Key Takeaways
- The size of the Chinese economy means that policy
changes in China can have indirect implications for Europeans, even when Europe
is not part of Chinese considerations at all.
- Many such policy changes have their origins in
Chinese insecurities rather than perceptions of Chinese strength and power.
- The current Chinese leadership is more insecure about
its grip on power the way that it projects itself to foreign audiences often
suggest.
- Rhetorically at least, these insecurities are
increasing as China’s leaders attempt the twin tasks of shifting both the basis of economic growth and
also the basis of party legitimacy.
- Understanding the extent and nature of these
insecurities can help others – and not just Europeans – prepare for the
consequences of future policies designed to ameliorate them.
Introduction
In a previous EH4S Policy Paper published in June
2024, we outlined the origins, meaning and objectives of Xi Jinping’s emphasis
on the need to develop New Quality
Productive Forces. Other previous papers have discussed
Chinese responses to both the US’s
increasingly hawkish China policies, the de-risking/de-coupling
discourses more generally, and also focussed on China’s desire to increase
technological self-reliance. While the individual focus of each of
these papers are very different, there is a common thread that runs through
them; the role that economic insecurities play in shaping not just debates in China
about its economic future, but also policies designed to mitigate risks and
create a more predictable, stable and sustainable future trajectory. The aim of
this long read is to act as a supplement to these earlier more focussed papers
by fleshing out in more detail the nature of these insecurities, how they have
emerged and evolved, and what the Chinese leadership things it needs to do to
address them.
At times, China’s search for security can have
very clear and significant impacts on Europe. The rather rapid emergence of
DeepSeek in early 2025 as a much cheaper and yet still
very effective alternative to pre-existing global leaders had an immediate (and
almost panic driven) impact on stock markets, and a more fundamental impact on perceptions
of what the future might hold. In no small part driven by Chinese responses to
the potential of being cut it off from “global R&D
ecosystems”, it the
prospects of China attaining global leadership in key economic
sectors (and perhaps even to use its economic clout to attain geostrategic
political goals). Indeed, there is a strong argument for saying that what
Chinese economic actors are doing overseas, including in Europe, are in large
part driven by a desire to resolve Chinese economic insecurities. For example,
as argued in some detail elsewhere, the Made in
China 2025 initiative that did so much to raise concern in Europe about Chinese
global ambitions was largely inspired by Chinese insecurities; the Chinese
economy was described as
being big “but not strong”, with weak Innovation
capability, and a heavy dependence on foreigners for “core
technologies and high-end equipment”, with most Chinese enterprises unable to
“operate globally” effectively.
In addition to these effects, Europeans are also indirectly
affected by economic shifts in China that are primarily driven by insecurities.
Moreover, the argument here is that the
current Chinese leadership is more insecure than the way that it projects
itself might suggest, and also that these insecurities are increasing. What we see is a combination of that
emerge perceptions of national (in)security and the nature of the global order,
and perceptions of economic (in)security built both on the nature of the global
economy and also the nature of China’s own domestic growth model. Underpinning
all of these insecurities, though, is the party’s view of its own grip on power
and perceptions of political or regime (in)security.
European’s might not have the ability to do much
(or even anything) to change the nature of many of these insecurities. And
where there is some potential room for a European impact, there may well not be
the desire to assuage Chinese concerns. But understanding the nature of what
Susan Shirk back in 2009 called a “fragile
superpower” should provide the basis for planning for a
range of potential futures that are not all just built on an understanding of a
strong, confident and immovable Chinese leadership.
Why Insecurities Matter: The Consequences of Scale and
Mass
In 2007, the UK newspaper The Daily Mail ran a story
about panic buying amidst rapid price rises in the cost of garden fence panels.
The reason was in part a surge in demand due to bad weather over the winter,
and in part a reduction in available supplies. Poor softwood harvests in
Northern Europe explained some of this reduction. More important, though, was
increased demand for wood from countries that were undergoing rapid economic
transitions and seeing rapid urbanisation, construction and growth.
