China and Europe hit the brakes abruptly.
The Straits Times reported on the evening of June 30: "As China-EU economic and trade relations continue to be tense, both sides have set October this year as the final deadline for resolving trade disputes, and established a mechanism for economic and trade consultations and monitoring. Scholars interviewed expect that China and Europe will find it difficult to completely eliminate economic and trade contradictions before October, but setting up communication mechanisms will help prevent a full-scale trade war from breaking out."
The abrupt "braking" in China-EU economic and trade relations has created crucial buffer space for bilateral economic ties, which were previously teetering on the brink of a full-scale trade war.
Differing fundamentally from the deeply entrenched geopolitical confrontation between China and the United States, there is no inherent strategic opposition between China and Europe. The two sides are deeply integrated within global industrial chains, with nearly half of their bilateral trade consisting of intermediate goods essential for each other's production operations. The so-called "product shock" and "supply chain security" anxieties expressed by European parties stem not from China, but from their own lagging structural reforms and declining industrial competitiveness. If the EU insists on provoking a trade war with China, it will ultimately lose access to the Chinese market for its high-end industrial products and face a sharp rise in inflation pressure—while the only clear beneficiary would be the United States across the ocean.
Original source: toutiao.com/article/1869439079988359/
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