ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the EU's China policy in terms of the extent to which it has been able to formulate a reasonably clear strategy on paper and implement it in practice. It presents the main impediments to formulating a common EU policy toward China. The chapter examines the EU's formulated policy on China, as established in official documents produced by the Commission and the Council. In terms of formal foreign-policy tools, the EU's common foreign and security policy (CFSP) has two main instruments at its disposal, common positions and joint actions. The chapter analyzes five contentious issues in EU China relations in order to gauge how the EU has performed in this regard in the face of conflicting interests. The specific policy issues reviewed in the chapter are market-economy status (MES) and antidumping, the intellectual property rights (IPR) issue, Taiwan, the arms embargo and Tibet.
