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Why can’t the EU find a coherent position on China? To find the answer to this question one has to analyze the interests and powers of the actors involved in shaping those policies, to do so a multilevel approach is required. The first level to analyze is that of horizontal coherence, among member states, in which one will find two main drives behind this policy incoherence: one is the member states economic interests, which can vary wildly in relation to China, and therefore determine the willingness to take a softer or tougher policies. The second driver, often competing with the first will be that of the importance of the relation between the members states and the U.S, inducing those who most need the American protection to confront China as a way to demonstrate their loyalty, and those who can afford a more independent foreign policy, to stand their ground. Then there will be the dimension of vertical coherence, in which we will analyze the different approaches of the institutions toward China and notice how the interests they answer to, and their prerogatives shape their positions to be different from one another. Lastly, we will look at the dimension of coherence among different policy fields and find that there are those were the EU sees China as a strategic partner, those in which it considers the country a competitor and those in which it believes it to be a systemic rival. Overall, the response, facilitated by looking through the theoretical lenses of intergovernmentalism, will be that different interests will amount to different polices, and that the complexity of the relation is such, that is impossible to find one, integrated, coherent policy for the EU on China, as long as the interests of the actors involved in the decision keep diverging.