During his visit to China, which ended on Saturday 14 October (see EUROPE B13270AA17), the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, came back on the concept of “de-risking”, meaning reducing risks with regard to its rival and trading partner.
During the visit, he reiterated Europe’s position of reducing the risks associated with its trade dependencies, without “decoupling the European economy from the Chinese economy” (see EUROPE 13213/2).
He also spoke of the need to rebalance bilateral economic relations, given that “we have a huge deficit that has increased 60% in the last years, and this should not be the consequence of just a competitive disadvantage between the EU and China, it must be other structural reasons related with the market access encountered by European firms here in China” (see EUROPE 13271/3).
According to Mr Borrell, the concept of de-risking involves reducing excessive dependency. He gave the example of the realisation, at the outbreak of war in Ukraine, of Europe’s energy dependence.
“We discovered that we were too dependent (...) on hydrocarbons, particularly gas, with 40% of our imports coming from Russia. These are excessive dependencies, and it makes sense to diversify our sources of supply. Nothing more”, he explained at a press conference at the end of his visit.
He went on to say that China was also diversifying its sources of supply and that he did not believe there was any “conspiracy against our trade relationship”.
He also explained that the European Commission was going to launch studies to analyse “sector by sector, product by product” where there are excessive dependencies that need to be reduced.
Finally, in response to a question about the investigation launched by the European Commission into Chinese subsidies for electric vehicles (see EUROPE 13264/21), Mr Borrell said that he had told a Chinese counterpart “that launching an investigation is just launching an investigation. Let’s wait to see the result (...)”. (Original version in French by Pauline Denys)