China on Thursday said that an investigation had found the EU imposed unfair “trade and investment barriers” on Beijing, marking the latest salvo in long-running commercial tensions between the two economic powers.
Officials announced the probe in July last year after Brussels began looking into whether Chinese government subsidies were undermining European competition.
Beijing has consistently denied its industrial policies are unfair and has threatened to take action against the EU to protect Chinese companies’ legal rights and interests.
Photo: AFP
The Chinese Ministry of Commerce said the implementation of the EU’s Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR) discriminated against Chinese firms and “constitutes trade and investment barriers.”
It did not mention whether Beijing planned to take action in response.
The two are major trade partners, but are locked in a wide-ranging standoff, notably over Beijing’s support for its renewables and electric vehicle sectors.
EU actions against Chinese firms have come as the 27-nation bloc seeks to expand renewable energy use to meet its target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
However, Brussels also wants to pivot away from what it views as an overreliance on Chinese technology at a time when many Western governments increasingly consider Beijing a potential national security threat.
When announcing the probe, the Chinese ministry said its national chamber of commerce for importing and exporting machinery and electronics had filed a complaint over the FSR measures.
The 20-page document detailing the ministry’s conclusions said their “selective enforcement” resulted in “Chinese products being treated more unfavorably during the process of export to the EU than products from third countries.”
The FSR had “vague” criteria for investigating foreign subsidies, placed a “severe burden” on the targeted companies, and had opaque procedures that created “huge uncertainty,” it added.
EU measures such as surprise inspections “clearly exceeded the necessary limits,” while investigators were “subjective and arbitrary” on issues such as market distortion, the ministry said.
Companies deemed not to have complied with probes also faced “severe penalties,” which placed “huge pressure” on Chinese firms, it added.
The European Commission on Thursday defended the FSR, saying it was “fully compliant with all applicable EU and World Trade Organization rules.”
“All companies, regardless of their seat or nationality, are subject to the rules,” a commission spokesperson said in a statement. “This is also the case when applying State aid or antitrust rules.”
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it plans to double investment in data center-related technologies, including advanced packaging and high-speed interconnect technologies, to broaden the new business’ customer and service portfolios. The chip designer is redirecting its resources to data centers, mainly designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for cloud service providers. The data center business is forecast to lead growth in the next three years and become the company’s second-biggest revenue source, replacing chips used in smart devices, MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told a media event in Taipei. “Three or four years
Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
Until US President Donald Trump’s return a year ago, when the EU talked about cutting economic dependency on foreign powers — it was understood to mean China, but now Brussels has US tech in its sights. As Trump ramps up his threats — from strong-arming Europe on trade to pushing to seize Greenland — concern has grown that the unpredictable leader could, should he so wish, plunge the bloc into digital darkness. Since Trump’s Greenland climbdown, top officials have stepped up warnings that the EU is dangerously exposed to geopolitical shocks and must work toward strategic independence — in defense, energy and
RSS