Top European Union officials Ursula von der Leyen and Antonio Costa are due to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing as the EU and China mark 50 years of diplomatic relations amid simmering tensions.

Von der Leyen and Costa, who respectively head up the European Commission and the European Council, will arrive in Beijing on Thursday for the 25th EU-China summit. But in the lead-up to the one-day summit, it was unclear whether von der Leyen and Costa would actually meet with Xi due to the ongoing political tensions between Brussels and Beijing.

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Their meeting was originally planned as a two-day summit in Brussels, but Xi declined the invitation to attend, according to a report by The Financial Times, citing people familiar with the matter.

It was only this week that China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs formally confirmed that a meeting between Xi, von der Leyen, Costa and Chinese Premier Li Qiang would go ahead.

Despite the back and forth over scheduling, Beijing has billed the event as a chance to reset relations with Europe, said Marina Rudyak, an assistant professor at the Institute of Chinese Studies at Germany’s Heidelberg University.

“What we see a lot from the Chinese side, and this is quite constant, is ‘let’s normalise the relations, let’s focus on pragmatic cooperation, let’s focus on where we agree and accommodate where we disagree’,” Rudyak told Al Jazeera.

In advance of the summit, Chinese state media published a positive analysis of EU-China relations – reports that are often seen as an indirect way for Chinese officials to comment on issues of the day.

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Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun similarly described the China-EU relationship in glowing terms on Tuesday, as “one of the most influential bilateral relationships in the world”, during a meeting with reporters.

“The China-EU relationship is now at a critical juncture of building on past achievements and opening up a new chapter,” Guo said.

“The relationship faces both new opportunities and new challenges,” Guo added, noting an “increasingly turbulent international landscape, with rising unilateralism and protectionism”.

Tensions over Xinjiang, Ukraine 

Despite Beijing’s offer of an olive branch to Brussels, expectations are low among Western observers that the EU and China will see any major breakthroughs, due to several ongoing and protracted disputes.

The EU and China have frequently sparred over issues such as human rights and political oppression in locations including Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang, but the relationship took a turn in 2021 when the EU sanctioned Chinese officials for their oppression of ethnic minority Uighur Muslims.

China responded with sanctions of its own on 10 Europeans, including members of the European Parliament, and several think tanks.

Beijing lifted sanctions on the European MEPs in April in a gesture of goodwill before the EU-China summit, but other political fractures remain over China’s ongoing and close relationship with Russia since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Beijing is also widely seen as keeping Russia afloat economically amid ongoing international sanctions, particularly by buying Russian energy exports.

The EU has also accused China of skirting arms embargoes by selling “dual-use” goods to Russia, which can be used for civilian and military purposes.

China has defended its actions, saying that it has long wanted to see a “negotiation, ceasefire and peace” in Ukraine.

Still, European officials were alarmed in June, when Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi reportedly told his EU counterpart that Beijing did not want to see Russia lose the war against Ukraine because it would free up the US’s attention, according to Rudyak at Heidelberg University.

The bloc continues to scrutinise Beijing’s economic ties with Russia, last week sanctioning two Chinese banks for the first time as part of its latest package of sanctions against Moscow aimed at ending the war. Five companies based in China were also included on the EU’s sanctions list.

China’s Ministry of Commerce said that the sanctions on Chinese banks and companies “seriously harmed” trade and economic ties with the EU and threatened to respond with its own measures against Europe.

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William Yang, a senior analyst for Northeast Asia at the Crisis Group, a Brussels-based nonpartisan think tank, said these issues will cast a shadow over the EU-China summit on Thursday.

“Beijing considers its relationship with Russia as a core interest amid ongoing competition with the US, and it keeps denying the EU’s criticism that it is an enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine,” Yang said.

“With these fundamental contradictions, prospects of any significant breakthrough at the upcoming summit are unlikely.”

A close but bumpy trade relationship

Another recent source of tension has been the EU-China economic relationship.

China is the EU’s third-largest trading partner for goods and services, but EU officials are concerned about their ballooning trade deficit with China, which doubled in value between 2015 and 2024, to reach 305.8 billion euros ($359bn) last year, according to EU trade data.

The EU and member states have long accused China of engaging in overproduction and “dumping” its cheap state-subsidised exports on the European market, but the issue has heightened recently.

“The view on the trade and balance in Europe is slightly different from the United States… where it’s basically about who’s going to be number one. This is a dimension that is not present in Europe,” Rudyak said.

“Europe is really concerned about its core industries, including the automotive. There is a huge concern about Chinese EV overcapacity being dumped on the EU market at prices where European companies cannot compete, and subsidised Chinese overcapacity crowding out European backbone industries,” she continued.

European automakers have also suffered from Beijing’s recent decision to curb its exports of rare earth minerals and magnets, which are essential components in many auto parts and electric vehicles.

Beijing, for its part, has opened its own investigations into European “dumping”, targeting key products like dairy, brandy and pork.

Beijing has other frustrations with Europe, even as it tries to reset relations, according to Wang Yi-wei, the director of the EU Research Centre at Renmin University in the Chinese capital.

At the top of the list for Beijing is the EU’s often conflicting approach to its relationship with the US and China, Wang said.

“China has at times engaged in wishful thinking, expecting Europe to resist US influence. In reality, however, the EU seeks to balance both resisting American dominance and cooperating with the US, including supporting its efforts to contain China – for example, justifying tariff disputes as addressing ‘Chinese challenges’, rather than questioning US unilateralism,” Wang said in remarks shared with Al Jazeera.

China wants the EU to stop portraying their relationship as one of “competitive cooperation”, and instead see it through the paradigm of “cooperative competition”, he noted.

With expectations for a breakthrough low, Marta Mucznik, a senior EU analyst at the Crisis Group, said observers hope that the summit will at least open up channels of communication between officials from both sides.

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“The EU doesn’t expect breakthroughs from this summit but sees it as a chance to keep communication channels open with Chinese leaders while it works to carve out its geopolitical role and reduce critical dependencies,” she said.