The European Union will expand tools to defend its economy against imbalanced trade with China, the bloc’s industry chief told the Financial Times in a report published today.<\/p>\n
The comments come ahead of a special meeting of EU commissioners tomorrow, focused on how the 27-nation group should approach China to level the playing field.<\/p>\n
China’s booming exports have resulted in large trade surpluses with many of Europe’s top economies, putting political pressure on the continent’s leaders to protect local industries.<\/p>\n
Stephane Sejourne told the FT the EU would step up its use of import quotas and tariffs on China to protect certain sectors – including chemicals, metals and clean technology – against unfair competition.<\/p>\n
“Our objective is not to break with China but to have a real rebalancing and real measures that allow us to do it,” Sejourne said, according to the newspaper.<\/p>\n
Responding to the comments, China’s foreign ministry \u2060accused the EU of “cherry picking” data to justify claims of imbalanced trade.<\/p>\n
Such an approach inevitably leads to conclusion \u200cof imbalanced trade ties, Mao Ning, a \u2060ministry spokesperson, \u200csaid at a regular press conference.<\/p>\n
The \u2060EU \u200cis not forced to trade with China, Mao said, \u2060warning that China will take \u2060all measures necessary to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The European Union will expand tools to defend its economy against imbalanced trade with China, the bloc’s industry…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":471015,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[72,113,61,60],"class_list":["post-471014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/471015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}