EU-China relations have a long diplomatic history that has been rooted in economic cooperation. In the past decade, trade and investment tensions between the two partners have become more visible, leading to a transition from a partnership based on unlimited cooperation to one that acknowledges the existence of competition and even rivalry. This transition originates from a switch in the EU’s approach to China and the growing apprehension towards the benefits brought by cooperation with Beijing. Simultaneously, the emergence of European Strategic Autonomy as a central concept to the EU’s foreign agenda has occurred, promoting the EU’s competitiveness and the capacity to mitigate overdependencies on non-EU partners. As one of the EU’s biggest trading partners with whom it shares a strong level of interdependence, China becomes an important element in the EU’s strategic autonomy. This has been evident in the recent European policy towards China, characterised by the idea of de- risking. Given this, this work aims to analyse how the policy of European Strategic Autonomy has impacted EU-China economic relations, specifically trade and investment. By combining the analysis of trade and investment statistics with the analysis of the EU and China’s policy documents and official communications published between 2000 and 2023, we intend to establish a correlation between political discourse and economic reality and explore how one impacts the other. This approach evidences the challenges faced by the EU in balancing the “partner, competitor, systemic rival” definition towards China, while highlighting the growing fusion between economic power and geopolitics.