“If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu,” was the verdict back in January of Canadian prime minister Mark Carney on the world’s new diplomatic order — one which appears to be dominated by China and the United States.
In the past 10 days, Chinese president Xi Jinping has hosted state visits by US counterpart Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Russia might not be an economic superpower, but it is fair to assume that trade was on the agenda in both cases. Trump left Beijing promising that China would be buying billions of dollars in extra agricultural goods from the US, though no detail has emerged since his trip.
Next week, however, China will be on the menu when the EU’s college of commissioners meet on Friday (29 May) to discuss a series of new trade instruments that are aimed primarily at curbing Chinese imports to the EU.
Among a series of proposed changes to EU procurement rules, the single main item for discussion is a so-called ‘overcapacity instrument’ that would cap imports of Chinese products sector-by-sector.
The commission insists that China is deliberately producing surplus steel, cars, solar panels and a raft of other products to drop the price and puts European rivals out of business.
“China currently accounts for 30 percent of global production but just 13 percent of consumption. That is an imbalance that the world just cannot digest,” Sabine Weyand, the commission’s outgoing chief trade negotiator, told MEPs earlier this month.
China sold goods worth €360bn than it bought from the EU in 2025 and that trade surplus is rapidly getting larger. According to Chinese customs data, Beijing trade surplus with the EU amounted to $113bn [€97bn] between January and April, up from $91bn over the same period last year.
Reliance anxieties
Though some EU member states, such as Germany and Spain, are increasingly reliant on Chinese inputs for their own industries, the commission is anxious to break or at least reduce this reliance, and the new proposals should not come as a surprise.
In its economic security strategy published last December, which promised to beef up the bloc’s ‘strategic autonomy’, the commission said it would present new tools by September 2026 to protect EU industry from unfair trade policies and overcapacities.
China will bear the brunt of a 47-percent reduction in global steel imports, a deal on which was concluded by EU lawmakers in April and will come into force on 1 July.