Europe isn’t big enough of a market for Chinese exporters to bully around China.
Consider this chart
Russia, India, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam. All bigger destinations for Chinese exports than Germany.
In fact, if you look at the chart, you will realise that Chinese export destinations are actually quite diversified. If a small group of countries tries to trade war against China, they will get less competitive industrial inputs while other countries get an advantage.
To really fight against Chinese exports would require signing on a good number of countries and threaten China. But even in that case, all you’ve done in real terms is force China to … give you less stuff. It’s really a lose-lose situation for western economies unless they go back to keynesianism.
This gives same vibes as a house cat thinking it owns the place.
I mean it’s not like the EU doesn’t subsidizes a bunch of shit. That just turns into dividends for VW shareholders or something.
More broadly though, the EU is free to run its economy any way it likes, but China is a sovereign state that’s not part of the EU and they get to run their economy the way they like. Also, the whole premise of subsidies being seen as a negative was that markets are more efficient. If that’s not actually the case then maybe EU should restructure its economy to be more competitive.
