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China is a giant threat and I am really struck when I talk to some of your colleagues at the top of this uh commission. They talk about the threat that China's cheap exports flooding the world are so large that you could be talking about the destruction of entire sectors of European industry in a very few years. Is that the level of threat that you see? I think that's that's clearly the perception and I think we have also the figures clearly to underpin it. I'm very open about the fact that the trade as we have it right now between China
and Europe is simply unsustainable. I mean it cannot create deficit 1 billion euros a day. That's right. That the trade deficit is running at 1 billion euros a day. 1 billion euro a day and we see that if you look just from top of my head over the last 5 years that the Chinese export increased by something like uh 50% and our exports to China decreased by 30%. On top of it we see that a lot of European companies is kind of squeezed out from the third market. So really that's that's a what you would call in basketball the full court pressing and
and therefore uh I believe that we also need very firm regular structural engagement with uh Chinese counterparts how to deal with that because clearly we have a huge trade with them. uh we are faced with a lot of problems and I want again to prevent uh u some kind of additional drama with the structured engagement because I believe it's clearly necessary but to take a step back I mean dialogue is great dialogue is lovely but it's pretty clear that China's ambition it's not just about arguments about this or that market access China currently makes it's 30% of
all global industrial production is in China the UN's estimate is that goes to 45% % by the end of this decade. So almost half of everything made in a factory in the whole world we made in China and yet they only consume 13% of global production. So that is an extraordinary amount of stuff that has to go somewhere. America's closing itself off. You're the last open rich world market. I mean your outgoing top trade official said this is an imbalance that the world cannot digest. So dialogue is great but don't you actually have to threaten really serious measures you know
new instruments the overcapacity instrument people talk about or even uh you know trade bazookas yeah I think that you know I in my long experience I really believe that people uh and partners react better to engagement than to threats and that I'm sure that I will use this approach until I conclude my public uh service and uh I think that what's uh very clear and I can I can tell you that we are not shine we are not shy about how we are messaging this to our Chinese counterparts or we would have to resort to more of this uh safeguard measures simply
uh to protect the European market. But what I can also say is that we'll be always uh respecting international trading law, WTO methodology and we will do it in very transparent way. But there's a gap, isn't there, between you describing this absolutely unsustainable flood of Chinese exports into Europe and kind of not wanting to have confrontations, wanting to keep dialogue going. So let's talk about um a recent Chinese threat. If you want to have a Chinese factory in Europe, you have to use European components. You have to hire European workers and you have
to transfer technology. You're trying the same kind of jiu-jitsu move uh on China that China used on Western companies so successfully uh 2030 years ago. What was China's response? A threat. There will be counter measures. This is totally unacceptable. This is so China is ready to fight tough. Are you ready to take some pain to show China that they have to play a different game if they want to keep access to European markets to invest in Europe? I think that I would really advise against uh any threats or any but they're the ones making the threats. They
made the threats on 27th of April. So what do you do? What you do is that we of course uh are very clear about the fact that we are going to uh fight tooth and nail for every factory for every job uh in the European Union. And I was very clear about that. But I would not be sending you know the threatening messages over the wires to my Chinese counterparts because I want to talk to them and I want to go through I would say the you know sectors by sector situation where we clearly have a problem and what are the measures uh we can uh undertake together.
