President Xi Jinping delivers a speech at the College of Europe in the Belgian city of Bruges. [Photo/Xinhua]

The rise of China is changing the geopolitical landscape, and this has led to cries of alarm and claims of a "China threat" by many established overseas scholars and thinkers when talking about China.

But as China's leaders keep reiterating, Beijing has no interest in war, hegemony or colonialism and in its diplomatic dictionary the key words are peace, development, and win-win cooperation.

At a seminar on the relationship between China and the United States in Brussels last week, Chinese Ambassador to Belgium Qu Xing pointed out that China has no track record of engaging in war with others to solidify its power.

Qu had also been invited to speak at the beginning of the year at a debate on the book China's Coming War with Asia by young scholar Jonathan Holslag from the Brussels Institute of Contemporary China Studies, during which he also refuted the suggestion that China was warmongering. Qu suggested that Holslag should at least have added a question mark in the title of his book.

At the event last week, I was asked to comment on China's investments in the European Union, especially in the renewable energy sector. The speaker had painted a broad picture of China's investment activities in the solar and wind farm sectors in Europe during the period before 2014, and I must say that the information used to support his points was enormous and profound.

But investment by Chinese companies in the European Union is much less than that of the EU in China. In fact, Chinese companies have just begun to invest in Europe on a large scale over the past five or six years, while European companies have been investing in China for decades.

Interestingly, when the seminar was organized last week, the European Investment Bank was announcing its first slot of projects under the new EU Commission's three-year 315 billion euro ($343 billion) investment plan and the bank could only mobilize 800 million euros. In contrast, China and Pakistan entered into a multi-billion-dollar cooperation agreement last week to develop the latter's infrastructure projects in the same week.