The Chinese ecosystem is very impressive. They both have tremendous cash and resources flowing into their government owned agencies, and specific funding and competition in their private new space companies. I understand there's tremendous talent and knowledge transfer sloshing around the Chinese ecosystem, say nothing about funding and resources.

But let's be real - EU new space is not competing against the Chinese launch market right now. There's time and room for them to mature.

One major reason why EU capabilities are lagging is because they hitched their geopolitical wagon to the US and assumed that the US launch providers would be sufficient for commercial purposes, and that ESA/Arianespace only had to preserve enough capability to meet truly strategic requirements.

Now the EU is scrambling because they realized that there are unsavoury downsides. Just deciding to cede all European launches to the Chinese is literally just putting themselves in the same shit soup.

And even practically, the EU-USA decoupling is going to take time. And until the EU gets enough strategic autonomy in space, I think the EU is largely going to play nice with the US rules against collaborating with China in space (that means almost no EU payloads are going to be launched by China).