Not surprisingly, China was one of the most
significant of those rapidly changing economies, where timber consumption “increased
nearly threefold” between 2000 and 2015. Similarly, Chinese
demand was also part of the reason for a shortage of timber pallets in
2013-14, used to transport a whole range of different goods and commodities;
though the flip side of this coin was a tripling of European
softwood exports to China in 2013 alone. The introduction in
China of environmentally driven restrictions on logging to prevent
deforestation, most notably in 2017, only served to increase the importance
of imports for China, and thus further increased China’s
significance for global supplies and prices. As Russia is
the main source of softwood lumber into China (including after the Ukraine
invasion), it also has at least some impact on European security concerns and
strategies too.
Pretty much any other commodity could be chosen as
an example of how Chinese growth impacts on Europeans in often indirect ways. For
example, as Hansen and
Wingender argue, China’s transition from a net food
exporter before it joined the WTO to the world’s biggest importer has
transformed global agriculture. In addition to its impact on prices of key
commodities, they argue that increased Chinese demand alone is the cause of a
massive diversion of land to crop production across the world, which will have
huge long term global environmental consequences. As too does the above
mentioned increase in wood and other “forest based” imports into China, which
maybe ironically were in part driven by local environmental concerns within
China itself.
Much has been written about China’s impact on
global energy trade and pricing. China accounts for
around 18 per cent of the global trade of both oil and
coal and 16 per cent of the global gas trade. Quite simply, “China’s centrality to
global oil demand growth this century” has become a major determinant of the
price of oil for everybody on the planet. For example, the stimulus measures
announced in China in September 2024 were directly credited (if that’s the
right word) for an almost immediate increase in global oil prices (and as a
result, of the prices of iron and steel too).
It is not exactly the world’s greatest insight to
say that China matters in ways that most other countries don’t and cannot. Its
sheer size alone might be enough. Or perhaps size plus increasing wealth is
enough. Even when there is no direct China-Europe interaction involved and
there is no Chinese intention try and influence or affect Europe, what Chinese
consume – or indeed, at times don’t consume or consume less of – impacts on
Europe and Europeans in different ways.
Of course, the consequences of size or mass are
then often compounded by the nature of the Chinese political economy, and the
way that the state supports privileged domestic actors to create an uneven
global playing field. Such measures include the provision of a range of
different types of subsidies and
tax breaks, easy access to cheap capital, currency and exchange rate controls,
limiting market access for foreigners, and so on. That’s why “ensuring reciprocity, achieving a
level-playing field, and addressing asymmetries in the relationship” have been
“matters of priority” for the EU in
its relations with China for many years. In addition to the frustrations of not
being able to fully access the Chinese market to the same degree that Chinese
actors access the EU, European producers can be disadvantaged in the home
market too. As Kratz and
Oertel have argued, the way that the state provides what
they call a “protected home market advantage” can have (and indeed, already has
had) had huge implications for European companies in some sectors when these
protected Chinese companies internationalize their activities and take their
commodities overseas.[1] Strategies
designed to export Chinese
overcapacity in some sectors have also already directly
impacted on domestic producers in a number of economies, including in Europe.
So
what happens in China indirectly impacts on Europe even when there is no clear
intention to target Europe at all because of the size, scale and mass of the
Chinese economy. It also has a direct but secondary impact when the primary
Chinese objective is not to do things to Europe, but to do things overseas to
reduce Chinese insecurities. Which then leads to the twin questions of what are
the nature of these insecurities, and where do they come from?
The nature of Chinese economic insecurity
The evolution of the Chinese discourse
As Wang Zhengyi
has outlined, the specific concept of “economic
security” (经济安全) was
not a feature of Chinese academic or policy debates until the second half of
the 1990s. Until then, concern with generating economic growth on the one hand
and issues relating to security on the other hand largely evolved and were
discussed in two separate domains with very little cross-fertilization. The
Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 is typically credited with starting a Chinese
debate over the nature of economic (in)security, as it
highlighted how quickly (and unexpectedly) China’s hoped for trajectory of
economic growth could be derailed by events outside its control. Foreign
investment (not least from the rest of Asia) had rather rapidly become a major
engine driving the growth of Chinese exports in the earlier part of the decade,
and the concern now was that both investment and exports would now decline. And
as China’s most influential trade official, Wu Yi, put it at the
time, this was not a case of worrying about “exports for exports’ sake”, but instead a “political
issue …. critical in helping the nation reform State-owned enterprises, create
jobs and promote social stability”.
