Inside the EU–China Human Rights Dialogue: assessing the practical delivery of the EU’s normative power in a hostile environment

Abstract

EU-China relations continue to be limited by a disagreement over values. As the only bilateral channel dedicated to promoting an EU value, the EU-China Human Rights Dialogue (HRD), reflects the principal forum for this normative conflict. Observing poor outcomes, scholars typically maintain that the dialogue's weakness is symptomatic of the EU prioritising its material interests with China. This paper seeks a more nuanced explanation for these shortcomings, exploring the neglected micro-level processes of the HRD. This encompasses the role and impact of EU diplomats, their Chinese interlocutors and EU institutional structures. The micro-level also offers novel theoretical insights into how the EU's normative power practically manifests in such a challenging arena. Through a discourse anaysis of elite interviews, capturing the small group of EU diplomats operationalising the HRD, this paper finds that while the dialogue is significantly weakened by China's systematic obstruction, the EU plays a key role in facilitating this, with ineffective diplomatic approaches and insufficient political backing by member states.