S5 Ep5: Backstage: Developing the EU-China relationship amid rising global trade tensions

Following a conference at Bruegel, at a critical moment for the
global economic system, Bruegel director Guntram Wolff is joined
by Zhang Weiwei, director at The China Institute of Fudan
University, together with Bruegel senior fellow Alicia
García-Herrero, for a discussion of EU-China trade relations.


With the United States pursuing a policy of imposing trade
tariffs on its international partners, the geopolitical landscape
is poised for change. What room is there, then, for closer
economic ties between China and Europe in a world where a
multilateral trading system cannot be taken for granted?


There are many points, political and economic, on which European
and Chinese approaches diverge; nevertheless, there remains the
opportunity to focus on common ground, establish a more mutually
beneficial relationship, while also standing up for the
multilateral system.


US trade tariffs have driven China and Europe together more
quickly than they might have met otherwise. How prepared China
and Europe actually are for building closer ties remains an
essential debate. This conversation assesses what problems still
prevent a smoother integration of interests in both the Chinese
and the European spheres.


We invite you to peruse the audio and video recordings of our
sessions from the event, ‘Perils and potential: China-US-EU trade
relations’, where Bruegel welcomed a number of Chinese and EU
trade experts.


For further reading, consider the Bruegel research paper looking
into European and Chinese trade competition in Latin America,
written by Alicia García-Herrero with Thibault Marbach and
Jianwei Xu.


Also note our blog post analysing data on bilateral trade,
services, investment and protectionism between Asia, Europe and
the US in recent years, determining whether the nature of the
global economy is Transatlantic, Transpacific or Eurasian.