European Union leaders said on Thursday that the EU wants to become a bigger actor in Asia, which they termed a "theatre of tensions", warning of an increasingly assertive China even as they called on Beijing to defend the multilateral global order.
The call came in a joint news conference in Tokyo after an EU-Japan summit featuring European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, European Council President Charles Michel and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. It also came a day after Beijing warned the summit not to "speak ill" of China.
