High China Exports Pressure EU Economy 06/16 06:06

   

   WASHINGTON (AP) -- For eight years, the United States has waged economic war 
on China, slapping big taxes on Chinese products before they enter America.

   But the campaign hasn't dented China's industrial prowess.

   The world's second biggest economy is exporting more products than ever. 
It's just redirecting them away from the U.S. tariff wall and toward more open 
markets in Europe and elsewhere in Asia.

   The shift in Chinese trade risks creating a European sequel to the China 
Shock that wiped out hundreds of thousands of factory jobs in the American 
heartland in the 2000s and contributed to the political upheaval that put 
Donald Trump in the White House twice.

   Despite U.S. sanctions, China last year notched a record global trade 
surplus -- an astonishing $1.2 trillion.

   Earlier this year, French President Emmanuel Macron warned that Chinese 
exports are "literally killing a large part of the European industry'' and 
admitted that Europe was "slow to see that.''

   The Europeans are clear-eyed now. China's trade practices will be near the 
top of the agenda this week as leaders of the G7 rich democracies gather in 
vian-les-Bains, France. In briefings last week, French officials indicated 
that they hope to come out of the summit with a plan to tackle the China threat.

   One possibility is that the European Union and others will build a higher 
tariff wall of their own against Chinese imports. Currently, the EU imposes 
relatively low tariffs on China under World Trade Organization rules -- though 
it hits specific Chinese products with higher ones (up to 35% on electric 
vehicles, for example).

   "China's export surge, unless its leaders rein it in, will provoke a 
protectionist wave against Chinese imports worldwide,'' said Maurice Obstfeld, 
senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former 
chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. "All the more so if the 
current disruptions around the Iran war persist and cause a sharper global 
slowdown.''

   Economist Taylor Wang at HSBC warned this month that a China-EU trade 
dispute could threaten Chinese exports; Europe accounted for a big share of 
China's exports of electric vehicles, solar panels and lithium-ion batteries.

   The Europeans also hope to persuade Trump to stop targeting U.S. allies like 
the European Union and Canada with punitive tariffs and to start working with 
them instead to counter China.

   China Shock 2.0 is different -- and more disruptive

   The first China Shock started around 2001 when the Chinese joined the World 
Trade Organization and gained low-tariff access to the lucrative markets of the 
United States and Europe. In the United States, many factories couldn't compete 
with low-cost Chinese textiles, furniture, electronics and other manufactured 
goods.

   Economists David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, David 
Dorn of the University of Zurich and Gordon Hanson, now at Harvard, found that 
competition from China had led to the loss of 2.4 million American jobs.

   China Shock 2.0, as it's come to be known, is playing out differently.

   The first time around China was still emerging as a major player in global 
commerce. Now it dominates world trade and manufacturing.

   China accounted for just 4% of global goods exports in 2000. Now its share 
is 16% -- the highest in the world -- making Beijing's trade policies far more 
consequential.

   China has also upped its game, exporting sophisticated products like EVs and 
batteries, advanced machinery, software, scientific instruments and putting it 
in direct competition with the richest countries in the world. For example, 
Chinese exports now compete with nearly 58% of the exports from the 21 European 
countries that share the euro currency, up from 46% in 2000, according to a 
paper last month by researchers at the Federal Reserve and the Federal Reserve 
Bank of St. Louis.

   "The second China shock is characterized by its companies running the board 
on manufacturing exports -- from low-tech, low-wage to high-tech high 
value-added industries," said economist Eswar Prasad of Cornell University. 
"This is directly hitting advanced economies where it now hurts the most" -- 
high tech industries such as EVs and high-end robotics that many countries "had 
been counting on for a manufacturing revival.''

   Germany has taken a hit from Chinese exports

   Germany has been hit hard. German companies once grew fat on exports to 
China but the situation has reversed: China now sells more goods to Germany 
than it buys. And German companies are struggling to compete with the Chinese 
rivals in industrial machinery, construction equipment, cars and chemicals -- 
all mainstays of Germany's export-oriented economy.

   Partly because of the competition from China, Germany's economy has 
stagnated, shrinking in 2023 and 2024 and growing just 0.2% last year.

   The United States is less vulnerable than it was in the 2000s. Trump's 
tariffs have kept out a lot of Chinese products. Exports of Chinese goods to 
the United States dropped 37% from January through April this year, versus the 
same period of 2025, the U.S. Commerce Department reports.

   The United States is also in a stronger economic position because it 
produces its own energy -- unlike the EU and Japan -- and is enjoying a boom in 
productivity and investment in artificial intelligence.

   Despite Trump's tariffs and diminished sales to the United States, China is 
benefiting from soaring demand for its low-cost EVs and from AI investment, 
which generates sales of Chinese electrical components and machinery for data 
centers.

   Exports from China to the 27-nation EU climbed 16.4% in January to May from 
a year earlier. For France, that meant that its trade deficit with China, 
according to Beijing's customs statistics, rose to $5.3 billion from $3.3 
billion a year earlier.

   Chinese policies contribute to the problem

   Economists say China's policies encourage factories to overproduce and 
consumers to underspend. For example, state-run Chinese banks pay low interest 
rates to savers but offer cheap loans to government-owned manufacturers. A 
flimsy social safety net pressures Chinese families to save, not spend, to 
build a financial buffer against old age and medical problems.

   Obstfeld said the policies are partly meant to keep factories busy and 
workers employed. "The result is an excess domestic supply of manufactured 
products, which must be exported abroad,'' he said. So low-priced Chinese 
products flood world markets and threaten to put European and other factories 
out of business.

   Beijing also has encouraged companies to compete ruthlessly against each 
other at home. "The rest of the world is ill prepared to compete with these 
apex predators,'' Autor and Hanson wrote in a New York Times column last year.

   China has repeatedly promised to rein in overproduction and encourage 
consumer spending -- as the United States and other countries have urged for 
decades. That would make its economy less reliant on exports and its consumers 
better off. It would also give U.S. and European an expanding market to sell 
into. "The leadership has long said this is a goal,'' Obstfeld said, "but they 
have been slow to act as if they mean it.''

   "Beijing has been relying on the rest of the world to address its 
overcapacity problem," said former U.S. trade negotiator Wendy Cutler, now 
senior vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute. "However, this 
unsustainable situation may soon change if the EU and others take steps to halt 
Chinese imports, following the U.S. lead.''