European Commission vice-president Teresa Ribera focused on preserving level playing field

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/38609043

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European Commission vice-president Teresa Ribera has warned China that the EU will not tolerate “dumping” of low-cost Chinese electric vehicles in Europe. And she rejected the idea that the EU should accept “cheap equipment” to help member-states to reach their decarbonisation goals.

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“There is this assumption that counting on cheap equipment could be good to boost the potential of new developments and new decarbonisation pathways in the European market that could be beneficial. And there may be truth on one side, but as you also know, it may be difficult in terms of how it could impact on the capacity to ensure a level playing field. So we cannot accept any type of dumping practices.”

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Trade figures on Monday showed that China’s exports continued to grow in June, jumping by 5.8 per cent compared to a year earlier, despite US tariffs of about 55 per cent on Chinese goods. China ended the first half of 2025 with a record trade surplus of about USD586 billion.

Analysts suggest that Chinese manufacturers have been front-loading exports to the US in case tariffs rise higher in the coming months. But exports to other parts of the world, including the EU, have also continued to rise.

  • Hotznplotzn@lemmy.sdf.orgOPEnglish
    4·
    18 days ago

    This is normal capitalism 101, a principle we demanded China to follow to get access to our market.

    This is an overly simplified narrative, and it is not ‘normal capitalism’.

    Chinese carmakers benefit from unfair state subsidies to say the least, and there has been strong evidence for forced labour conditions in Chinese companies. Brazil sued China carmaker BYD over ‘slave-like’ conditions just to name a more recent example. The Brazilian prosecutors say two of BYD contractors in Brazil (where BYD opened a factory) were responsible for human trafficking and conditions “analogous to slavery” at a factory construction site in the country.

    China is also heavily opposing any transparency, including the supply chain law introduced (and watered down in the meantime) by the EU. The conclusion here is that China is not a trusted partner, at least not under the current government.

    Did coerced labour build your car?

    Thousands of cars ship out of factories every day. But at the other end of the production line, workers are shipped in – thousands of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz every year – from Xinjiang, the western region at the centre of a long-running human rights crisis.

    Moved as part of a labour transfer scheme that experts call forced labour, these ethnic minorities are coercively recruited by the Chinese state to travel thousands of miles and fill the manufacturing jobs that recent Chinese graduates have spurned. An investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found more than 100 brands whose products have been made, in part or whole, by workers moved under this system.