The EU imposed provisional tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles with the European Commission maintaining that Chinese firms unfairly benefit from government subsidies, allowing them to keep their prices artificially low.
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has arrived in Beijing, the first stop of a trip to China which aims to strengthen what he considers a close bilateral political and commercial relationship.
“Our aim is to maintain the political momentum of the bilateral relationship, strengthen economic and trade relations and support Spanish culture, education and science in China,” Sánchez said in a post on X.
In Beijing, Sánchez will be received by China’s president Xi Jinping and will hold talks with the country’s prime minister, Li Qiang, and the president of the legislature, Zhao Leji.
He’s expected to inaugurate the 9th Spain-China Forum and attend a meeting of the Business Advisory Council, which consists of 15 Spanish and 21 Chinese companies.
Sánchez will then fly to Shanghai later on Monday evening where he will open the Spain-China Business Meeting on Tuesday.
“China is willing to take Prime Minister Sánchez’s visit as an opportunity to advance bilateral relations, deepen mutual trust through high-level exchanges, and address global challenges through high-quality cooperation,” spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry, Mao Ning, said in a press briefing last week.
The Foreign Ministry said in a statement early in September that Sánchez’s visit will end on Wednesday.
Sánchez’s trip to China comes at a tricky time for relations between the European Union and the world’s second-largest economy.
The EU imposed provisional tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles in July with the European Commission saying that Chinese firms unfairly benefit from generous government subsidies, allowing them to keep their prices artificially low.
EU member states will vote on whether to make those tariffs permanent in October.
That prompted Beijing to file a complaint with the World Trade Organisation.
China’s Commerce Ministry said that it had resorted to the WTO dispute settlement mechanism “to safeguard the development rights and interests of the electric vehicle industry and cooperation on the global green transformation.”
And in June, China’s Commerce Ministry said it had launched an “anti-dumping investigation” into imports of “relevant pork and pork by-products” from the European Union, a move that paves the way for trade restrictions on a sensitive sector for the EU.
In a statement, the bloc’s farmers association COPA-COCEGA denied the pig meat sector was engaging in anti-dumping practices and said Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Belgium would be the hardest hit by Chinese retaliation.
Spain is Europe’s largest pork exporter and in 2023 supplied China with around 22% of its imported pork, trade that’s worth €1.2 billion.