This was also a period when maintaining export
growth faced considerable political challenges too. Though the international
response to the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989 had proved to be rather shallow and
short lived, access to the US market for Chinese exporters was dependent on
China being granted Most Favored Nation status by the US every year. As it
turned out, this was always granted, and China gained permanent access to the
US market in 1999 as part of the process of gaining WTO entry (in 2021).
Indeed, trying to take politics out of trade relations was one of the reasons
that China’s leaders pushed to join the WTO in the first place; to take disputes out of the hands of politicians
and into the hands of technocratic and legally bound trade experts instead. But
until 1999, China’s leaders could never be certain of that.
In addition, the second half of the 1990s also
saw the emergence of energy security concerns in China. Although China had switched from being a net exporter of oil
to a net importer in 1993, this was initially not really seen as a problem. This
is because, crucially, there is a difference between (self) sufficiency and
security. There is no inherent insecurity in being dependent on either imports
or foreign markets at all if you are confident that those supplies will keep
coming and those markets will remain open. And such confidence – or the lack of
it – is the key to the spread of Chinese economic insecurities and anxieties.
In the case of oil, as the volume of imports
increased, then the question of whether these supplies could be guaranteed
increased too, not least because of the “Malacca Dilemma”. With so much of China’s oil imports passing through the narrow
Straits of Malacca on the way (and indeed, with many Chinese exports to Europe
going the other way too), then what would happen if a hostile state like India
or the US hindered or blocked sea lanes for political/security reasons? Hence
the expansion of “resource diplomacy” in and with Africa and other developing countries in a search to
diversify sources of supplies (preferably to places where trade was not already
dominated by companies from the West).
Typologies of Insecurities
To
sum up then, what we might calleconomic
security with Chinese characteristics
entails a bundling of three different types of insecurities.
National
(in)security: Those concerns that relate to the nature of
the global order, and China’s place within it. Most clearly, the fear that
for political reasons, other countries might do things that make it harder or
even impossible for China to get what it wants and needs (resources,
commodities, markets) so that China’s leaders can run the economy in the way
that they want to want to run it. This includes fears of military blockades,
sanctions, tariffs, investment screening and other punitive actions.
There has also been
concern that the US is trying to establish relationships with its allies designed
to drive a wedge between
them and China with important economic (as well as broader
security) concerns. And at times that the US is trying to build regional
economic structures like the Trans Pacific Partnership that would “exclude China from regional economic affairs”.
Economic (in)security:
Which can be divided into two halves. The first half relates to the nature
of the global economy, and what we might call “normal” (which means
non-politically motivated) economic vicissitudes that all economies face. This
includes fluctuations in the price of key commodities, and at times the supply
of them too. We might also include here conflicts and other geopolitical
uncertainties that do not directly involve China, but have potential economic
consequences for China (and indeed, for all global economies). Conflict in the
Middle East is an obvious case given China’s energy concerns; hence the
increased interest in playing a diplomatic role in
the region. There has also been growing concern with the impact of piracy in
the South China Sea and
off the Horn of Africa as
China’s global economic presence increased.
Perhaps most
clearly of all, though, is the spillover effect of economic problems elsewhere
that China simply cannot control. In particular, economic crises elsewhere have
twice had a profound impact on Chinese thinking; as already noted, first in
1997, and then again when the Global Financial Crisis led to Chinese exports
falling dramatically and suddenly in November 2008.
This brings us
directly to the second half, which is the nature of the Chinese (political)
economy. There has been considerable
debate over how important exports have been for Chinese
growth. If you just count exports as a percentage of GDP, then in 2007 (ie:
just before the global financial crisis), then the figure was 40 per cent. But
this ignores the high degree of imported components in Chinese exports at the
time. So adjusting the calculation to take this into account, then the value
added of net exports to GDP in 2007 was only 20 per cent; which to be fair is
still not insignificant. To complicate matters even further, though, this ignores
the domestic spillover effects of trade; if you build a new port and
infrastructure to access it, this does not count as trade, but is clearly a
trade driven growth. Factor this
back in and you could argue that trade related growth was
as high as 50 per cent of GDP in 2007.
Whatever the
true number, China’s leaders have certainly acted at times as if they think
that economic growth was too dependent on exports. And this meant that China’s
economic fortunes were even more vulnerable to the sort of politically
motivated action outlined under national (in)security above.
