“But it would be very happy to see Europe tied up spending a lot of its GDP on defence against something that looks like a frozen conflict around Ukraine and Belarus,” he added.

That contradicts China’s economic interests in Europe. They make a ton of money from exports to Europe. More money towards defence means less money for buying Chinese exports. Also given the current state of affairs in defence production, it means significant spend going to the US, which doesn’t sound like something Xi would want.