After von der Leyen's high-profile announcement of an anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese electric cars, the Financial Times broke the news that within nearly a month, the EU also plans to launch similar investigations into Chinese companies in two industries, steel and wind power.
When discussing this matter, we must first make clear the premise that these so-called anti-dumping and countervailing investigations by the EU, including the United States, against China are political in nature, not economic.
To take a simple example: under the framework of the American and Western jargon, as long as enterprises and state-related institutions, especially with financial institutions, will be characterized as subsidies. In China, for institutional reasons, the banks are state-owned.
That is to say, as long as the United States and Europe want, as long as Chinese companies have borrowed money from banks, they have received "improper subsidies" and can be sanctioned.
Fuzhou Xinghua Bay offshore wind power
Therefore, in the case of countervailing and anti-dumping, it is not that China does not abide by the rules, but that Europe and the United States "do not speak of martial virtues" and look for trouble. In this context, China's protests and even countermeasures are entirely justified.
In such a short period of time, the EU has simultaneously released the word that it wants to deal with Chinese enterprises in the fields of trams, wind power and steel, which is a political suppression based purely on institutional bias.
The EU's rush to politically suppress China has three main objectives.
First of all, the most direct reason should be that a group of politicians in the EU want to use the development prospects of China and the EU as stepping stones for their own political future.
Von der Leyen
At present, the European Union is deeply penetrated by the United States, and the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in addition to herself, her spouse and children all live in the United States. Such officials, when dealing with matters related to Sino-European cooperation, will most likely prioritize the interests of the United States, rather than the interests of the EU itself.
However, in 2024, the European Parliament has to be re-elected, because during the term of office, the European Commission president, von der Leyen is not a long seat.
From the current Revelations of the Western media in the United States, her career plan is to run directly to NATO as Secretary-General after leaving the European Union. In order to achieve this "magnificent turn", the following year, von der Leyen will certainly find a way to make waves in the European Union, please the White House, and get tickets to the NATO secretariat.
Flag of European Union
Second, European Union Trade Representative Borrell will visit Beijing this week to attend the China-Eu Strategic Dialogue. The EU chose to release such a wind at this time, which does not rule out that it wants to give China a "mawei".
Mr Borrell's trip to China was not a smooth one.
Originally, he was going to come to Beijing in the first half of this year, but at that time, the Sino-US relationship was very tense because of the "spy balloon", so Borrell unilaterally said that he was "Yang" and canceled the visit temporarily when the schedule had been determined.
In July, after seeing Blinken take the lead in opening a new round of dialogue between the United States and China, Borrell felt that "the weather has cleared and the rain has stopped, and I have come to the European Union again", and I rushed to "renew the leading edge" with China, but the Chinese side said that it was "inconvenient", so this visit was also soaked in soup.
Borrelli
Now, after Borrell's invitation to China, the EU has released the wind of investigating Chinese enterprises in many fields in advance. On the one hand, it may be infected with the bad problems of the United States, and it wants to create a vanity brand and increase the negotiating chips. On the other hand, it may also want to "find face" for Borrell.
The second theory is a little naive for international relations. But if you look at today's hysterical US and European politicians, they are really capable of such childish things.
More important, of course, is the fact that the European Union is now in the midst of an unprecedented strategic anxiety in its dealings with China, which has spawned a large number of "unreliable" European politicians, and then these people continue to feed and sell this anxiety.
This is the fundamental reason why the EU continues to break through the lower limit, and is willing to tear down its centuries-old camouflage of "free trade" and engage in political persecution against Chinese companies.
steel
Finding an outlet for its strategic anxiety is the third and most important motivation for the EU to deal with Chinese companies this time.
Trams, wind power, steel, the EU's areas of difficulty, one is in new energy, the other is in basic industry. The former is a well-deserved "pearl" in the industrial chain of industrial countries and is the main direction of development in the future, while the latter is the basis of industrialization and the soil where the industrial chain takes root.
The EU's intervention to deal with these two industries shows one thing, that is, the industrial countries of the EU, whether in the breakthrough of frontier industries, or in the capacity of basic industries, by economic means, have been unable to compete with China.
China's industrialization process "late to the first", in a few decades to overtake the development of hundreds of years of old industrial countries in Europe, such a speed of development, not only challenges the European economy, but also challenges the European world view.
Borrell, who is about to visit China, once made a controversial remark to the effect that Europe is a garden and the rest of Europe is a "jungle".
This logic runs through the development ideas of Europe and even the United States. Western countries are keen to teach the developing world, which is nothing but relying on their own early industrialization and good development.
But now, another country, with a different system and a different development model, has caught up with them and even surpassed them in one-fifth or even one-tenth of their time.
What does that mean? It means that this group of people are no longer entitled to hold on to the "sense of superiority" of hundreds of years, it means that they are lagging behind, and they must give up their right to speak and give up the power to make rules.
Biden
The history of the development of the United States and Europe is not bright. The reason why they can be so "decent" and can label themselves as "gardens" is simply because they have mastered the discourse and made the rules in their favor. Under such circumstances, to ask them to cede their power is to dig at their roots.
In fact, this explains why discerning people can see that this wave of EU investigations into China is "hurting the enemy 800, self-damage 3,000", but still have to go ahead.
For this group of people, the power to make rules is more important than simple economic interests. The EU's political fight against China is focused on short-term interests, they are not unaware that this matter will hurt both sides, they only want to slow down the pace of China's development in any case, to give themselves breathing space.
Such an approach would be shortsighted. Chinese enterprises have not been investigated before, China's photovoltaic was comprehensively suppressed by the United States and Europe, and China's steel industry was also investigated by the United States.
After the former was badly hurt, it quickly moved its production capacity to the country, and then relied on the "internal volume" to forcibly iterate into one of China's most competitive industries in the world.
The latter was investigated by the United States for several years, and it was found that there was no investigation, and the United States court ruled that the United States steel company lost the case, and the Chinese steel companies won a big victory.
This was true of the two investigations 10 years ago, and China is even less afraid of EU investigations today. Outside the European Union, China's wind power, electric cars, steel has a considerable market, there is no worry about exports.
China-europe freight train
On the contrary, the EU itself should weigh the loss of China's low-cost steel and cost-effective new energy products, and whether large European companies can continue to survive.
It would be a lot of fun if, like the United States, it imposed tariffs on Chinese goods and ended up inflating itself.
The EU needs to see that trade with China is actually mutually beneficial. China's development will shatter the ridiculous "garden theory" in Europe, but as long as we work together to make the cake bigger, other countries are busy developing, and really have no intention of settling colonial scores with the United States and Europe, the ordinary people in Europe will also live better.
Wang Wenbin
Chinese Foreign Ministry Wang Wenbin pointed out that in the past ten years, the China-Europe railway has reached more than 200 cities in 25 European countries and regions, and the lives of local people have been significantly improved.
From self-styled "garden dwellers" to looking at the world head-on, Europeans must undergo an ideological transformation, which can be dignified or hysterical, depending on the EU's choice.