Donald Trump’s recent swing through Asia was punctuated by a ‘successful’ meeting with Xi Jinping, where the two leaders agreed to ratchet down tensions and call a truce in the trade war between the United States and China. But it would be premature to declare the end of what Americans call ‘strategic competition’. The superpower rivalry will lumber on, and Europe – like the rest of the world – will have to chart a course through those choppy seas.

As European leaders evolve their approach, a critical question that must continually be revisited is: what does China want from Europe? The reason why this is a difficult question to answer is that Beijing doesn’t necessarily have a clear answer itself.

That Europe is important goes without saying – in purely economic terms. The value of the total trade volume between the PRC and the European Union and United Kingdom combined last year was in the region of one trillion US dollars. But geographical distance and security calculations trump trade statistics in Beijing’s strategic mindset. Europe is far away, and Chinese foreign policy takes the ‘geo’ in geopolitics seriously. Equally important is the fact that Europe is not a significant military power in its own right. European military capacity and security policy, integrated into NATO, are understood in China as an extension of US power, and treated as such.

So the first thing Europeans must keep in mind is that, at the level of grand strategy, Europe is not a priority. The United States remains the unavoidable great power that China confronts. While Beijing’s all-consuming focus on US-China relations has been diminishing somewhat as China becomes a genuinely global player, managing the rivalry with Washington remains crucial. Beijing, in a funny way, has an America First foreign policy.

Then there is Vladimir Putin and the violent resurgence of Russian power. Thanks to its war on Ukraine, Russia has taken on enhanced significance as the second most important ‘great power’ that Xi needs to manage. In fact, if we look back to the time a decade ago when President Xi floated his trademark concept of ‘a new type of great power relations’, he made the point that Russia fell under the rubric along with the United States. Xi has met over 40 times with Putin and clung as much as possible to the ‘no limits friendship’ declared on Putin’s visit to Beijing just moments before launching the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. By sticking with the Russian president, Xi Jinping put enormous strain on China’s relationship with Europe, already bruised from the lack of cooperation in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. Europeans were rightfully dismayed as they watched Beijing sit on the fence, implicitly backing Russia, as European territory was invaded for the first time since the Second World War.

Yet from Beijing’s perspective, the policy of maintaining ties with Moscow, Brussels and London despite the war can be seen as a success. For all the hurt feelings in Europe, China’s ‘neutrality’ in the Russo-Ukraine War did not trigger a fundamental rupture in Sino-European economic ties. Chinese capital continues to flow into Europe in search of return on investment and long-term strategic influence.

After the near-peer powers of the US and Russia, the next tier down on Beijing’s strategic hierarchy is still not occupied by Europe. Instead, the focus is divided among a varied group of neighbours. Again, if we look back at the early Xi Jinping years, he signalled this second tier by articulating a ‘friendly neighborhood’ policy to complement the new type of great-power relations. Beijing faces massive complexity in managing its neighbourhood, from economically sophisticated US allies like Japan and South Korea to unstable and repressive regimes such as Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and Myanmar. The economic boom in Southeast Asia and slow rise of India are opportunities but also represent challenges to Chinese dominance. At sea, the unresolved status of Taiwan remains the great historical thorn in the side of Beijing’s concept of nationhood, while establishing control over the maritime domain requires jostling with numerous coastal states, behind which lurks the naval strength of the United States.

Looking beyond the great powers and the near abroad, strategists in Beijing still aren’t focused on Europe. The third tier is defined in terms of ‘the Global South’, a massive category in territory and population, albeit accounting for a smaller share of world GDP. Overlapping with some of China’s neighbours, the Global South category wraps around the planet, linking Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. As the US retreats from global engagement and slashes development assistance, China will be growing its economic and diplomatic presence in developing countries at a global scale.

Strategically speaking, then, Europe comes after pretty much the rest of the world. European security is a function of US power, and therefore Washington, not Brussels, is the place for Beijing to look in calculating implications for its own policy. European trade and investment is important, but it too can be managed as a corollary of combating aggressive US industrial policy and trade protectionism.

Here’s what is so important about Europe’s status as fourth tier: China does not prioritise relations with Europe, but allows ties with European countries to fluctuate as a function of external variables. There is no sign of a grand plan to wrest Europe from the American orbit, at least under current conditions where US power remains strong. Instead, Europe is treated as an extension of America.

Thus, as the trade war intensifies with Washington, Beijing applies the same counter-measures for Europe as those designed for the US. The second Trump term opened with extreme stress on the transatlantic alliance; Europeans were genuinely shocked at the attitude Vice President JD Vance brought to the Munich Security Conference. But Beijing did little to reap the harvest of such tensions by wooing Europeans; rather, Xi’s strategy is tailored to managing Trump.

Beijing, of course, monitors divisions within Europe, including the tensions Brexit creates between the United Kingdom and European Union, and will exploit them where it can. As the itinerary of senior Chinese officials makes apparent, Beijing seeks to maximise opportunities with countries, mostly in Eastern Europe, deemed friendly to China. This is sheer opportunism, rather than any grand plot to divide Europe. In this sense, the dynamics are nothing remotely like the Cold War, when rival superpowers vied for control and influence over the main theatre of geopolitical contest, which – from the view of both Moscow and Washington – was Europe. No such luck, or misfortune, faces Europe today. So far as China is concerned, the centre stage is elsewhere.

What are the implications of China’s priorities when we turn from grand strategy and scrutinise the patterns of Chinese engagement in Europe? The UK, for example, is wrestling anew with the dilemma of Chinese investment and influence. The controversy over Chinese ownership of British Steel, and the attempt to shut down England’s last blast furnaces, raised questions of a grand plan to cripple Europe’s capacity to produce strategic materials. These concerns were mirrored in the very different strategic sector of education, where the purchase by PRC entities of UK schools has raised alarm bells. And controversy rages over Beijing’s insistence on relocating to a mega-embassy in London (as was done in Seoul a decade ago). Worries over Chinese espionage run out of a giant location near the Tower of London are compounded by the sudden collapse of the case against a former British parliamentary researcher and an academic accused of passing on state secrets to a Chinese intelligence agent.

Concerns over these activities should not be dismissed out of hand. However, the sensible posture for Europeans to adopt is something in between on the one hand, the fear that every renminbi spent in the UK or EU is part of a plan to dominate the West, and, on the other, the naïve notion that Chinese money will not insist on any strings being attached. Frankly, Europe is not strategically important enough for China to pursue an aggressive and coherent plan to spy and subvert its way to dominance. Most investments will be made on economic grounds, as the extraordinary growth of capital accumulation by Chinese actors goes abroad in search of returns. Any paranoid hunting for a master plan that does not exist could paradoxically distract from the smaller ways in which PRC funding can undermine European institutions; these should be judged coldly, case by case.

The world order is changing before our eyes. There is a near future in which Europe takes real steps towards much-discussed ‘strategic autonomy’, which, in concrete terms, would mean a defence force independent of NATO. Until then, Beijing will factor Brussels into the equation as a strategic externality. Europe can expect to be a low priority for China, for better and for worse.