SHANGHAI, July 21. /TASS/. European Union officials are behaving arrogantly during talks with China, Zhang Weiwei, the director of China Institute at Fudan University, said.
"I have just returned from Europe, from Berlin. Frankly speaking, European officials are still rather supercilious," he said during the Dialogue of Thinkers discussions at the university. "They say, ‘China, please, wave goodbye to Russia and we will open all trade channels to you.’ I told them, ‘Wake up, you are neither independent nor autonomous!’"
According to the expert, he is profoundly disappointed that the European Union has no foreign policy of its own. Neither does it have any autonomy in the area of security, "having become the United States’ underling." China will not be waiting for the European Union to come to its senses and realize its own interests, he stressed.
The China-European Union summit will be held on July 24. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa will visit China on July 24. They will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang.
The European Commission has recently put forward several demands to China, with scaling back cooperation with Russia among them. However, no concessions have been offered to Beijing in exchange.
Following Xi’s visit to Russia in May, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi stated that any attempts to drive a wedge between China and Russia "were something from the realm of fantasy."