Beijing to lift sanctions against some EU Parliament members. However, what was supposed to be the beginning of a détente process resulted in a hard confrontation between the two groups, mainly because of the arrogant approach of the European side, to which the Chinese responded in kind.
The European Parliament delegation was led by its chairman Engin Eroglu, a former German Green Party member who was elected to the EU Parliament on the “Freie Wähler” slate. The FW got 2.7% in Germany, representing between a 300th and a 350th of the voters in the EU. That percentage would exclude them from entering the Bundestag, but was enough to send a member to Strasbourg, where they exert a widely disproportionate power. On the eve of the meeting, Eroglu had told Politico that the EU Parliament delegation would make their counterpart clear that the future of EU-China relations depends on China’s willingness to cut support to Russia.
The five-member delegation from the National People’s Congress of China was led by Fu Ziying, member of the Standing Committee of NPC.
As the two delegations met, Miriam Lexmann, a Slovak center-right MEP, raised human rights issues, including in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong. As she raised the issue of Taiwan, insisting that it had never been “part of the People’s Republic of China,” a Chinese delegate informed her that she “did not know history.
Additionally, “During the meeting, the Chinese side has questioned NATO’s right to exist. I haven’t heard this stated publicly in this way before,” said Eroglu. “From the Chinese perspective, there is no longer any reason for NATO to exist after the end of the U.S.S.R. I find this absurd in light of Russian aggressions against Ukraine and Eastern European countries,” he said. The Chinese delegation also blamed the EU for taking the U.S. side in Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.
Eroglu said he hopes there will be another meeting in December.