There is also a
concern that as the significance of exports has declined, growth has become too
dependent on
investment instead. Not least because in the period after
the financial crisis as expanding investment was seen as a key means of
maintaining growth during global economic turmoil.
Political/Regime
(in)security: Crucially, both national and economic
insecurities were part and parcel of a more fundamental and existential
insecurity relating to the nature of the Chinese political system. In
the post Mao era, the party went to great lengths to establish the
idea that generating growth was a key indicator of its
wisdom and effectiveness. Growth (and announcing that growth targets had been
met and exceeded) thus became a crucial part of its strategy of justifying and
legitimating its monopoly on power. Quite simply, then, if growth could not be
maintained, then the party ran the risk of failing to meet the benchmarks,
standards and expectations that it had set for itself, and communicated to the
Chinese people. And while many political parties lose elections when the
economy isn’t doing well, this is not an option in a one-party state where it
is the entire party-state political system that is at stake.
Mitigating risks
As the growth of concern about over-reliance on
investment and China’s changing strategy in the Middle East both clearly show,
Chinese economic insecurities (and the responses to them) are not static. So
nearly three decades after the emergence of the economic security discourse in
China, how do things stack up today?
China’s leaders have been proactive in trying to
reduce uncertainties and insecurities. We have already noted the move to
increase technological self-reliance, and to make more of the high tech
components that drive advanced modern manufacturing at home. Even before the
launch of DeepSeek, there was already evidence that it had made considerable
progress in some high-tech sectors. The Australian
Strategic Policy Institute’s 2024 Critical Technology Tracker
calculates that China had become the global leader in 57 of its 64
tracked technologies in the 2019-23 period (up from leading in
just three at the start of the millennium).
Overseas
investment has increased access to and often control over a
range of resources, and also diversified the sources of supplies in many cases.
This includes oil supplies,
with Russia and Angola now two of the top three suppliers, with a rapid
expansion of refining capacity also playing a role. Even so, oil from the
Middle East still plays a very important role, and countries like Australia
which have had a fractious recent relationship with China supplies more than
half of Iron Ore and Coal imports. At times, China has used export controls for
commodities deemed to be essential for domestic economic growth and the
transformation into a new type of economy built around the promotion of new
productive forces (as detailed in a previous EH4S paper). Starting
in 2008, China has also become an active actor in anti-piracy operations
too.
China’s leaders have become an active promoters of
forms of
regional integration that promote their interests, and actively
pursued and promoted Free Trade Agreements
(FTAs). At the time of writing, alongside the FTA with ASEAN as a whole and the
Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (with ASEAN, Japan, South Korea,
Australia and New Zealand), 17 bilateral agreements were in place (19 if you
include the FTAs with Macao and Hong Kong), there was one Service and
Investment agreement (with Belarus) and 12 FTAs were under negotiation. It has
also developed a range of institutional mechanisms to pursue its economic (and
other) agendas with different regional groupings that span the globe (as
explained in detail in a previous EH4S paper). Amongst
other things, the Belt and Road
Initiative is meant to open up new markets, suppliers, trade
routes and production networks. More recently, major Chinese producers
(particularly if they have a large US market) have diversified
their production bases to “bypass market access or trade
barriers”.
Chinese Insecurities Today
The external environment
The USA and the EU are notably absent from the
list of Chinese FTA partners. And despite joining the WTO in 2001, access to
these two important markets remains a concern in China. This is not really
surprising for a number of reasons. Not recognising China as a market economy
within the WTO in 2016 (as many assumed would automatically happen after 15
years of Chinese membership) appeared to be a case of the western powers moving
the goalposts when viewed from China (rather than the view from elsewhere that
China had not met its contracted obligations). European
debates over de-risking and how Europe can respond to the
China challenge and enhance its own security have been heard in China, and taken as a sign
that the EU is turning away from free trade towards protectionism; at least
when it comes to trade with China.
Most important, though, is the deterioration of
relations with the US. A White Paper
issued in September 2018 outlined China’s anger at the initiation of tariffs by
President Trump which led to what has widely been described as a trade war. The
four different Biden administrations restrictions on microchip and high tech
exports to China (including one of his last acts as President in 2025) very
clearly demonstrated this this view of China is now a bipartisan one, and not a
Trump or Republican specific phenomenon. That said, Trump’s re-election did raise the prospects of things getting worse, with the
promise of more and/or higher tariffs in his second term. Even the status quo
ante access to the US (without market economy status) seemed to be at risk as
well, with calls to revoke the permanent normal trade relations that China had gained in 1999.
