Maroš Šefčovič, the EU’s commissioner for trade and economic security, is expected in Beijing on October 8 and 9. He is going with a deadline in his pocket. In early September he named October as the month by which Brussels wants concrete results, or it will look at harsher measures and fuller use of trade-defence tools.
That deadline sat at the centre of a September 29 roundtable in Rome, held at John Cabot University’s Guarini Institute for Public Affairs. Enrico Fardella, the institute’s associate director, chaired. Diplomats, scholars and think tankers from several European countries worked through three questions: is Europe really changing, which dependencies truly need securing, and which channels should stay open. Their starting point was that the EU has stopped talking mainly about cutting its reliance on China and begun bargaining over the terms of what comes next. The near-term choice, as they framed it, is between a negotiated kind of managed interdependence and a more independent European effort to restrict, condition and redirect some Chinese trade and investment.
The numbers behind the impatience
In 2025 EU goods exports to China fell 6.5% to €199.6 billion. Imports rose 6.4% to €559.4 billion. The gap: €359.8 billion. China is the EU’s largest source of imports and only its fourth-largest export market.
In September, Ursula von der Leyen put the deficit at roughly €1 billion a day and said a “second China shock” was already under way. If dialogue failed, she said, the EU would use all available tools. She also pointed out that for many critical raw materials Europe depends on China for more than 80%, and for some rare earths around 90%.
Brussels now treats the imbalance as an industrial problem. Chinese consumers are not buying enough, the state steers industry on a huge scale, and ever more sophisticated Chinese exports push European producers out of their home market and out of third countries too.
The EU’s toolkit has grown to match. It includes the Industrial Accelerator Act from March, the Foreign Subsidies Regulation, the International Procurement Instrument, critical-raw-materials policy and investment screening. September added a Public Procurement Act with European-preference criteria. The two newest proposals are not aimed at China alone.
What the talks cover
Since June the two sides have been negotiating the overall shape of the relationship. The China–EU Trade and Investment Consultations opened in Brussels on June 29 and take in trade and investment balancing, export controls, intellectual property and WTO reform. Electric vehicles, procurement, rare earths and subsidies used to be handled as separate files. Now they sit under one roof.
The EU says the dialogue should get time to work. If it fails, the case for going it alone gets stronger. Some defences are already up: in July the EU imposed definitive anti-dumping duties of 4.3–45.3% on Chinese tyres. Brussels was also reported to be pressing for voluntary limits on hybrid-car exports, a sector where Chinese makers hold around 15% of the EU market, plus action in other sectors and larger Chinese purchases of European goods.
Beijing’s side
China will sit down for intensive consultation. What it will not accept is that European market restrictions are a legitimate answer to the imbalance. It points to WTO rules and to Europe’s own competitiveness.
Its own preferred fix is “upward balancing”, meaning more European exports to China. That leaves “balance” without a shared meaning. It could mean fewer Chinese exports, more European ones, more Chinese production inside Europe, wider European access in China, or a mix.
The harder question for Europe is which dependencies are genuine strategic weak points and which are ordinary interdependence or plain competitive pressure that it risks over-securitising. Critical materials are the clearest case. Reliance on Chinese processing and export licensing has shown how little autonomy Europe has. Stockpiling, diversification and investment in other processing are speeding up, but they are medium-term substitutes, not immediate ones.
Divided capitals
Member states are still split, though the centre has shifted. France favours a more defensive line. Germany is tougher than it was a year ago: its deficit with China reached €89.3 billion in 2025, and its exports kept falling in the first half of 2026. Italy and Spain are more supportive of action against sectors exposed to Chinese overcapacity.
Xi Jinping’s state visit to the United States, September 23 to 25, may change the picture on tariffs, rare earths and technology. A US–China deal that left Chinese industry with access elsewhere would sharpen European fears of becoming the default destination for surplus supply.
The European Council meets on October 15 and 16, and trade ministers hold an informal meeting on October 22 and 23. Those two dates will show whether the new convergence among capitals survives once restrictive measures start costing their own firms.
