German Chancellor Olaf Scholz yesterday instructed Chinese officials to promote free trade and equal business opportunities, a week after US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen pressed Beijing on the same trade issues.
“Competition must be fair,” Scholz told an audience of university students in Shanghai, on the second leg of his four-day trip to the Asian nation.
“We want a level playing field, of course we want our companies to have no restrictions,” he said, identifying dumping, overproduction and copyright infringement as key areas of concern.
Photo: Reuters
Scholz is in China to deliver a delicate message: If Beijing does not heed European warnings to end discriminatory business practices, Brussels would have no choice but to escalate trade defense mechanisms.
A survey published on Wednesday last week by the German Chamber of Commerce in China showed that two out of three German companies operating in the world’s second-largest economy say they face unfair competition.
The survey results underscored concerns that foreign businesses in China suffer disadvantages compared with their local counterparts.
Scholz began his second visit to China as chancellor in the southwestern city of Chongqing on Sunday, where the German delegation raised the issue of Chinese overcapacity when meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Secretary of Chongqing Yuan Jiajun (袁家軍).
One participant of that meeting said that the Chinese side dismissed the German criticisms as “fake questions,” saying they were based on what CCP officials regarded as “fake news” or “false information.”
Last week, Yellen also implored Beijing to scale back its industrial output, saying that Chinese factories were producing more than the world could bear, and chided officials over the “unfair” treatment of US firms.
“We’re concerned about the possibility of surges in Chinese exports to our markets in areas where they have a great deal of overcapacity,” Yellen said in a CNN interview broadcast on Sunday.
“I’ve been very clear in my discussions with them that this is a concern not only to us, but also to other countries, to Europe, to Japan, and even to emerging markets. India, Mexico, Brazil,” she said.
Asked if additional US tariffs could be in the cards, Yellen told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, “I wouldn’t take anything off the table as a potential response, but we really want to responsibly manage this relationship.”
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