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CNN
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The European Union has launched an investigation into China’s state assist for its wind turbine corporations, intensifying a push to guard Europe’s trade from a flood of low cost Chinese language imports.
Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competitors chief, said Tuesday that the probe would look into the event of wind farms in Spain, Greece, France, Romania and Bulgaria.
The transfer supplies additional proof of tensions between China, the world’s largest producer, and its main buying and selling companions ensuing from the oversupply of Chinese language items in key industries around the globe. The nation’s international commerce surplus in items has soared lately and is now approaching $1 trillion.
On Thursday, a Chinese language commerce ministry official responded that Beijing “firmly opposes” the investigation. The probe not solely “severely damages” the boldness of Chinese language enterprises working in Europe, but additionally interferes with mutually helpful industrial cooperation between the 2 sides, the official mentioned in a statement.
“It is going to additionally have an effect on international efforts to handle local weather change and the method of inexperienced transformation.”
Vestager’s announcement as a part of a speech in Princeton, New Jersey, got here simply days after the European Fee, the EU’s govt arm, opened a separate subsidies probe into Chinese language corporations bidding for a photo voltaic farm contract in Romania.
The fee is making use of recent powers beneath its Foreign Subsidies Regulation, aimed toward addressing market distortions attributable to subsidies from international governments and making certain that EU corporations are competing on a degree enjoying subject.
“We noticed the playbook for the way China got here to dominate the photo voltaic panel trade,” Vestager mentioned, citing “huge subsidies for home suppliers.”
“The result’s that these days, lower than 3% of the photo voltaic panels put in within the EU are produced in Europe,” she added, noting that China was deploying the identical technique throughout different areas of unpolluted expertise, together with “exporting extra capability to the remainder of the world at low costs.”
“We are able to’t afford to see what occurred on photo voltaic panels taking place once more on electrical automobiles, wind or important chips,” Vestager mentioned.
In October, the European Fee launched an investigation into China’s subsidies for electric vehicle makers, which it suspects could also be enabling these companies to maintain costs super-low, creating unfair competitors with European rivals.
Beijing sees exports as a key measure to revive China’s slowing financial system and is more and more specializing in higher-value exports in industries that Europe and the USA see as strategically necessary as they search to inexperienced their economies and cut back planet-heating air pollution.
CNN’s Wayne Chang contributed reporting.