As the EU forges closer ties with China, the bloc is also moving to calm concern that Chinese exporters would destroy EU-based industries ranging from steel to solar.
The EU is to retain the scope to impose hefty levies against Chinese businesses that sell goods below cost in Europe under a planned tariff overhaul, said Salvatore Cicu, an Italian member of the European Parliament.
Europe is revamping the way it calculates duties on these “dumped” imports in response to longstanding Chinese demands for more favorable trade treatment.
“We want to give a political message — especially to China — that we are open for trade, but EU industries mustn’t be penalized,” Cicu, who is steering a draft law on the controversial issue through the 28-nation parliament, said in an interview at the assembly’s headquarters in Strasbourg, France.
“We can find an effective compromise,” he said.
At a meeting in Brussels on Thursday and Friday, Chinese and European leaders continued to chart a path to closer trade and investment ties.
The EU is seeking to create stronger international bonds without reigniting a populist wave in Europe that rallied against globalism’s negative effects on domestic industries and workers.
Meanwhile, the bloc is telling China that more open trade with Europe first requires fewer barriers to foreign investment in the Chinese market.
After Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) used the Davos forum of global business and political elites in January to portray his country as a champion of free markets, EU Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmstrom said she is still looking for results.
“We are all waiting now for the remarks by the president to translate into action and make trade and investment more open,” Malmstrom told an EU-China business conference in Brussels on Friday.
Disagreements over trade prevented both sides from drawing up their first-ever statement on climate change and “clean” energy at the summit as planned, said an EU official, who added that the discord over commercial matters had no effect on the unity over global warming.
Chinese Ambassador to the EU Yang Yanyi (楊燕怡) told Xinhua news agency before the summit that some differences between the two regions might arise while others fall away, but “the key is to understand how to manage and handle these differences properly.”
Cicu, a native of Sicily serving his first term as an EU lawmaker, said European industries have little to fear from the planned overhaul of the bloc’s system for determining anti-dumping duties.
At stake is the level of European import levies on billions of euros of goods.
While it is the EU’s No. 2 trade partner after the US, China is grouped with the likes of Belarus and North Korea in lacking market-economy designation by Europe and faces more European anti-dumping duties than any other nation.
After years of stalling, the EU moved to upgrade China’s status in November last year when Malmstrom proposed elevating the nation’s classification in dumping cases.
A final EU agreement is likely to be reached by the end of this year, Cicu said.
The next step is a June 20 vote in the European Parliament’s trade committee on amendments he is proposing.
“We are confident of finding a convergence of views,” Cicu said. “If we manage this properly, it won’t be so bad for the European industry.”
To limit a flood of cheap imports from China, the EU has included in the draft law a formula for calculating anti-dumping duties against countries whose markets are deemed to have “significant distortions” from state intervention.
A related provision would allow the European Commission to report on regional distortions, aiding European industries when filing dumping complaints.
After the June 20 vote in the trade committee, Cicu plans to start negotiations on a final deal with representatives of the bloc’s national governments, which have already reached a deal among themselves.
Asked how one of the most politically toxic EU policy questions in years could suddenly seem ripe for settlement, Cicu cited cool heads, widespread consultations and the value of two decades he spent in the Italian parliament and government before joining the European legislature in 2014.
“Twenty years of political experience is a way to manage hot potatoes,” he said with a smile.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts