European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s state-of-the-union speech on September 17 offered few details on new trade measures targeting China, but its sharp tone was designed to send a message to Beijing, analysts said. Von der Leyen warned that a “second China shock” was already affecting Europe and vowed that the EU would use all available tools to rebalance its trade relationship with the country. Her remarks came as the European Union’s October deadline for securing tangible results in rebalancing trade with China approaches. EU Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic held a video conference with his Chinese counterpart Wang Wentao as planned on September 18. Though Von der Leyen’s speech was light on specifics, the fact that China was the third topic addressed and explicitly mentioned as a threat to Europe was significant, according to Peter Chase, Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund and a former U.S. diplomat in Brussels. “Where it was placed and how explicitly she spoke were the more important messages than the actual words that she used,” he said.
Others saw the speech as a sign that von der Leyen still wanted Europe to deal with China within the framework of the World Trade Organization (WTO). “For me, the important signal is that there was no reference to new instruments,” said Ignacio Garcia Bercero, Senior Fellow at the Bruegel think tank and former Director at the European Commission’s Trade Department. The fact that she refrained from mentioning any specific measures also indicated that the priority was still for both sides to see what could be achieved during a coming round of trade talks in October, he said.
Analysts agreed that the ongoing trade talks could be a reason von der Leyen did not announce any new measures. “It would be inappropriate to say, ‘we already committed to this deadline for these negotiations, but we’re going to go ahead and start doing all this stuff anyway’, that would be very unusual by European diplomatic standards,” said Jacob Gunter, Head of the Program for Economy and Industry at the Mercator Institute for China Studies.
It would also be politically risky for von der Leyen to go too far in her speech, given the delicate power balance between the EU Commission and member states, which could hurt the EU’s ability to build a political consensus next month and take concrete actions, according to Gunter, as reported by the South China Morning Post.
