When Maroš Šefčovič set out his strategy for engaging with China to European Union ambassadors in July, he had a warning for governments urging tougher action on trade against Beijing.

“Sometimes, it’s even popular to start a trade war, but it’s very difficult to finish it,” the EU trade chief recalled later in an interview with POLITICO.

Three months on, Šefčovič has secured a first breakthrough, reaching a deal in Beijing last week to sharply reduce imports of Chinese hybrid cars. The symbolic win marks a small step toward stabilizing a trading relationship that Brussels believes has reached a dangerous tipping point.

The agreement, which will initially cap imports at 350,000 vehicles a year, marks a significant concession from Beijing, whose carmakers have been flooding the European market with increasingly competitive vehicles. 

For Šefčovič, who negotiated last year’s tariff truce with Donald Trump, the agreement suggests his strategy of engagement backed by the threat of tougher trade measures may be starting to pay off.

Šefčovič agreed to launch the trade dialogue at a meeting with Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao in Brussels in late June.

By focusing initially on cars — an area where the EU has leverage as one of the few major markets still open to Chinese manufacturers — the Slovak commissioner hoped to secure a confidence-building win before tackling thornier questions, from critical raw materials to China’s vast industrial overcapacity.

At the same time, he worked to coalesce European governments behind a parallel effort to strengthen the bloc’s trade defenses, reinforcing his negotiating position with the threat of tougher action to bring down the EU’s €1 billion-a-day trade deficit with China.

The hybrid deal, however, is only the opening move in a much bigger contest.

EU leaders meet in Brussels on Thursday to take stock, weighing the benefits of continued engagement against demands for more aggressive action to protect European industry from a surge in Chinese imports.

The meeting will test whether a commissioner who has made a career of finding compromises with difficult partners can maintain Europe’s support for a strategy whose success is far from assured.

“You have to deal with the same partner across the table,” Šefčovič said of the risks of starting a trade war, in the interview with POLITICO in August. “So if you can avoid this, it would be much better.”

Market power

Šefčovič’s opening move was to focus on an area where Europe still has leverage: access to its market of 450 million people.

China’s fiercely competitive manufacturers have become global powerhouses, but they are struggling with weak demand at home. A prolonged property slump has weighed on consumer spending, while cutthroat competition has triggered price wars. Domestic sales of passenger vehicles fell 28% in September from a year earlier.

That makes overseas markets increasingly important. With the U.S. shutting out Chinese imports, Europe remains one of the most lucrative markets still open to Chinese manufacturers.

Šefčovič gambled that Beijing would prefer to accept limits on exports rather than risk losing access to the European market altogether.

He set his sights on the automotive sector, where Chinese manufacturers have been making rapid inroads. Chinese carmakers accounted for just 2% of both the European hybrid and plug-in hybrid markets in 2024; by the first half of 2026, their respective shares had risen to 14% and 25%, industry figures show.

The Commission was preparing to restrict hybrid imports even without an agreement. But a negotiated settlement also offered Šefčovič something valuable politically: evidence that engagement with Beijing could deliver tangible results.

The negotiations were intense, according to a person familiar with the talks on the Chinese side.

“It was very, very tough,” the person said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door negotiations. “Both sides hadn’t seen such intensity in a long time. No summer break, no holidays. They worked around the clock even one, two days prior to Šefčovič’s trip to Beijing.”

While pursuing dialogue, Brussels also wanted to convince Beijing that it was prepared to take tougher action if the negotiations failed.

Šefčovič had earlier flagged plans for a new “diversification instrument” that would require businesses in critical sectors to source essential inputs from at least three suppliers — a move to reduce China’s ability to exploit Europe’s dependence on its critical raw materials.

Then, just three days before Šefčovič’s trip to Beijing, France and Germany raised the stakes.

President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called for a powerful new trade weapon that would allow Brussels to restrict — or even shut off — access to the European market within days for countries deemed to have severely distorted the bloc’s single market.

The proposal did not explicitly name China, but Beijing was its obvious target. 

Keeping it together

EU leaders are expected to welcome the agreement but also press the Commission to act quickly to strengthen the bloc’s trade defenses, according to several diplomats. The understanding reached in Beijing has bought time, but hasn’t settled how far Brussels should go if Chinese exports keep rising or negotiations stall.

“We’re losing thousands of jobs in industry; olive oil and ice cream won’t solve the core issue,” said one EU diplomat after Šefčovič briefed ambassadors on Sunday, referring to reported deliverables from the talks.

A senior German official welcomed the Beijing deal as a first step in the right direction. “It’s a positive sign — which, of course, doesn’t fully solve the problem of the trade deficit with China,” the official said.

But Berlin’s support for a tougher line might prove short-lived.

Alicia García-Herrero, a senior fellow at the Bruegel think tank, argued that Beijing’s concessions had been calculated to assuage Berlin, given the importance of the automotive industry to the German economy.

