EU Chamber pushes for BIT this year
China, Europe need bilateral cooperation more than ever
The top European business group in China on Thursday called on China and EU to complete a bilateral investment treaty (BIT) by the end of the year.
While the China-EU relationship faces a growing list of obstacles from differences over issues such as Hong Kong and Xinjiang to external risks such as US' rising unilateralism, the two sides need bilateral cooperation more than ever to confront challenges facing the global economy, Chinese experts noted.
They said that both sides, not one, must make efforts and compromises to push forward cooperation, including talks on BIT.
In its annual position paper released on Thursday, the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China went to great lengths to highlight the difficulties facing the China-EU relationship, and it painted the bilateral investment deal as a must-do before the end of the year.
It is therefore imperative that the EU and China strive for a political agreement on the
Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) by the end of 2020, said a EU chamber policy paper.
In a press release for the paper, Joerg Wuttke, president of the EU Chamber, said that “there's a real sense that this is now or never.”
However, the paper of the EU Chamber was noticeably largely focused on oft-repeated grievances regarding issues and difficulties in the Chinese market and even waded into the political arena, noting what it calls a “clash of China's charm offensive towards European business and its ‘wolf warriors' in Europe.” Though mentioning the
EU's “souring” public opinion toward China, the paper did not focus on issues in the EU itself, including tightening rules for Chinese firms' acquisitions and ambivalent stances by some EU countries on the US' crackdown on Chinese tech firm Huawei, experts noted.
“The EU has raised some issues about the Chinese market, but there are also obstacles in the EU that must be overcome,” Bai Ming, deputy director of the international market research institute at the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, told the Global Times on Thursday.