CENTRE FOR EUROPEAN UNION STUDIES Understanding EU-China Relations: An Uncertain Partnership in the Making

After three decades of evolution, EU-China relations reached a new milestone: the EU became China’s largest trading partner while China became the EU’s second biggest trading partner by March 2004. Although much has already been said about the growing importance of the EU and China as global players, academic study on EU-China relations per se remains a somewhat neglected field. The main purpose of this paper is to try and contribute to the understanding about the nature of EU-China relations by asking such questions as: how important is China to the EU? What are the main factors that are affecting the bilateral relations between the EU and China? The scarcity of academic literature in this field is compensated by adopting a case studies approach and utilising a variety of sources such as public policy documents, current affairs reports and the author’s face-to-face interviews recently undertaken in China.