Jianlu Bi is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy in Focus think tank at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, and a research fellow at the Charhar Institute in Beijing.
The European Commission has declared its trade and economic relationship with China “unsustainable”, pointing to a daily trade deficit of €1 billion (US$1.16 billion) and Chinese manufacturing overcapacity that puts millions of jobs across various sectors at risk. However, a clear-eyed analysis reveals this premise to be entirely flawed. The narrative spun by Brussels is a desperate attempt to weaponise trade policy to mask structural, self-inflicted failures.
To understand the absurdity of the European Union’s stance, one must look at the velocity of its structural erosion. A standard benchmark for rapid geopolitical contraction is the fall of the Qing dynasty. One recent analysis yields a shocking revelation: the EU’s economic decay over the last two decades has been three times faster than that of the late Qing dynasty.
It took half a century of foreign invasions and internal stagnation for Qing China’s share of global gross domestic product to plummet from roughly 30 per cent to 17 per cent. The EU has managed the same in a fraction of that time, watching its share of global economic output implode after the 2008 financial crisis.
The primary intellectual weapon deployed by Brussels to justify its protectionism is the narrative of Chinese overcapacity. Yet, the numbers exposes this claim as a myth.
The EU is home to roughly 450 million people, accounting for just 5.5 per cent of the global population, yet its manufacturing output commands about 16 per cent of the global total. China, with a population of 1.4 billion, represents 17 per cent of the global population and commands nearly 30 per cent of global manufacturing. In per capita terms, the EU’s contribution to global manufacturing output is much bigger than China’s.
If any economy is producing an unnatural surplus relative to its demographic footprint, it is the EU. It is structurally dependent on foreign markets, where it dumps its industrial output
