Zhang Jian on China, the EU and Russia "De-Risking" from the US

"There is no effective coordination or cooperation among them, but on some issues this has objectively produced the policy effect of a collective China–Europe–Russia response to the United States."

Despite official PRC discourse formally disavowing balance-of-power and bloc politics, the idiom of geopolitical balancing runs deep in Chinese strategic thought.

The Three Kingdoms remains the obvious shorthand for the US–China–Russia triangle that recurs across Chinese writing, but in today’s piece, Zhang Jian (张健) includes Europe in the strategic calculus—a framing that might be welcome in Brussels, which is habitually overlooked as an independent power by Chinese analysis.

Europeans may find Zhang’s analysis itself less agreeable, not least the claim that Europe and Russia’s positions have “reversed”, with Russia’s improving. Readers may also feel that Zhang overstates European convergence with Russian and Chinese positions on “de-risking” from America.

However, the piece exemplifies a wider tendency in Chinese commentary to portray Trump’s second term as geopolitically favourable to Beijing. Many Chinese analysts now see China as occupying a relatively privileged position in global …