BRUSSELS ― EU leaders winged their way back from Beijing Thursday, clutching a precious and rare win — a joint agreement with China to fight global warming.

This is a good thing since the rest of the summit was, quite frankly, a bust.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the climate statement a “big step forward … our cooperation can set a global benchmark.” 

But von der Leyen’s comments, which focused far more on the tensions that derailed wider talks on economic cooperation and trade, also highlighted the starkest threat to the goals laid down in the climate agreement.

That’s because the source of much of the friction is China’s lead in building clean technology, especially in solar panels, batteries and electric cars. And its supply-chain capture of the critical minerals needed to produce the magnets for wind turbines.

These technologies underpin the global effort to fight climate change, and to a large degree, China now offers the cheapest and highest-grade products in many clean sectors. This is beneficial to the climate, with Chinese exports shaving around 1 percent off global emissions last year. 

However, EU officials see China’s subsidized export model as a direct threat to Europe’s industrial backbone in chemicals, specialized manufacturing and — of course — car production.

In comments reported by the state-owned Xinhua News Agency, Chinese President Xi Jinping urged the EU to see that “convergent interests are not a threat” and “boosting competitiveness should not rely on building walls or barriers.”

To date, climate efforts have been viewed as a safe space for cooperation amid turmoil for the EU and China. Now, they are also a source of upheaval.

“It’s expanding more and more into the competition and the rivalry space,” said Byford Tsang, a senior policy fellow with the Asia program at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

The reality on display in Beijing was that both the EU and China want to combat climate change. But neither wants to give an inch while doing it.

Now more than ever

The fact that the climate statement came together at all was seen as cause for champagne by officials in Brussels.

Teresa Ribera, the Commission executive vice president who flew to China last week to broker the climate text, hailed it as “a meaningful step in a world facing growing geopolitical tensions and climate risks.”

Cooperation between the EU and China on climate change has taken on new importance since President Donald Trump yanked the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris climate change agreement.

“Together, the European Union and China must uphold the Paris Agreement. Now more than ever,” von der Leyen said.

The message that China and the EU remain committed to both international discussion and their own domestic efforts was “a significant political signal at a critical moment,” said Belinda Schäpe, a China policy analyst at the Finland-based nonprofit Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

By maintaining a semblance of cooperation and avoiding all-out hostilities, both China and the EU gain political leverage over the U.S., said François Chimits, who manages European projects at French think tank Institute Montaigne. 

With this climate statement, “both will hope this contributes to their bargaining position with Washington, as both still have pending substantial trade negotiations with the U.S.”

But when it came to the contents, there was little substance. 

“The fact a climate statement was issued is the news, less on what’s in it,” said Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington D.C.

Whose fingerprints?

Despite featuring the word “cooperation” five times in a 452-word document, the underlying tensions of the meeting were barely papered over.

In one section of the climate statement, Beijing and Brussels agreed to speed up the deployment of renewable energy and “facilitating access to quality green technologies and products, so that they can be available, affordable and beneficial for all countries, including the developing countries.”

That could be read two ways, said Tsang: That both wanted to do more to help the transition to clean energy in poorer countries, or “China’s view” that the EU should be willing to open up more to its products, which would make climate efforts significantly cheaper. 

“There’s a lot of Beijing’s fingerprints on the statement,” said Tsang. Also, he noted, China was named before the EU throughout. Then there were Chinese Communist Party-style poetic flourishes, such as the line: “Green is the defining color of China-EU cooperation.”

Chimits at Institut Montaigne agreed: “It doesn’t cost much for the Europeans to accept this — those are only words.”

“Besides, our current and future production in green industries will only marginally be aimed at developing economies, because they will be high-value-added products,” said Chimits. China, he added, also produces those but mostly focuses on lower-value products, while 85 percent of its car exports go to developing countries.

China’s global expansion in EVs means European automakers are now fighting to stay relevant in nearly every market, including their home turf. While the duties slapped on made-in-China EVs curtailed some exports of the models to the EU, a loophole allowing hybrids to enter levy-free has caused Chinese automakers to shift toward those models instead.

Beijing has dubbed the surge in exports driven by a domestic price war “involution” — a phrase von der Leyen mentioned in her speech, saying China agreed to increase consumption rather than focus on production. 

For all the scolding by Chinese state media, little has been done to curb the practice. And experts don’t expect that to change.

“Those sectors facing overcapacity are the ones that China is promoting. Beijing cannot afford to stifle them in the name of a production cut,” said Mingda Qiu, a senior analyst at consulting firm Eurasia Group.

For many in the EU, the idea that the Chinese would be able to flood the global market with cheaper goods, produced in part as a result of heavy state subsidies, is a non-starter. 

Add to that China’s crimping of critical minerals exports, which harm efforts to build clean technology worldwide. On this, von der Leyen told the press that the meeting had delivered “practical solutions” for resolving bottlenecks quickly when businesses raised issues.

Given other geopolitical tensions, such as China’s tacit support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, some questioned the wisdom of finding accord at all.

“We are dealing with a country that is fueling the war in Europe, that might become an EU war or a NATO war,” former Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis told POLITICO’s Brussels Playbook.

“And we’re going there waving the white flag and saying ‘well, let’s talk about climate’ — it doesn’t look serious, and I don’t think anyone in Beijing is taking us seriously,” he said.

Gabriel Gavin contributed reporting from Brussels. This story has been updated.