Europe’s phoney war with China is at an end. After years of building up an improved arsenal for a trade war, Europe is now showing it is willing to get tough on Beijing.
On Tuesday, EU investigators swooped on the Dutch and Polish offices of Nuctech, a maker of security scanners, in a case that hinges on one of Europe’s longest running grievances with China — lavish state subsidies that help Chinese firms undercut European rivals.
Nuctech was once run by Hu Haifeng, son of President Xi Jinping’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, and China’s reaction was predictably seething. The raid “highlights the further deterioration of the EU’s business environment and sends an extremely negative signal to all foreign companies,” China’s mission to the EU fumed.
The timing of such an inflammatory raid seems significant, ahead of a trip to Europe by Xi next month — his first in five years, taking him to France, Serbia and Hungary — marking a definitive shift in the way that Europe is prepared to tackle its trade problems with China.
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What are you talking about? It’s known China pours tons of subsidies into their organisations that go so far as these organisations selling their products cheaper than what they cost to produce. They flood target markets with the clear intention of destroying local industries so they can take over the entire market for themselves.
Also, free market? A company who wants to operate in china will have most times to do some sort of technology transfer and give part of the control to the Chinese government. Add child labour on top of that and the horrible working conditions Chinese workers endure and you will start to having a picture of how absurd it is to have “free market” with China.
Free market is a good thing when you operate in the same leveled field.
Victimisation?! They EU has done nothing about China’s BS for way too long and it’s now finally taking action. That’s a good thing if you ask me.
Eu does that also, we sell goods to other continents cheeper than what they can produce. We are not Innocent in this regard, we fuck over African producers by subsidizing the shit out of our products, so they can’t compete. Poor people buy our can of tomatoes, instead of tomotoes produced in the region, creating jobs and businesses.
The US does the same thing, when NAFTA was signed the US started to subsidizing agricultural, to take over the Mexican markets. Clinton knew this would make a lot of people poor in Mexico and they would probably emigrate to the US, so Clinton increased the border security.
Right, maybe I can be more clear on my stance then.
I don’t agree with the outcome, nor am I saying it’s a good thing china is doing. I mean I’m impacted by the EU’s decisions as a part of it, so I would be shooting myself in the foot.
What I’m saying is, the EU has been consistently making naive decisions when it comes to enforcing its economic safety. Making free trade agreements that would negatively impact its internal economical balance and turn out to be very much one sided, and not taking preemptive or earlier measures against china’s obvious economical dogma. It’s been decades. While I am indeed glad they finally do something about it, I’m just worried about the time it took them to realize the Chinese could be a threat or even worse, that they did it on purpose.
Edit: I deleted my original comment because it was awkwardly and hastily written and did not reflect accurately what I meant to express.
Yeah you’re pretty much saying what I’m saying then.
Because the EU doesn’t really allow large-scale subsidies in the same way. Of course, the US does, which is why Tesla has been so successful and half the chip companies in the world just decided to set up new fabs there, but…