Europe’s top trade official has demanded a bigger share of the Chinese market in telecoms network equipment in an increasingly heated dispute that risks escalating into a full-blown trade war.
Chinese diplomats privately complained about the EU’s demands this week with at least one EU capital, expressing frustration at what they believed were unreasonable – and possibly illegal - demands, officials and diplomats said.
They claimed that Karel De Gucht, the trade commissioner, requested that EU suppliers be given a 30 per cent share of China’s telecoms market in return for dropping a highly contentious EU investigation into alleged subsidies to Chinese companies.