Europe’s phoney war with China is at an end. After years of building up an improved arsenal for a trade war, Europe is now showing it is willing to get tough on Beijing.
On Tuesday, EU investigators swooped on the Dutch and Polish offices of Nuctech, a maker of security scanners, in a case that hinges on one of Europe’s longest running grievances with China — lavish state subsidies that help Chinese firms undercut European rivals.
Nuctech was once run by Hu Haifeng, son of President Xi Jinping’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, and China’s reaction was predictably seething. The raid “highlights the further deterioration of the EU’s business environment and sends an extremely negative signal to all foreign companies,” China’s mission to the EU fumed.
The timing of such an inflammatory raid seems significant, ahead of a trip to Europe by Xi next month — his first in five years, taking him to France, Serbia and Hungary — marking a definitive shift in the way that Europe is prepared to tackle its trade problems with China.
Eu does that also, we sell goods to other continents cheeper than what they can produce. We are not Innocent in this regard, we fuck over African producers by subsidizing the shit out of our products, so they can’t compete. Poor people buy our can of tomatoes, instead of tomotoes produced in the region, creating jobs and businesses.
The US does the same thing, when NAFTA was signed the US started to subsidizing agricultural, to take over the Mexican markets. Clinton knew this would make a lot of people poor in Mexico and they would probably emigrate to the US, so Clinton increased the border security.