As the European Union forges closer ties with China, the bloc is also moving to calm concern that Chinese exporters will destroy EU-based industries ranging from steel to solar.
The EU will retain the scope to impose hefty levies against Chinese businesses that sell goods below cost in Europe under a planned tariff overhaul, according to Salvatore Cicu, an Italian member of the European Parliament. Europe is revamping the way it calculates duties on these “dumped” imports in response to longstanding Chinese demands for more favorable trade treatment.
“We want to give a political message”•especially to China”•that we are open for trade, but EU industries mustn’t be penalized,” Cicu, who is steering a draft law on the controversial issue through the 28-nation Parliament, said in an interview at the assembly’s headquarters in Strasbourg, France. “We can find an effective compromise.”
At a June 1-2 meeting in Brussels, Chinese and European leaders continued to chart a path to closer trade and investment ties. The EU is seeking to create stronger international bonds without reigniting a populist wave in Europe that rallied against globalism’s negative effects on domestic industries and workers.
Meanwhile, the bloc is telling China that more open trade with Europe first requires fewer barriers to foreign investment in the Chinese market. After Chinese President Xi Jinping used the Davos forum of global business and political elites in January to portray his country as a champion of free markets, EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said she’s still looking for results.
“We are all waiting now for the remarks by the president to translate into action and make trade and investment more open,” Malmstrom told an EU-China business conference in Brussels on June 2.
Disagreements over trade prevented both sides from drawing up as planned their first-ever statement on climate change and clean energy at the summit, according to an EU official, who said the discord over commercial matters had no impact on the unity over global warming.
Ambassador Yang Yanyi, head of the Chinese mission to the EU, told China’s official Xinhua News Agency before the summit that some differences between the two regions may arise while others fall away but “the key is to understand how to manage and handle these differences properly.”