American tariffs take the center of the stage, but China and the EU face silently

The US Tarifa saga has stolen the worldwide attention of commercial tensions between China and the European Union, which are now warming up.

The accusations and investigations on the commercial practices of others have been a basic element of the EU-China commercial relations, backed by concerns about how national economies are probably affected by competing imports.

In recent weeks, EU restrictions on Chinese companies participating in public tenders for medical devices quickly met China by imposing import curbs in these products. Separately, Chinese duties in the EU Mumada entered into force earlier this month, and both Beijing and Brussels have increased mutual criticism.

In total, the EU-China commercial relations are now “quite poor”, according to Marc Julienne, director of the Asian Studies Center of the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI).

“What was once a domain of great opportunity and enthusiasm for the bilateral relationship has become more the risks than opportunities,” he told CNBC earlier this week.

The relations of the EU and China are taxed by many often related challenges and risks related to the economic positions of confrontation, Grzegorz Stec, a senior analyst of the Mercator Institute for China Studies, suggested.

“The EU and China are widely in a trajectory to collide in terms of their commercial and industrial policy concerns,” he told CNBC. Containment bones include the challenge of China’s overcapacity and commercial diversion to Europe, Stec, who is also head of the Brussels office of the Mercator Institute, he explained.

“Beijing’s increasingly pressing need to export contradicts EU’s need to protect his own industrial base,” he added.

China’s economy faces a gap between its production and demand capacity. He is also fighting with a slow growth, while exports, which for a long time promoted the economy, have been under pressure in the midst of global commercial tensions and a lower demand.

Julienne de Ifri also marked a series of concerns that make the UE-China relationship difficult, including an increasingly difficult environment for foreign companies operating in the growing commercial deficit of China and Europe. In addition, he said that Beijing was “Armando” the trade to press Europe, as they did with Brandy’s tariffs.

China began to investigate the European imports of Brandy after the EU began to slapped the levies in electric vehicles made by Chinese last year, which raises strong competition to European manufacturing alternatives.

The recent tariff regime of the president of the United States could have been an opportunity for China and the EU to improve its relations, according to Julienne de Ifri.

“It should have had a positive impact on the bilateral relationship, in the sense that, facing the economic coercion of the United States, the United States, [the EU and China] – You could have expected that you negotiate and commitments to make the most of your commercial relationship in the midst of the United States tariff war, “he said.

This has not yet materialized.

Jean-Marc Fenet, the main member of the Essec Institute for Geopolitics and Business, suggested that a reason for this failure could be that Beijing feels that he has come out at the top of his own commercial drama with Washington.

“The need for a common front with the EU is, therefore, less necessary,” said Fenet. “In fact, fear now in Beijing is rather that the EU will accept an alignment with an anti-china line that the US administration would impose outside the commercial negotiations.”

After the initial acute climbs and tense negotiations, China and the United States confirmed a commercial framework agreement in June, including the provisions around rare and technological regulations highly disputed. Earlier this year, Beijing had imposed export restrictions on various elements and magnets of rare earths, which are often used in automotive, defense and energy sectors, as part of their response to the initial rates of the United States.

The Stec of the Mercator Institute argued that it is “unlikely to be” at the persistent points of the commercial dispute between Beijing and Brussels, instead providing for more problems.

“Excessive fun and trade problems combined with Beijing’s disposition to use rare earth export controls such as leverage in EV Rate negotiations indicate more turbulence to come,” he said.

Tensions about EU measures to increase their autonomy and China’s attempts to avoid these efforts can also be expected according to STEC.

Fenet gave a skeptical tone.

“The significant hardening of the positions of the European Commission and the increase in the power of the protection tools with which it has been equipped in recent years, makes it likely that there are increasing frictions, as evidenced by the recent measures taken against the Chinese medical team and, as undoubtedly, we will see at the EU-China summit on July 24 on July 24.^th In Beijing, “he added.

Their hopes for the summit, which the sources said that CNBC will include a meeting between the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and Chinese President Xi Jinping are also low.

“The two parties already seem to anticipate a difficult and probably not conclusive meeting,” said Fenet.

– Silvia Amaro of CNBC contributed to this report.