 China's diplomats were already having a terrible year in Europe, but they just managed to make it even worse. At this rate, Chinese President Xi Jinping may achieve the dubious feat of alienating the Europeans faster and further than even U.S. President Donald Trump is doing. Xi's overarching objective in the region is to prevent the European Union and the U.S. from ganging up against China. He was hoping for a breakthrough at a summit with EU leaders scheduled for Sept. 14. Originally slated to take place in Leipzig, it'll be a video conference instead, owing to the pandemic. But the stakes are high. So Xi this past week dispatched his foreign minister, Wang Yi, to five European countries for some preparatory sweet talk. Talk there was; it just wasn't sweet. Wang showed up hoping to hear the softer tones to which he's accustomed from Europeans, who remain more eager than the Americans to keep trading and doing business with China. Instead, he was surprised at the amount of resistance he was picking up underneath the formal niceties. In the ritualized world of diplomatic jargon, this has signaled not only a new European tone but also a new direction. For years, many European countries, and above all Germany, did their best for commercial reasons to look the other way as China violated human rights, took advantage of Europe's open markets and bullied some of its Asian neighbors. Those times appear to be over. Read the whole thing. A Bubble Scarier Than Big Tech Is Brewing in China — Shuli Ren Of Course Trump Couldn't Resist Bob Woodward — Timothy L. O'Brien Here's a Smarter Way for Biden to Attack Trump — Ramesh Ponnuru Fallen Soldier Insults Give Trump a Lot to Fear — Cass R. Sunstein Bankers Hit the Limits on Working From Home — Elisa Martinuzzi 'Weimar America'? The Trump Show Is No Cabaret — Niall Ferguson Welcome to Your Bland New World — Ben Schott Biden Plan to Improve the 401(k) Does the Opposite — Aaron Brown Go Ahead and Call Warren Buffett a Snowflake — Tae Kim and Tara Lachapelle This is the Weekend Edition of Bloomberg Opinion Today, a roundup of the 10 most popular stories Bloomberg Opinion published this week based on web readership. | 
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