This was a P0 national security issue, So China hyper-invested into alternative energy technologies, subsidizing and overproducing solar technologies at a loss, while investing in electric transportation and moving away from fossil fuels. It's paying off. Over the past 25 years, this strategy is proving to be very successful and by the end of this decade, the Malacca weakness will be overcome.
As a result, the rest of the world gets to enjoy cheap solar energy and cheap EVs.
These are not solvable issues, the EU and China are not aligned at a fundamental level.
In contrast, EU/Russia and EU/US relationships actually make more sense, because both partners have mutual self-interest to maintain a relationship.
Would love to know how you can defend the claim that the EU and China are fundamentally not aligned, unlike the EU Russia and EU US.
Russia is at war with a country that wants to join the EU. The US almost invaded EU territory at the start of this year and threatened to leave NATO. China and the EU have done nothing but sign trade agreements throughout all that time
Then both relationships were unnecessarily and unilaterally broken, and China profited from that.
People here like to dump on the EU, but I' argue that considering they were betrayed by two of their most important strategic partners within a span of four years, they're still holding up quite well.
The US has the world's strongest military. The US offers Europe military protection in exchange for military access and political sway to maintain its position as the global hegemon. In exchange, Europe gets to export its goods to the US, backs up the US on the world stage, and Europe profits from a trade surplus. It's win-win.
A Europe-China deal has neither of these. China does not have abundant natural resources to export. And China will never provide military protection to Europe. And China does not need anything from Europe. The best Europe can offer is market access, to buy Chinese overproduced manufacturing, but that will decimate Europe's industry. Europe doesn't have an equivalent good that China needs, so it will run a trade deficit, which is a losing trade in the long term. It's win-lose: China wins, Europe loses. A relationship with China will never provide the same level of benefits as Europe's relationships with the US or Russia.
Any idea of Europe replacing its relationships with a new one with China is a short sighted knee-jerk reaction.
China, long term, may be a less needy trade partner, but they are not trying to destabilize Europe.
It's far more short-sighted to go into business with someone who's trying to burn your house down, rather than try and trade with the rich guy down the street who might not give you the best deal
So nothing except the world's largest market of wealthy consumers, the very thing the Chinese economy needs.
Seems like you're underplaying the European hand here...
In contrast, if you go shopping at a European hypermarket, >50% of the items sold are imported from China. Europe heavily relies on China for its domestic consumption. Without cheap Chinese goods, costs would go up, and European quality of life would decline.
We can see the relationship is imbalanced with statistics, because Europe runs a €350 billion annual trade deficit with China.
And the world's largest market of wealthy consumers is the US, not Europe.
That trade deficit is precisely what China needs and what Europe brings to the table.
Europe has about twice the population of the US.
Europe pays for its trade deficit by transferring wealth from Europe to China. It amassed this wealth through centuries of colonialism. The deal you are proposing makes Europe poorer, and China richer. Every year, compounding. Europe loses, China wins.
And pretending that China will face "economic collapse" if it doesn't export its goods to Europe is delusional. Chinese exports to Europe are only 3.0% of Chinese GDP, practically nothing. China does not need Europe.
The thing about international trade is that it doesn't need to balance out on a country to country level. Europe can support a deficit with China by maintaining a surplus with the rest of the world. There's a reason they just built the worlds largest free trade zone centered around themselves. Profits made from India to Mercosur, Canada to South Korea can all be spent somewhere.
There's no "China wins" or "Europe loses". Trade is not zero-sum. Trade is interdependence and the customer is always right.
This is unclear and poorly written. What you are referring to here?
The core issue with Europe and China is they are fundamentally unequal trading partners. China does not need to buy European goods. In fact, for whatever China does import from Europe, it is aggressively pursing its own domestic alternatives, so that it doesn't have to buy from Europe. COMAC replaces Airbus. SMIC replaces ASML. AECC replaces Rolls Royce jet engines. Dozens of domestic alternatives are replacing European precision manufacturing. German auto manufacturing is replaced by Chinese EVs.
In a few years, what will Europe have left to export to China, to keep a balance of trade and stop wealth from flowing to China?
>Europe can support a deficit with China by maintaining a surplus with the rest of the world.
Easy to say, but how will Europe achieve this? Who will Europe export to? Europe enjoys a €200 billion trade surplus with the US; but given the deteriorating relationship with the US, it's not likely to gain here. The developing world is rapidly buying more from China, because their goods are cheap, numerous, and adequate quality.
Practically everything Europe can export, China can produce at a lower cost and equivalent quality. Where is the competitive advantage?
There is no easy way out.
And again, Europe will be vital to China once China finally makes the move to reunify with Taiwan. China will find itself completely isolated from the only other market of comparable wealth and size to Europe.
China already has a huge underconsumption crisis. If you have an Economist subscription, I would recommend listening to this Episode of Drum Tower for more context: https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2023/08/29/chinas-consume...
All this to say: China needs consumers more than Europe needs producers. The balance of power is entirely in Europe's favour.
You keep focusing on production, but the demand side is what drives economies. Any fool can produce. Without a buyer, that is just a waste of resources, however.
The technology thing is complicated. Europe still makes quite a lot of high end stuff like Airbus, Rolls Royce jet engines, Mercs, German/Swiss machine tooling, F1 cars etc. But the Chinese are cheaper for normal gizmos.
Anyone got verifiable references?
They broke down y into all these different energy sources and made a pie chart. So roughly 25% of y was solar PV.
So this shows us what y is.
But the precise mix that supplied X no longer exists, due to closures, so something must have back filled that x. So is that pro rata from these figures?
Yes I understand this isn't strictly capacity, but in practical terms, wind turbines and solar panels have been installed to allow this increase.
Terawatt-hours per year is a ridiculous unit — it contains three different units of time embedded in it (seconds, hours, and years)
2700 TWh/yr = 309 GW
(Which happens to be about 37 W per person, or less than the average output of a 1 m² solar panel)
It's been fairly close to Kurzweil's doubling every couple of years prediction https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2016/03/futurist-ray-k... and exponential growth could keep on for ages before we hit Kardashev 2.
It's easy to "predict" the future years after gigantic sums of money are invested into making something happen.