Comments on arrival in Beijing with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker for the 20th China-EU summit
European Council President Donald Tusk called for joint efforts from China, the United States and Russia to avoid trade wars and to reform the World Trade Organisation to maintain the current global order.
Tusk made the comment on Monday when he and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker arrived in Beijing to hold talks with Chinese counterparts at the 20th China-EU summit.
It came at a time when China and the EU have separate disputes with US President Donald Trump’s administration on areas including trade, security and other global affairs and governance.
Trump even told the US media on Sunday that both the EU and China were “foes” to the US, in trade and the economy respectively.
Tusk said the EU and China had agreed to further develop their strategic partnership after “a fruitful meeting” on Monday morning with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, according to a statement issued by the EU.
The summit was held hours ahead of the one-on-one summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Finland.
“It is a common duty of Europe and China, America and Russia, not to destroy this [global] order, but to improve it,” said Tusk.
“Not to start trade wars, which turned into hot conflicts so often in our history, but to bravely and responsibly reform the rule-based international order.”
He advocated joint efforts by China, the US and Russia to reform the WTO, because “there is still time to prevent conflict and chaos”.
The EU and China agreed to set up a working group to reform the WTO in late June, and issues such as industrial subsidies, mandatory technology transfers and market access barriers – the concerns about China shared by the EU and the US – are expected to be raised under that framework.
“We need new rules in the field of industrial subsidies, intellectual property and forced technology transfers, reduction of trade costs, as well as a new approach to development and more effective dispute settlement,” said Tusk.
“The aim of this reform should be to strengthen the WTO as an institution and to ensure a level playing field.”
The Chinese government said in a brief statement earlier in the morning that the two sides had agreed to jointly maintain rule-based international order and support multilateralism and free trade.
China and the US are engaged in a trade war in which they have slapped 25 per cent tariffs on US$34 billion of each other’s products. Trump’s administration is working on levying 10 per cent tariffs on an additional US$200 billion of Chinese products as early as September. Beijing responded by vowing to retaliate and file a complaint to the WTO.
The EU has been careful not to side with China on the trade dispute. It disagreed with the US’ approach to addressing the long-standing complaints about China but also called for Beijing to speed up the opening up of market access and improvement of competition fairness.
The EU and US are also involved in an exchange of tariff sanctions. Trump continued to anger allies in a chaotic end to the Nato summit last week.
In an interview with the American television network CBS, Trump said that EU is “a foe, what they do to us in trade”, and Russia is a foe “in some respects”. China, he said, is a foe “economically… but that doesn’t mean they are bad. It doesn’t mean anything. It means that they are competitive.”
Tusk wrote on Twitter that the EU and the US are “best friends”. “Whoever says we are foes is spreading fake news,” he wrote.
Tusk also said that the two parties discussed the issues of denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula and Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, and that they would talk about the issue of Russia’s role in Ukraine.