“I’m just hoping Merz doesn’t turn away from the letter he sent to the Commission,” she said. With the German chancellor politically weakened at home, García-Herrero fears he may be reluctant to risk a prolonged confrontation: “I worry Merz will take this quick win and run.”

That leaves Šefčovič facing a balancing act: keeping EU governments on board with continued engagement with China while maintaining a credible threat of tougher action if the talks break down. 

“I expect [leaders] to give the Commission a nod to move ahead with other trade defense measures. China may see this as a betrayal. If that is the case, we could return to conflict very quickly,” said Noah Barkin, a senior adviser at the Rhodium Group’s China practice.

The battle ahead

For Šefčovič, the challenge now is to turn a limited breakthrough on cars into a broader rebalancing of trade with China — while buying Europe time to strengthen its defenses should the negotiations fail.

“There is an argument for doing to China what China had done to Europe for years — bogging Beijing down in dialogue and process while Europe gets its tools in place. But the EU needs to make full use of the time that these talks provide,” said Rhodium’s Barkin. 

The trade chief is expected to hold a video call with Wang in January, before the two meet again next March. Those talks will test whether Beijing is prepared to make further concessions in sectors where European industry is increasingly on the defensive, including chemicals.

Another priority is critical raw materials, where China has agreed to continue issuing export licenses for rare earths. Beijing’s grip on their supply gives it considerable leverage over European manufacturers, underscoring the limits of Šefčovič’s negotiating position.

The Commission is also preparing two proposals for December: the diversification instrument, aimed at reducing dependence on Chinese supplies, and a mechanism to shield European industries and regions from retaliation.

The scale of the challenge is daunting. Chinese hybrid imports were worth €6.7 billion in the first half of 2026, against an EU-China trade deficit of €360 billion last year. The agreement offers some relief to European automakers but does little to address the underlying imbalance.

Brussels hopes the hybrid safeguard can serve as a blueprint for protecting other industries facing a surge in Chinese imports.

“We hear our industry. That includes the chemical industry, the wind industry, the furniture industry. We know where there’s a surge, and we know what hits the hardest in terms of our deindustrialization,” a senior Commission official said on Monday.

Šefčovič acknowledged the limits of dialogue in his August interview, warning that negotiations would become harder to sustain without tangible progress.

“What would be very important is to come back to say there is acknowledgment of the issue and there are already some pilot schemes which we want to test and to see if they are working,” he said.

“But if simply there will be no action, then of course it will be much more difficult for us just to talk about these issues.”

Jordyn Dahl in Brussels and Hans von der Burchard in Berlin contributed reporting. 

STRASBOURG — Policymakers across the political spectrum are coalescing around a stronger approach to the European Union’s relationship with China — one that goes beyond trade measures.

A report from the Committee on Foreign Affairs on the EU-China political relationship paints China not just as an economic foe but also a geopolitical one that is undercutting European security.

The European Parliament will vote on the report on Wednesday, just in time for Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič’s trip to Beijing on Thursday, where he will meet with Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao.

“I want him to go there with the strongest possible mandate from this house,” Hilde Vautmans, the report’s author, said in a debate on Tuesday evening. “Europe has economic power. It’s time to use it.”

The remarks echo those made by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron in a joint letter earlier this week, advocating that the European Commission be handed more powers to restrict or even cut off imports from countries that create “severe and systematic distortions” in the EU.

While some MEPs hailed the French-German joint approach as proof of a unified position, Polish MEP Mariusz Kamiński from the European Conservatives and Reformists said creating “pragmatic economic ties is not only cynical, but irresponsible or outright stupid.”

China is a “communist dictatorship that poses a threat to the free world,” he continued.

He’s not alone in that sentiment, as for many lawmakers, simply tackling Chinese overcapacity isn’t enough. The Commission needs to address China’s growing human rights abuses, escalations in the Taiwan Strait, and its role in the war in Ukraine, they said.

“We have to recognize that China is behaving in a way that is endangering our interests. Not just on trade but on security and defense,” said Spanish MEP Nicolás Pascual de la Parte from the center-right European People’s Party. “The human rights situation has not improved, but it has disappeared from our agenda in recent years.”

The lawmakers called out Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghur minority group in Xinjiang, which China has systemically placed in camps and prisons and persecuted. The Parliament stopped just short of calling the action a genocide in a 2024 resolution, saying it amounts “to crimes against humanity.”

Others like the EPP’s Michael Gahler called out Beijing’s encroachment on the island of Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory. China’s role in propping up the Russian economy while it fights Ukraine also received plenty of airtime.

The issues diverged, but the MEPs used Tuesday’s debate to call out the EU’s unequal relationship with China — a sign that Vautmans says is proof the bloc is coming to a unified stance toward the country.

“This is no longer just the position of the European Parliament or of one political group,” Vautmans said after the debate. “There is a growing recognition that Europe needs a more coherent China policy: open to dialogue and cooperation, but much more willing to defend its interests when necessary.”