EU official signals ‘unilateral’ trade curbs on Chinese exports, saying dialogue alone will not be enough

The EU will need to impose “unilateral” measures to curb Chinese exports, the bloc’s trade enforcer Denis Redonnet told MEPs on Tuesday (14 July).

“Dialogue alone will not suffice,” Redonnet, the EU Commission’s deputy director-general for trade told a hearing of the parliament’s international trade committee.

Redonnet’s tone was far more combative than that taken by his boss, EU trade commissioner Maros Sefcovic, after a meeting at the end of June with Chinese commerce minister Wang Wentao.

At that meeting, Sefcovic and China’s commerce minister Wang Wentao agreed to set up four “workstreams” on trade and investment balancing, export controls, intellectual property rights and WTO reform. The idea is that these will enable officials to make progress on a range of issues ahead of Sefcovic’s visit to Beijing in October.

But Redonnet insisted that the EU would still take steps to curb Chinese exports.

“We need to look at what the Chinese do. It is more than likely that we’ll have unilateral protection measures adopted at the European Union level. So we’ll be taking various measures in parallel,” he said.

“There is nothing cyclical in this,” Redonnet told MEPs, adding that the ever-growing trade deficit was “the result of structural factors … the result of a Chinese economic model that prioritises production over consumption.”

He described Beijing’s tactics as “a form of industrial dominance”.