If introspective unease about economic destiny were a growth industry, the EU would dominate the global market. Even when its economies have racked up years of growth, policymakers still fret not just about Europe’s inability to create a tech industry to rival the US, but about being usurped by China.

This concern frequently develops into a milder form of the ideology gripping the White House and much of Capitol Hill: China is appropriating technology, distorting competition and trade, combining it with state spying to create a full-spectrum challenge to the industrialised world’s prosperity and security. Policymakers and commentators toss aside the familiar prescriptions to liberalise trade. Instead, a strategic view of global economics has arisen in which trade means zero-sum competition rather than mutual gain, with governments practising “economic statecraft”, the use of commercial policy for foreign policy ends.

Jonathan Holslag of the Free University of Brussels is firmly in this camp. For Prof Holslag, the EU’s traditional ways of engaging China in the world economy — integrating it into the World Trade Organization, encouraging reciprocal investment — have failed. As China has enriched itself, it has resolutely failed to develop as expected. Rather than moving further along the arc towards a market economy, China has intensified state intervention to climb the value chain, undermining European progress in areas like artificial intelligence, robotics and semiconductors. As well as traditional tools of unfair competition, so the story goes, China uses forced technology transfer or simple cybertheft to establish and entrench its position.