China: the European revenge, political success and economic defeat

Indeed, the German MEP, Reinhard Butikofer, has said that China has been given the hoe in the foot. Before singing victory, however, the facts must be analyzed. The Investment Treaty, CAI, is anomalous in that it is negotiated between two entities, the Commission and the Chinese Government, which have non-aligned mandates: on the one hand, the Chinese Government has full powers on how to manage incoming investments, whether and how to accept our requests for reciprocity and market access and what are the limits of shares granted to foreign investors, sector by sector. The Commission, on the other hand, does not have responsibility for investment, which remains in the hands of the individual Member States which decide for themselves who they want to open their doors to, just as Italy does when it exercises the power of Golden Power. Between the two markets, the one that is more closed to foreign investments and the one that is Chinese and we were the ones who asked for more openness to their market and not vice versa since our markets are already open. Therefore, the agreement would be of net benefit to EU companies. With the suspension of the treaty, however, it goes back and in time and China will continue to negotiate directly and to invest in the 27 countries, without even making the informal passage in the EU Commission, So he loses even the slightest role he wanted to carve out with this treaty. The lack of a shared vision will therefore create imbalances within the EU and China will be able to choose to penetrate the entire Old Continent market by entering through any of the 27 European countries, perhaps the most vulnerable, from time to time.

A strategy that I warned myself of years ago, comparing the states of the Union to 27 potential Trojan horses. So European revenge has been successfully consumed, but it’s been a political success and an economic defeat: it’s been a victory if it’s important to show that we’re against China, It was a defeat if it was important to help our companies penetrate the difficult Chinese market and give our young people and not new job opportunities. With GDP at -8.9%, perhaps we were the ones who gave us the hoe on our feet and the position of Butikofer, a modern Medea, wiped out the chances of companies in her own country, Germany, which would have been the maximum beneficiaries of this agreement, as Merkel had well understood. But it seems that even the great Germany is beginning to give signs of failure.