A trade deficit of more than €300bn is already large enough to dominate a political agenda. The more unsettling detail is that the roughly €1bn-per-day gap is likely to persist in the EU's May and June figures, according to trade expert Rafael Jimenez Buendía, because shipments recorded by Chinese customs remain at sea and have not yet appeared in EU data. The imbalance Europe is arguing about today is, in part, yesterday's trade still arriving.
The scale of the relationship explains why the numbers matter. The EU exported €213.2bn of goods to China in 2024 and imported €519bn. EU imports of services reached €45.5bn while exports totalled €67.3bn. Yet the direction of travel has become harder for European policymakers to ignore. Between 2014 and 2024, EU imports from China rose by more than 102%, while exports to China grew by almost 47%. Even after both imports and exports declined compared with 2023, the imbalance remained entrenched.
The deficits are not scattered randomly across the economy. Large deficits in machinery and vehicles and in other manufactured goods have been a continuous feature of trade between the EU and China. In the first quarter of 2026, surpluses in food, drink, raw materials and other goods were far smaller than deficits in energy, chemicals, machinery, vehicles and manufactured products. Europe is not losing ground in peripheral industries. The pressure falls on sectors that shape industrial capacity itself.
Industrial decline rarely announces itself while it is happening
That is why the language surrounding the debate has changed. China's growing trade surplus with the EU has prompted warnings of a "China Shock 2.0", invoking the U.S. experience after Beijing joined the World Trade Organization more than 20 years ago. In that earlier episode, industries were mothballed across what became known as the "rust belt." The warning is not that history repeats perfectly. It is that industrial decline, once it takes hold, rarely announces itself as decline while it is happening.
Industrial buyers say they already see the risk. Alexander Julius, president of Eurometal, has urged EU leaders to wake up to what his members believe China is doing to factories across Europe. His assessment leaves little room for ambiguity: "We are really suffering so much, and the politicians are going in completely the wrong direction, and they don't realise how much the Chinese are destroying the industrial backbone of Europe." The force of the complaint lies less in the rhetoric than in what follows from it.
Julius argues that dependence changes who sets the terms. "If you end up relying on China, China can dictate what parts will be made available to us that we are not producing any more, they will dictate the quantity and the price," he said. He added that the situation could prove particularly difficult for defence industries. The vulnerability he describes does not begin when supplies stop. It begins when the capacity to make essential parts disappears.
Europe's policymakers increasingly acknowledge the problem even as they disagree on the remedy. European trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič told a conference in Brussels that the deficit had to be addressed. The European Commission is thought to have discussed several options, with tariffs considered the least likely because of the political effort required to secure support. Analysts believe quotas on imports of Chinese chemicals and hybrid cars may prove more viable, especially because imports of hybrids have soared since the EU imposed tariffs on electric vehicles but not hybrids in 2024.
Dependence has become the argument at the centre of Europe's trade debate
France is still trying diplomacy. Emmanuel Macron has pursued a last-ditch cooperative approach before the EU decides whether to toughen trade policy toward China. Yet no breakthroughs are expected, partly because France considers acknowledgment that a problem exists a victory in itself. That is an unusually modest objective for a dispute involving the EU's top trading partner.
China rejects the central accusation. Beijing says it has never deliberately pursued a trade surplus and rejects allegations that exporters benefit unfairly from state subsidies. It argues that a significant share of the surplus comes from EU companies manufacturing in China and re-exporting to Europe. State news agency Xinhua says about half of China's exports are components that "considerably reduce" costs for EU factories. The defence is notable because it accepts a key point made by Europe's critics of dependence: European industry has organised itself around Chinese production.
That arrangement once looked like a source of resilience. Today the argument in Brussels revolves around whether it has become a source of vulnerability. A €1bn-a-day deficit that still has not fully appeared in the official data is not merely a trade statistic. It is evidence that Europe's industrial economy increasingly consumes what it no longer makes itself, and the most consequential decision facing the EU is no longer whether to recognise that condition, but how much of it it is willing to keep.
