Unpopular opinion, but I absolutely want the EU to drop the alliance with the US and seek better relations with China.

China is remarkably passive with its neighbours for the standards of a superpower. Look at the history of interventions of the USSR and Russia in Eastern Europe, northern Middle East and Central Asia; the history of the US in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East; the history of GB in... Gestures very broadly.

They want to annex Taiwan, and that's bad, but from their perspective, Taiwan has never stopped being part of their country. It's still part of the rationale of a very average geopolitical actor, and according to the international laws we've supposedly been following since WWII, it's a legitimate claim, and it isn't grounds to believe that they'll become the 40s Germany. Apart from that, what's the worst that China is doing in the international stage? Bullying their neighbours' fishing areas, and staging periodic stick combats with India. The latter is laughable and deserves no further comment. Their neighbours' complaints about fishing violations are completely legitimate, but literally half the EU is doing it to African countries (and Spanish fishing vessels are notoriously on it too), and I'm not about to argue for leaving the EU over it. The world is a terrible place right now, and I just don't think it's practical to set the red line there as of today, even if I agree that Europe and China are definitely on the wrong on this issue. The worst thing you can blame them of is supplying Russia; but if I was China, my main geopolitical rival was the US, and the EU was tightly allied and even subservient to the US at all levels, I would be supplying Russia too. If the EU was independent enough, we would be able to negotiate the Eurasian balance of power with China on very different conditions.

Then you have the democracy/civil/political liberties issue. I'm pro-democracy, but taking an interventionist attitude where we refuse to deal with non-democratic countries is a dumb position that no one's really following. Imposing democracy tends to work very poorly if the local population wasn't already trying to achieve it, we have no means of provoking regime change in China, and we have excellent commercial and diplomatic relations with half the dictatorships in the Arab world, so please don't act like pro-liberal-democracy-jingoism isn't just propaganda at the service of Western capital. China is slowly evolving into becoming more socially egalitarian, with LGBT acceptance growing at rates that are very similar to historical developments in Western Europe, and their government is getting relaxed in the enforcement of the Great Firewall to the point that millions of Chinese people use VPNs on a daily basis. Their lack of political liberties is bad, but right now their model seems to be working great for them and it's difficult to find Chinese people in China who want revolution rather than reform. I believe their system will eventually result in enough corruption that will bite them in the ass, but that will be their own battle to face.

The real problem we should be confronting is the fact that they have a plan, and we don't. China is conquering the global EV vehicles market like they're being led by Genghis Khan, they have invested globally in the resources and infrastructure they need for their production chains, they've put themselves in a strategic place of the global economy that is even a little bit scary, given how well they have executed it from a position of disadvantage. But it's been legitimate play and any country that was trying to improve the lives of hundreds of millions of their own citizens while having limited resources at home would have done either that, or attempted to invade their neighbours. So now we find that German car manufacturers can't compete because they were too busy lobbying for preferential domestic regulations rather than investing into new tech, that China is competing with US in the global smartphone market while we're a zero to the left, that they have their own software ecosystem while ours is incredibly dependent on the US, and it is all our own fault.

Europe needs to seek a partnership between equals with China, because it's no longer possible to understand the global economy without recognizing the role they play, but instead we'll play a repetition of our relationship with the United States: we'll get late to the party only when it's impossible to continue denying the obvious, led by people without strategic vision, we'll be infighting for over 20 particularist interests, with politicians far too invested into repaying favors to their lobbying domesting elites, and believing that we can regulate our way out of irrelevance when we no longer control our share of the economy.