China's Export Controls Increasingly Lack 'Pure Dual-Use Justification,’ EU Official Says
The EU is growing increasingly concerned about Beijing's use of export controls and trade remedies as retaliatory tools against other nations, a senior European Commission official said this week.
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“It's very clear that China is quite ready to use trade dependencies as a weapon,” Maria Martin-Prat De Abreu, the commission’s deputy director general for trade and economic security, said during an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “So the situation is difficult.”
De Abreu said Beijing is already using a range of trade measures to retaliate against the EU for its decision last year to impose countervailing duties on Chinese electric vehicle imports (see 2410290031). She pointed to recent Chinese probes on imports of EU pork, dairy and brandy (see 2412260024, 2406180009 and 2409250010), and she mentioned that Beijing officially determined that the EU’s Foreign Subsidies Regulation is an unfair trade and investment barrier (see 2501100005).
De Abreu also noted that China is more frequently using export controls as a retaliatory tool. After issuing new dual-use export control regulations last year (see 2410210042 and 2411150014), Beijing imposed export restrictions on certain key critical minerals and other dual-use items being shipped to the U.S. for military uses (see 2412030022). It also has imposed controls on exports of gallium, germanium, antimony and other critical minerals sent to the U.S., the EU and elsewhere (see 2307050018 and 2310030035).
De Abreu said some of those export controls don’t appear to be for national security purposes. She said China is “expanding their list of controls, export controls, in a manner that clearly departs from the pure dual-use justification and is becoming increasingly large and general.”
Maros Sefcovic, the EU’s trade and economic security chief, traveled to Beijing this week to discuss trade issues with Chinese officials, she said. The EU wants to pass along a “very clear message” that it won’t tolerate what De Abreu said are unjustified Chinese trade measures.
“We are not pursuing decoupling. But we consider that the current situation, the current imbalance in our trade and investment relations, is not tenable,” she said. “We think it is important to pass a clear message that China cannot take for granted the openness of the European internal market.”
De Abreu said the commission will “see how these discussions go,” adding that the EU wants to maintain open communication with Beijing. But she also said she has “no reason to believe” that those talks will “do away with the need to continue with our derisking policy, to use trade defense [tools], and to use other autonomous instruments.”
She noted that the EU continues to be open to “alternative solutions” that would allow the bloc to lift its countervailing duties on Chinese EVs, including by negotiating “price undertakings” with individual Chinese exporters. But De Abreu acknowledged the two sides haven’t made much progress.
“There has been intensive engagement with China. I'm not sure at this stage I would call it negotiations,” she said. “And the reality -- and that is not a secret -- is that this far, we have not found a solution.”
De Abreu briefly touched on the U.S., saying the EU wants to partner with the Trump administration to counter unfair trade barriers put in place by China. “We clearly don't want a confrontation,” with the U.S., she said.
But the EU is also looking to diversify its major trading partners. She said the bloc recently struck a trade agreement with the four main South American nations in the Mercosur trade bloc (see 2412060060) -- Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay -- and also concluded political talks with Mexico on modernizing their trade deal (see 2501170018). “I don't think those announcements came just by chance,” De Abreu said.
The bloc is also relaunching trade negotiations with Southeast Asian nations that “had been left aside for a number of years because they were not progressing,” she said, specifically referencing Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines.
“It really, really is a very, very busy year,” De Abreu said, “and likely going forward it’s going to be even busier.”