The Domestic Context
So significant economic and national
insecurities remain. And they exacerbate ongoing political/regime
insecurities. In previous EH4S papers we have covered both the promotion of a
new ever more nationalist and Chinese (rather than Marxist) ideological
basis of party legitimacy, and (as already noted) the
attempt to move on from a focus on growth to high quality
development. Despite these moves (and others) it has
proved difficult to shift the basis of growth away from investment (and
exports) to consumption,
and to deal with the consequential problems of the old model (such as local
government debt). It also seems to have proved difficult to
move away from past impulses relating to the importance of maintaining growth.
Rising Concerns ?
To be sure, we have to be careful how we treat
what Xi and the rest of the party say about security. Talking up insecurity too
much might lead to questions about the party’s role in allowing them to emerge
or persist. Particularly if they have persisted for some time and been
identified as a problem without finding any effective solutions for many years.
However, it is also potentially beneficial for the party to construct a
discourse of insecurity and a degree of fear in two main ways. First, to
encourage the people not to complain or rock the boat and do anything that
might undermine the party’s ability to keep them safe and (relatively) wealthy.
Second, to try and shift the benchmark of success and wisdom from simply generating
growth to focussing on the quality and utility of growth, and in the process,
to show their skill and effectiveness in dealing with these urgent challenges
and problems as they set a new course to an even brighter future.
That said, it is notable that Xi Jinping has been
very open and clear about the extent of these insecurities. At the 20th
Party Congress in 2022, Xi told the Chinese people to be
“prepared to deal with worst-case scenarios, and be ready to withstand high
winds, choppy waters, and even dangerous storms”. This was partly because of
domestic challenges, and the existence of “many deep-seated problems regarding
reform, development, and stability that cannot be avoided or bypassed”. But
these domestic insecurities were compounded by geopolitical concerns as
“external attempts to suppress and contain China may escalate at any time” as a
result of what is often referred to as
“changes not seen in a century”.
A People’s Daily editorial on 11th
November 2024 gave a bit more detail, pointing to four main “difficulties and
problems”. In reverse order, the four listed was “hidden dangers”; local
government debt, increasing unemployment levels for college graduates, slowing
income growth for urban residents, and (some) enterprises laying off employees
and cutting salaries. There is a clear overlap with the third, namely “weak sales, declining
profitability, and weakening market expectations” for some companies. This in
turn is a consequence of the second, weak domestic demand and a lack of
“willingness” to consume. But as Kewalramani notes, it is very
notable that the first of the listed difficulties and problems was the “external
environment”:
The instability of the world economy has
increased, the uncertainty of international politics has increased, global
trade protectionism has intensified, and some countries have continued to increase
their containment and suppression, which has increased the pressure on China to
stabilize foreign trade and foreign investment.
A change of Gear?
The People’s Daily editorial was published a month
before the annual Central
Economic Work Conference (CEWC), which since
2012 has become the main meeting of key economic policymakers to set the broad
economic priorities for the next year (which are then fleshed out the following
spring at the annual National People’s Congress session).
The 2024 CEWC saw
a renewed emphasis on “boosting domestic demand, especially consumer demand”. This
was not unexpected given what was being said in the official press beforehand,
and the announcement of a new stimulus package designed to “address China’s economic slowdown, focusing on liquidity improvements,
boosting the property market, and stabilizing financial markets” in September
2024. Nevertheless, it formally marked a shift in gear,
with “more proactive and impactful
macro policies” promised for 2025 to include：
“a higher
deficit-to-GDP ratio”
“the issuance
of ultra-long special treasury bonds and local government special-purpose
bonds”
“a moderately
loose monetary policy …. with reductions in the reserve requirement ratio
and interest rates”
And if there was any doubt as to why the economy
needed this boost, it was made very clear; in words that echoed what Wu Yi said
in the wake of the Asian crisis nearly three decades before, it was all about providing
“people's wellbeing and security”
in order to “maintain overall social stability”.
