Spain's China Gambit: Pedro Sánchez, Strategic Autonomy, and the European Turn to Beijing — with Mario Esteban Rodríguez

**Kaiser Kuo** (0:09)
Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Guo coming to you this week from my home in Beijing. Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Sinica Podcast is and will remain free. But listeners, if you value my work and would like to see me continue doing it, please support Sinica by becoming a paying subscriber at sinicapodcast.com. Your subscription helps me continue to bring you these conversations.
As we record this episode, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is wrapping up his fourth visit to China in four years. And this one may be the most consequential yet. It comes at a moment when Spain has emerged almost improbably as the most outspoken voice in all of Europe, challenging the direction of American foreign policy. Just weeks before this trip, Spain took the extraordinary step of closing its airspace to US military aircraft involved in the war in Iran and denied Washington the use of the Rota and Morón military bases in southern Spain. Trump threatened to cut off trade with Madrid. Secretary of State Rubio accused Spanish leaders of bragging about it. And Prime Minister Sánchez fired back with one of the great rejoinders of this young century. The government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.
This is the backdrop against which Sánchez flew to Beijing. On Monday at Tsinghua University, he delivered a speech defending multilateralism, calling the EU trade deficit unsustainable and to the astonishment of some, describing Spain as a country that recognizes China is rebuilding its greatness and is destined to play a vital role in the future. He called on Beijing to do more to push the adherents to international law and to end conflicts in Lebanon, Iran, Gaza, and Ukraine, especially now that the United States has decided to withdraw from many of these fronts, he said. He even called on Western countries to relinquish their participation quotas at international institutions in favor of countries of the global south.
On Tuesday, Sánchez met with China's President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People, where Xi greeted his guests with suitably apocalyptic language. The international order is crumbling into disarray, she said, adding that both China and Spain are nations of principle and integrity, and should cooperate closely to resist any regression toward the law of the jungle. Later, Sánchez met with NPC Standing Committee Chairman Zhao Leji and Premier Li Qiang, and a set of 13, I've also heard 15 bilateral agreements were signed on education, technology, sports, and cultural exchange.
Sánchez also visited Xiaomi, the Beijing headquartered tech company, and met with its founder, Li Jun. He test drove one of their very nice EVs and checked out their factory automation. This visit caps an astonishing year in Spain-China relations. King Felipe VI and Queen Leticia paid a state visit to China last November, the first by a Spanish monarch in, I think, 18 years. Chinese investment in Spain surged from 149 million euros in 2024 to 643 million in 2025
Bilateral goods trade exceeded 55 billion last year, up nearly 10 percent, and yet the trade deficit keeps widening. China now accounts for a staggering 74 percent of Spain's total trade gap.
So what is Sánchez actually up to? Is this a sophisticated bid for strategic autonomy, a bid for a Spanish brand of leverage between Washington and Beijing? Or is it, as one analyst put it, an increasingly one-sided and unbalanced pilgrimage? How does Spain's China gambit sit with Brussels, which is watched uneasily as Sánchez undercut the EU's position on EV tariffs, and cozied up to Beijing while acting as some would have it as a self-appointed ambassador for Europe? And what does this all tell us about the broader debate inside Europe over how to navigate between great powers?
To help us make sense of all of this, I am joined by Mario Esteban Rodríguez, who is full professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid, where he directs the Center for East Asian Studies and is senior fellow at the Elcano Royal Institute, Spain's preeminent international affairs think tank. Mario has served as an expert for the European Commission, the European Parliament and Spain's own ministries of foreign affairs and defense. He has been a visiting professor at Beijing's Foreign Studies University and a visiting researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He's the author or editor of several important books, including most recently, China's Vertical Multilateralism and the Global South, published by Routledge just this year, and China and International Norms, Evidence from the Belt and Road Initiative. He also happens to be the scholar most frequently quoted in Spanish and European media coverage of Spain-China relations, and indeed was quoted in the Chinese media and in La Razon coverage of this very trip. Now, Mario comes on the strong recommendation of a dear friend of mine here in Beijing, a Spanish diplomat who had the pleasure of being present at Prime Minister Sánchez's Tsinghua Speech and who thought Mario would be exactly the right person to help us understand what Spain is doing and what it means for Europe. I think just from that bio I just presented, you would agree that my friend Julio was absolutely right. Mario Esteban, welcome to Sinica.