European Commission Vice-President and leader of the jobs, growth, investment and competitiveness team Jyrki Katainen, in Beijing to take part in the international forum on the new Silk Road, has stated that negotiations on an EU-China bilateral investment agreement need to be sped up.
Addressing the forum on Monday, Chinese president Xi Jinping said protectionism had to be rejected. “President Xi has repeated this message several times now, and it is a good sign, and we want to help him deliver. The easiest way to deliver what he has said is to speed up EU-China investment agreement negotiations”, Katainen said in an interview with Reuters.
An investment deal of this kind is “urgently needed” to boost business links between the two sides, Katainen said, making the point that the EU wanted increased access to the Chinese market for European investors. “People in Europe are just asking for reciprocity. Nothing more”, he stated.
In view of Xi’s statements, were the forthcoming EU/China summit, in Brussels on 2 June, to fail to bring any speeding up of the negotiations “it would be not that encouraging”, Katainen said, when “the political will has been expressed so directly several times”.
Europe wants to see “concrete, measurable outcomes” from these talks, Katainen went on to say, adding that, in his view, “results” were possible within a year if Beijing could show strong enough political will to make market access offers.
The talks on an EU-China investment deal that were opened in January 2014 entered their second phase in January 2016 after the parties defined the scope of the hoped-for agreement (see EUROPE 11469).
At the sixth meeting of the EU-China high-level economy and trade dialogue, Katainen and Chinese Deputy Prime Minister Ma Kai encouraged their negotiators to reach agreement “as quickly as possible” on the basic provisions needed to make it possible to exchange market access offers (see EUROPE 11649). (Original version in French by Emmanuel Hagry)