{"id":45265,"date":"2026-05-17T13:09:48","date_gmt":"2026-05-17T13:09:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/45265\/"},"modified":"2026-05-17T13:09:48","modified_gmt":"2026-05-17T13:09:48","slug":"a-sinking-ship-why-the-eu-and-china-could-be-heading-for-a-trade-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/45265\/","title":{"rendered":"A sinking ship? Why the EU and China could be heading for a trade war"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sparks flew in a Beijing conference room this week, as diplomats, officials and experts from Europe and China clashed over their deepening trade problems<\/a>.Chinese speakers were accused of dismissing Europe\u2019s long-standing complaints and ignoring the harsh economic reality of an increasingly lopsided trading relationship<\/a>.<\/p>\n

EU diplomats were accused of \u201cbullying\u201d, while the bloc\u2019s policies were billed as \u201cprotectionist\u201d efforts to decouple from China.<\/p>\n

At the acrimonious event hosted by the European Union on Tuesday, the two sides bickered not only over policy but also over who was at fault for the broad deterioration in their ties. The blame game suggests that an off-ramp in their rapid descent towards a trade war may be hard to find.<\/p>\n

On one fiery panel billed as \u201cEU-China trade relations, partnership or sinking ship?\u201d, top European business figures and observers looked exasperated as Chinese speakers disregarded their insistence that Europe remained comparably open to Chinese goods.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is neither a sinking ship nor a partnership \u2013 it\u2019s a 400-metre-long giant container ship loaded with 24,000 containers going to Europe and coming back almost empty,\u201d said Jens Eskelund, president of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China.<\/p>\n

In response, Jian Junbo, a researcher at Fudan University\u2019s Centre for China-EU Relations, said it was \u201cunfortunate that the EU is taking decoupling policies with China\u201d, adding that the pair should \u201cwork together to fight protectionism\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sparks flew in a Beijing conference room this week, as diplomats, officials and experts from Europe and China…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45266,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[276,81,66,39,4,28269,40,1192,226,10651,28271,13239,28270,369],"class_list":["post-45265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-eu","tag-beijing","tag-china","tag-donald-trump","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-european-centre-for-international-political-economy","tag-european-union","tag-fudan-university","tag-industrial-accelerator-act","tag-jens-eskelund","tag-john-clarke","tag-nuctech","tag-princess-diana","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45265\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}