EU and US Foreign Economic Policy Responses to China (Routledge/UACES Contemporary European Studies)

This book examines EU and US bilateral trade and investment relations with China, their attempts to level the economic playing field and to narrow the ‘reciprocity gap’ in market openness.

It explores the extent of EU and US policy change, the underlying factors accounting for this change and compares EU and US foreign economic policy answers to an adversary increasingly perceived as an unfair economic competitor and as a systemic rival. The book covers a broad range of policy areas from ‘trade wars’, trade defense instruments, their reform and use, investment screening, and export control to industrial policies. It makes eclectic use of different strands of International Relations, International Political Economy and Policy Analysis theorizing to account for the extent of, and differences in, the EU and US responses.

The People’s Republic of China’s stellar economic and political rise combined with the resilience of its unfair trade practices, its reinforced authoritarian repression at home and its ever more assertive foreign (economic) policy has triggered a shift in perceptions of China, followed by equally profound policy change in the European Union and the US. This book expertly charts and explains this significant shift in stance.

This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners in the fields of EU trade policymaking, US foreign/ foreign economic policy, EU-China-US economic relations, European political economy, and more broadly to European studies, Asian studies, International Relations, International Political Economy, and transatlantic relations.

Joachim Schild holds a Chair of Comparative Politics at Trier University. His research focusses on Franco-German relations in the European Union, French European Policy, and the political economy of European integration. He is the co-author (with Ulrich Krotz) of Shaping Europe: France, Germany, and Embedded Bilateralism from the Elysée Treaty to Twenty-First Century Politics (2013) and co-editor (with David Howarth) of The Difficult Construction of European Banking Union (Routledge, 2020).

Dirk H. Schmidt is a tenured Senior Lecturer at the Chair for Comparative Government and Political Economy of China at Trier University. His main research interests are Chinese foreign policy, Chinese foreign economic relations and China-Taiwan relations. He is co-author (with Sebastian Heilmann) of China’s Foreign Political and Economic Relations. An Unconventional Global Power (2014) and has contributed several chapters to China’s Political System (edited by Sebastian Heilmann, 2017).