They may be more “stable” right now - but the amount of outright IP theft, cyber attacks and espionage is more than enough to keep them at arms length.
The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.
While true, there is economy to the least awful option - by virtue of the USA making itself less reliable, they’ve increased China’s standing automatically, especially in the soft-power vacuum the US has left behind.
China is right to calculate this, even if they aren’t really anyone’s ally.
To be perfectly blunt, I don’t think the presentation of a united front is the issue. The wariness is from China wanting to fill the power vacuum left by the US, and many countries being extremely wary of hitching their wagons to an authoritarian superpower (which is what the US is turning into, and one of the primary reasons outside of the tariff idiocy that a lot of countries are stepping away from the US now). And the PRC is absolutely an authoritarian superpower.
The E.U. should rule the world.
