This workshop examines what Europe's past experience of external competitive shocks can reveal about the current China shock. Adopting a multidisciplinary perspective that combines history, law, political economy and economics, it compares the Japanese challenge of the 1970s–1990s with contemporary Chinese industrial and trade competition.
This workshop examines what Europe's past experience of external competitive shocks can reveal about the current "China shock 2.0". Adopting a multidisciplinary perspective, it brings together historians, legal scholars, political economists and economists.
Rising Chinese exports of electric vehicles, batteries, solar equipment and machinery have prompted the European Union to search for new policy instruments, from countervailing duties to proposals for a European preference in public procurement. This challenge is not without precedent. From the late 1960s onwards, Japanese producers in steel, shipbuilding, consumer electronics, automobiles and semiconductors placed European industries under sustained pressure. The European Community responded with voluntary export restraints, anti-dumping measures, collaborative research programmes and policies aimed at opening the Japanese market and attracting Japanese direct investment to Europe.
In both periods, Europe confronted a strategist state pursuing long-term industrial planning. In Japan, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) identified priority sectors, coordinated firms and steered them towards export markets. Today, the Chinese state combines comparable strategic planning, through five-year plans and sectoral programmes, with considerably greater resources. The European Community, and later the European Union, operated instead within a decentralised framework in which industrial policy remained largely a national competence, yet had to develop new instruments and policy doctrines to respond.
The workshop adopts two historical entry points: the Japanese challenge of the 1970s–1990s and the negotiations on China's accession to the GATT/WTO. It analyses the continuities and discontinuities between the two shocks and relates them to current debates on EU industrial and trade policy. It also considers the legal questions they raise, including the limits of multilateral trading rules, the adequacy of trade defence instruments and the extraterritorial reach of EU law.
The workshop will conclude with a roundtable on the implications of these experiences for contemporary policy, and on future steps, including the establishment of a network for a multidisciplinary research agenda on the history of EU industrial and trade policies.
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