would be good enough excuse for all of Europe to start sanctioning China the way they did to Russia

All that would do is sink Europe even faster than it already is sinking. The sanctions on Russia have been the biggest economic own goal in history. Sanctions on China would be a hundred times worse and China would shrug it off the same way it did the US trade war.

You’re right in that the framing is just an excuse. The root cause is that the US has shaped the geopolitical and economic conditions through various pressures to coerce these countries into their current predicaments.

European industries cannot possibly compete with Chinese industries. The cheap Russian energy allowed Europe to stay competitive post-2009 GFC while paying their workers relatively well compared to the rest of the world. This advantage is now lost.

Additionally, wages aren’t regulated/enforced in China and the price wars among Chinese capitalists have been putting downward pressure on the worker’s wages. It has gotten so bad that the government is forced to step in with their “anti-involution” policy to stop the industries from killing themselves. If Europe wants to compete on Chinese wages, good luck, it’d be a political suicide for any country that even attempts that.

And as I’ve said before, since these countries have bought into the neoliberal free trade ideology, where they all want to run trade surpluses, which can never happen, one of them is going to lose. And if both refuse to budge, it’ll have to be a war.

As such, Europe has no choice but to sanction and impose tariffs on China. The “China is evil” narrative is simply the excuse used to justify why the European economy is uncompetitive, in order to better sell the propaganda to its populace on why they have to militarize.

This wasn’t so much of a problem in the previous decades because the US had voluntarily run a trade deficit strategy to absorb the global surplus goods. Now that Trump wants to cut back its trade deficit, and if no country is willing to run its own trade deficit to take up the oversupply of goods from global exporters, it can only result in mercantilism as it did in the 19th and early 20th century.

It is the same for Japan where their car manufacturers have been suffering from Chinese competition, and once again, neoliberal free trade ideology will only further intensify the mercantilistic warfare, where the country with the cheapest and most efficient export production ends up killing its competitors.

The real beneficiary of free trade is obviously the US, who can use its financial power to “bail out” the economies of those countries under pressure, and coerce them into submitting to the US interests and reshape the global supply chain through weaponizing China’s industrial prowess.

An analogy here is a landlord deliberately create situations that drive down the land value in a neighborhood (e.g. increased crime) or an industrial zone (increased business cost) they are interested in, and then come in and buy out the land for cheap for re-development. The financial hegemon is the landlord, the industrial and commodity supplier nations are the factory owners and producers.

And for the 100th time, the only way out is China tapping into its huge domestic market to absorb the global export capacity, which it has found very difficult to do in practice.