The European Union is bracing for a confrontation with China as a trade deficit exceeding $1 billion a day heightens anxiety over potential job losses and pushes the bloc’s political leaders to take a more aggressive approach toward its second-largest trading partner.
The European Commission’s top trade envoy, Maros Sefcovic, will be in Beijing on Thursday (October 8, 2026) for a two-day meeting with Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao. The goal is to narrow the EU’s 360 billion euro ($410 billion) trade deficit with China.
Earlier this year, he gave Beijing a deadline of October to provide meaningful results in doing so.
A letter by France and Germany, a copy of which was seen by The Associated Press , called for a sweeping rethink of the EU’s China policy. This is a never-before-used raft of measures for blocking or restricting trade and investment from countries found to be putting undue pressure on EU member nations or corporations. Trade Act.
In a debate on Tuesday (October 6, 2026) in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, lawmakers overwhelmingly expressed anxiety alongside defiance over trade with China. On Wednesday (October 7, 2026), they voted 454 to 86 on a resolution to toughen up on China that centred on a call for “economic reciprocity and a proportionate EU response if China does not open its markets. The European Policy Centre in Brussels said in June that European battery producers, solar panels, steel, electric vehicles, chemicals and machinery are already haemorrhaging jobs and capacity and called for a trade investigative body modelled on Section 301 of the U.S.
Among other actions, it proposed making it easier for the European Commission to use the bloc’s so-called “trade bazooka”, the Anti-Coercion Instrument. The EU’s ailing economy requires both a domestic overhaul and a more aggressive foreign trade policy, especially with China, said Tim Ruhlig, a China analyst at the European Union Institute for Security Studies, the bloc’s internal think tank. This week in Beijing, when asked about the letter penned by France and Germany, a spokesperson at China’s Ministry of Commerce said that the countries should refrain from encouraging the EU to resort to protectionist measures. “Protectionism cannot enhance competitiveness, and decoupling or cutting off supply chains will only harm others without benefiting oneself,” the Commerce Ministry said in a statement.
Ahead of the vote, Hilde Vautmans, the Belgian lawmaker who led the resolution, said that “Europe has economic power; it’s time we used it.”
