MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 23rd November, 2022) EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Tuesday that he will pay a visit to Washington next week to conduct high level talks with US officials on China.
"To keep a dialogue with the US, this dialogue is going to take place next week, the Secretary General of the External Action Service and my team will travel to Washington to have this political high level dialogue about China," Borrell said at an EU Parliament plenary session on EU-China relations.
The EU official also noted that China was an important economic partner for the bloc, which made the so-called decoupling of the EU from Beijing hardly possible.
Over the past months, there have been growing calls within the EU for decoupling from China by dramatically reducing the bloc's economic dependence on the Asian nation. With China accounting for almost 16% of EU foreign trade, some members of the EU parliament and a number of European countries including the ones in Eastern Europe have been urging the bloc to review its policy toward China so as to prevent the EU from being too dependent on it amid what they call Beijing's rising authoritarian tendencies and increasing military power.
At the same time, high-ranking officials in the EU have been following a more balanced approach, with European Commission Executive Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis saying in late October that the EU should continue engaging with China "with pragmatism and without naivety."
