Awakening to China’s Rise provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of how Europe’s major powers have responded to the re-emergence of China as a great power in world politics since the end of the Cold War. To do so, it puts forward a unique cross-regional comparison of how the major European powers (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) have confronted Chinese assertiveness both in the Asia-Pacific and in Europe. Firstly, it analyzes their response to China’s increasingly muscular regional posture in the Asia-Pacific through the development of diplomatic and security initiatives with partners in the region. Secondly, it delineates how they have confronted China’s inroads into Europe, looking at the measures that they have taken to tackle Chinese investments in, and supply of, technologies in strategic sectors such as critical national infrastructures, dual-use technologies, and in the digital domain, including Huawei’s 5G networks. A longstanding assumption in the IR literature has been that European foreign policies toward the People’s Republic of China have been driven by a “naïve” and self-interested focus on the economic opportunities presented by such a vast market, overlooking security considerations. This book challenges this belief through a detailed examination of the policies of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom from 1989 to the present.

In light of the intertwining logics of military competition and economic interdependence at play in US-China relations, Trading with the Enemy examines how the United States has balanced its potentially conflicting national security and economic interests in its relationship with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). To do so, Hugo Meijer investigates a strategically sensitive yet under-explored facet of US-China relations: the making of American export control policy on military-related technology transfers to China since 1979. Based on 199 interviews, declassified documents, and diplomatic cables leaked by Wikileaks, two major findings emerge from this book. First, the US is no longer able to apply a strategy of military/technology containment of China in the same way it did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This is because of the erosion of its capacity to restrict the transfer of military-related technology to the PRC. Secondly, a growing number of actors in Washington have reassessed the nexus between national security and economic interests at stake in the US-China relationship-by moving beyond the Cold War trade-off between the two-in order to maintain American military preeminence vis-à-vis its strategic rivals.