While official
reports of the CEWC did not directly reference Donald Trump’s return to power
in the US, they did refer to “the deepened adverse impact brought about by
changes in the external environment” alongside the persistent domestic
challenges noted in the People’s Daily. It is difficult to imagine that Trump
was not discussed at the conference. After all, as Chi
Lo argues, “the timing
for another tariff war under Donald Trump’s new presidency could hardly be
worse. China’s economy is now much weaker than it was in 2018 when the Sino-US
trade war started.
Yet
perhaps ironically Wang
Xiangwei (the former
editor of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post) argues that the threat of
tariffs “might be just what China’s ailing economy needs”. This is
because it will force the leadership to push through with the sort of “painful
reforms” that are needed to make the transition to a more domestic consumption
driven model of economic growth.
The obvious next question is why haven’t they done this
before given that the need to make this transition was identified many years
ago now, and the leadership’s oft repeated commitment to do things differently
in the “new era”? And given that the growth of debt has long been identified as
a potential source of future economic uncertainty, why does the expansion of credit and
liquidity and repeating past policies so often seem to be
the go to solution when the economy slows? The answer to both of these
questions appears to be that the leadership thinks that the costs of making the
transition – the domestic “difficulties and problems” in the People’s Daily
opinion piece - would at the very best make governing China more difficult, and
might even jeopardise the party’s grip on power. Which brings us back to the
basic argument that you don’t have to dig very deep into national security or
economic security discourses in China before you get to more fundamental
questions about regime (in)security.
Conclusion
The 2024 CEWC also included a comment on the
importance of “improving
management of expectations”. The things said by Xi and in the People’s Daily
repeated in this paper are part of that process of trying to shift expectations
of what is a realistic economic future given the nature of domestic and global
challenges. It thus forms part of the broader strategy of shifting the basis of
party legitimacy by redefining what represents a good performance worthy of the
people’s support or even adulation. Or in the words of the Party’s theoretical
journal, Qiushi, in 2024:
in this new stage of development, to determine whether the
economy is doing well or not, we must go beyond aggregate volume and rate of
growth. We must see if the engines of development are robust and if the
economic structure is rational. We must consider whether the drivers of
innovation are stronger, development is more balanced, the foundation for green
development is more solid, the standard of opening up is improved, and people’s
wellbeing and happiness are higher.
It is less about
what the economy is doing now than it is about getting the fundamentals in
place for what the economy might do in the future.
What might make
sense, though, from a national perspective in the long term doesn’t necessarily
assuage the individual whose personal fortunes are being affected in the here
and now.
Moreover, we now
have a generation of Chinese university graduates who – for the first time in
decades – do not expect to have a better life than their parents (even if they
have found a job). This is also a generation whose education (and personal
development too) was interrupted by Covid, many of whom do not view the way the
party managed the pandemic as a sign of its wisdom, greatness and success.
Managing the expectations of those whose expectations are already quite low
could prove to be a very tricky task indeed. And while we are thinking about
future trends, the implications of the demographic
challenges of an aging
population are not insignificant either.
The freezing of the
EU-China
Investment Agreement, the move
towards investment screening and more generally the way that China has been
spoken about in recent years all feed the idea of a West that does not want to
accommodate China’s rise. But it is doubtful – to say the least – that European
policy makers will think that putting aside their own insecurities (about
China) to assuage Chinese ones (about the future nature of the global economy)
is a price worth paying. And even then, US-China relationship looms so large in
Beijing that any European changes would only have an impact on these Chinese
insecurities at the margins.
It is not the intention here, though, to try and
predict what they future might hold. Nor to suggest that Europeans should do
anything to make China’s leaders feel more secure. Rather it is simply to argue
that much of what these leaders do is driven by insecurities that are not
always immediately obvious if you just focus on the headlines (and particularly
the headlines produced in China for overseas audiences). And that the resultant
policy changes can have indirect implications for Europeans simply because of
the size and scale of the Chinese economy compounded by the relationship
between states and markets in China’s political economy. Understanding domestic
dynamics, then, might at least increase awareness of potential or even likely
changes to come in China as the party attempts the twin tasks of shifting both
the basis of economic growth and also the basis of party legitimacy.
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Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
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[1]
Because it allows them to “leverage
the vast size of China’s market to build scale, amass profit, and improve
productivity, technical capabilities, and product design and quality” which
“enables some of these firms to enter foreign markets on a strong financial
footing and to sell tried-and-tested, more tailored products at highly
competitive or below-market prices”.
