“The European business community has long been part of China’s success story. Today, the EU is China’s most important trading partner, while China is the EU’s second most important trading partner.”

The European business community has long been part of China’s success story. Today, the European Union (EU) is China’s most important trading partner, while China is the EU’s second most important trading partner.

There is still plenty of untapped economic potential for both sides. Given the importance of EU-China economic relations, it is vital to maintain very close trade and investment links, while developing a more balanced and reciprocal economic relationship. It is also critical for China to  accelerate domestic reform and opening up its market to the rest of the world, strengthen the protection of intellectual property, and consider treating state-owned enterprises (SOEs) with the principle of ‘competitive neutrality’ in order to ensure fair competition, regardless of ownership status.

With respect to the energy sector more specifically, I would expect these evolutions to also include two elements:

1. a more customer-oriented approach, meaning that customers should be able to choose cleaner energy solutions and benefit from these, thanks notably to a carbon pricing mechanism that would encourage adding more renewable power into the energy mix; and

2. an approach considering further resilience of the energy systems, and how to best reconcile a centralised system with decentralised ones, fitting as closely as possible customers’ needs while limiting the risk of disruption in case of crisis.