A week of shadow boxing between EU and Chinese trade officials will now be followed by a series of set-piece meetings and summits in Europe before the end of June. But there’s no guarantee of a breakthrough at the end of them.
This month will conclude with meetings in Brussels on 29-30 June between EU trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič and China’s commerce minister Wang Wentao.
Officials are expected to travel between Europe and China in preparation for the officials to have meaningful discussions with “concrete outcomes”, Šefčovič told reporters in Paris, after meeting with Chinese trade envoy Li Chenggang on the margins of an OECD meeting.
“I hope that we will have very detailed discussion on how to address this growing deficit, how to make sure that also EU exports to China will grow, because China is a huge economy, but we export to China less than we export to Switzerland,” he said.
Those remarks make the EU’s intentions clear: it wants to reduce China’s ever-growing trade surplus with the EU-27, which hit €360bn last year and has already widened in the first three months of this year.
