Today’s NEW REVAMPED PLEASE SUBSCRIBE Trade Secrets: EU (often aping US) is creating ever more elaborate legal tools against unfair Chinese trade. Problems: 1. hard to make them work 2. China’s state capitalist model keeps changing. Me:

ALSO THREAD 1/n https://www.ft.com/content/0e94cd4e-16f9-4bfc-8bba-333027fb95ed

The EU's new antisubsidy initiative unveiled last week goes a step further and brings in competition tools, basically extending state aid rules abroad to foreign subsidies that distort the single market. Fair enough in principle (a bit tricky in practice). BUT 2/n

Chinese FDI into the EU has been dropping for several years and it's pulling back from Belt & Road all over. So this would have been a useful tool for the EU to have a while back, along with all the other tools it created which rapidly became outdated. 3/n

You can see from the infamous China-EU investment deal and the v weak access it grants to Chinese companies that Beijing's less bothered about dominating the EU market (except through standards like 5G) than transferring technology to China for the dual circulation strategy. 4/n

And tech transfer (also standards imperialism) are v difficult things for EU or any trading partner to counter. In other words, lots of extremely clever Commission lawyers in Brussels have spent a lot of time designing trade and competition tools of unfortunately limited use. 5/5