Could the EU dust off its trade bazooka to take on China? Europe weighs its options

Alarm bells have failed so the bloc is considering a weapon that it originally planned to fire at the US

Reading Time:4 minutes

The EU is doing a stocktake of its own arsenal, looking to identify pressure points it can push and chokepoints it can weaponise. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 7:00pm, 19 Sep 2025Updated: 3:35pm, 20 Sep 2025

At the start of this year, as US President Donald Trump returned to pummel the European Union and China with tariffs and threats, many expected a rapprochement between Brussels and Beijing.

Nine months in, however, gloom hangs over the relationship, as the bloc grows increasingly frustrated at the Asian giant’s action on trade and what it sees as its catalysing support for Russia on the battlefield.

“Some expected some kind of charm offensive by China … we haven’t seen a charm offensive. We’ve seen, rather, a worsening of our relations with China,” Maria Martin-Prat, the EU’s deputy director for trade, said at an event in Brussels this week.

An EU-China summit in July produced just one deliverable: a government-to-government alarm system that would help speed up the granting of rare earth export licences to European companies.

This was trumpeted as evidence that despite tensions, the sides could still make progress through dialogue, but it has failed to deliver.

A survey of European Union businesses released on Friday showed that just 13.5 per cent of their 141 applications had been approved, leading to seven “production stoppages in August” and a further 46 expected stoppages in September.

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