By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- Germany's leading industry body swung behind European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen as she and French President Emmanuel Macron headed to Beijing for an official visit.
The two leaders will hold joint talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday.
"China is challenging the international rules-based order and is undermining the logic of free markets and open trade with its striving for security and control," the Bundesverband Deutscher Industrie said in a statement. "German industry expects that the EU President and Emmanuel Macron insist on reliability, the observation of international rules as well as transparency, market access and fair competition in their meetings with China's leadership."
The comments reflect German industry's frustration at the steady increase in pressure from the Chinese authorities on German companies who have invested heavily in the country in recent years, especially pressure to hand over advanced technology in exchange for access to China's huge internal market. That pressure has contributed to growing wariness of China's longer-term ambitions, expressed in growing instances of companies such as Huawei and TikTok owner ByteDance being restricted in the European market.
The joint visit of Macron and von der Leyen to Beijing comes a week after a hawkish speech by the Commission President that moved Europe much closer to the U.S. position of treating China as a strategic rival, warning against excessive dependency on China for export markets and for key inputs such as rare earths.
Von der Leyen called for the EU to "de-risk" its relationship with China, not least in view of its growing closeness with Russia, whose invasion of Ukraine upended the European economy last year and poses the biggest security challenge to Europe in over 30 years. In its statement, the BDI also called on China to stand up for "the principles of the United Nations and thus the preservation of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity."
Von der Leyen's hardening rhetoric has unsettled some in Germany and France, who fear losing what access they still have to the Chinese market.
"We hear increasingly loud voices expressing a strong concern about the future of relations between the West and China that in some form lead to the conclusion that there is an inescapable spiral of mounting tensions," Macron told reporters at the French embassy in Beijing. "I do not believe, in any case I do not want to believe, in this scenario."
The BDI also stressed in its statement that "Decoupling (from the Chinese economy) is not in the interest of companies at home."