After years of negotiations, the EU and China finally reached an investment agreement on the 29th, which will be formally signed by both sides on the 30th, German media disclosed an internal document of the European Commission on the 30th, hitting the core of the agreement.
According to the Deutsche Welle, the “Europe-China Comprehensive Investment Agreement” (CAI) will remove barriers to foreign investment in China in certain EU sectors and expand access to the Chinese market for foreign investors, including cloud services, new energy vehicles, financial services and the healthcare industry.
According to exclusively obtained internal EU documents, during the negotiations between the two sides, the European Commission claimed that “the EU-China CAI will be the first agreement to deliver on the obligations of state-owned enterprises to act and to subsidize full transparency rules,” while the Chinese side agreed to continue working towards the ratification of the International Labor Organization’s fundamental conventions against forced labor.
In addition, the European Commission indicated that China has made substantial commitments to three key elements of the negotiations, namely increased market access to foreign capital, a more level playing field, and sustainable development.
In response, Mattes, an international economics expert at the Cologne Institute for Economic Research, said that the meaning behind this part of the agreement is not that significant, saying that the starting point of the EU and China is not the same, and that the Chinese market is very closed, while the European market is quite open, and that this huge difference makes both sides know from the beginning that China would have made more concessions than the EU in opening up the market, “which is not particularly worth celebrating”. .
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