EU too slow to act as China rewrites global trade rules, trade chief Sefcovic warns

The European Union’s trade chief Maros Sefcovic has railed against the bloc’s glacial trade defences, warning that years-long probes and rigid rules will not protect the bloc from China’s increasingly fierce export machine.

Speaking in the European Parliament on Tuesday, Sefcovic lashed out at Beijing’s “unsustainable” trade surplus and called for an urgent overhaul of world trading rules to account for “overcapacities”, “unfair trade policies” and “state subsidies”.

He confirmed, meanwhile, that the commission was “monitoring very closely the increase of plug-in hybrid Chinese vehicles” to the EU.

“Last year the deficit with China was €360 billion [US$424 billion] … clearly this is not sustainable in the medium to long-term,” the commissioner said, pointing to an International Monetary Fund study which showed that 4 per cent of Chinese gross domestic product is used for “different kinds of state subsidies”.

“We have well over 200 cases where we are using trade defence investigations. But here I also would like to say that in the framework for our economic security discussions ... we have to look at how we can speed up the process,” Sefcovic added.

An average trade probe can take “more than a year” and often relies on an official complaint from a company. The process “takes a lot of time and often misses the opportunity to act when it’s really needed”, the Slovak official said.