The first four months of 2026 show how unbalanced the relationship has become. China’s exports to the EU reached US$201bn, while its imports from the EU were only US$88bn. The result was a US$113bn surplus in just four months. This is not simply a story of rising trade.
The imbalance widened fast. Compared with Jan-Apr 2025, China’s exports to the EU rose by 19%, while imports from the EU increased by 12%. Since the export base is already much larger, China’s surplus with the EU jumped by 26% in just one year.
From chemicals to medicine-adjacent inputs, the EU is confronting a harder question: what happens when low-priced Chinese supply does not just compete with EU production, but gradually replaces it?
Electric cars, solar inverters and Chinese e-commerce parcels get the headlines. The quieter story is in chemicals, feed ingredients and pharma-adjacent inputs, where China has built very large shares of EU imports. Low prices may look like a benefit for buyers, but over time they can also hollow out EU production, reduce alternative supply and shift leverage towards China.
This week we look at that less visible front in the EU-China trade relationship. The data are more worrying than we expected.
Highest China shares
This is the less visible part of the China trade story. The same pressure now appears in less glamorous inputs: amino acids, adipic acid and broader chemical categories. These products sit inside feed, food, chemical and pharma-adjacent supply chains.
In all three cases, China is already a dominant supplier by volume. The gap between value and quantity is especially revealing. In amino acids, China supplied 88% of EU import quantity but only 52% of import value. That is not proof of dumping. But it is exactly the kind of pattern that helps explain why EU trade defence is moving from the margins to the centre of the China debate.
The risk is not simply that the EU buys cheap inputs from China. The risk is that low-priced supply gradually makes EU production uneconomic, leaving the Union dependent on the very source that displaced it.
Bigger in tonnes than in euros
This chart shows the mechanics of price pressure more directly. Choline, vanillin and aldehyde/ketone acids are not headline products, but they feed into animal nutrition, food, fragrance, chemical and pharma-adjacent supply chains.
In each case, China’s share is larger in tonnes than in euros. That is not a legal finding of dumping. But it is consistent with lower average unit values and helps explain the EU trade-defence concern: Chinese supply is not only large, it can also become the benchmark against which EU production must compete.
Once that happens, the risk is no longer just cheaper imports. It is the loss of EU production capacity behind the products being imported.
Food, feed and broader chemical inputs
This third group is more mixed, but that is part of the story. Ethylvanillin is used in flavourings and fragrances. Feed premixes go into animal nutrition. The “other inorganic acids” line is a broader chemical category, so it should be read more cautiously than a clean product line.
Still, the pattern remains. In all three lines, China’s share of EU import quantity is higher than its share of import value: 68% versus 62% for ethylvanillin, 60% versus 47% for other inorganic acids, and 50% versus 37% for feed premixes.
These are not the most dramatic cases in the sample. That is precisely why they matter. The tonnes-versus-euros gap is not confined to one isolated product. It appears across several less visible inputs embedded in food, feed and chemical supply chains.
In the end, this is the question now confronting the EU. It is no longer asking only whether Chinese supply is cheaper. It is asking whether, product by product, cheap supply is becoming the route by which EU capacity disappears.
China supplied 87% of EU solar inverter imports by quantity in 2025, compared with 75% by value. As with several chemical and other input lines, China’s share is larger in tonnes than in euros.
This is no longer theoretical. In early May, the Commission said it was restricting the use of EU funds for projects involving inverters from high-risk suppliers, citing risks to electricity generation, operational data and even remote shutdown of networks. The product line where China supplies 87% of EU import quantity is now also a critical-infrastructure concern.
Beijing reacted as expected. China’s Ministry of Commerce strongly opposed the Commission recommendation and warned that it could take measures to safeguard Chinese firms’ interests. Solar inverters are no longer just another clean-tech import line. They are becoming part of the EU-China economic-security argument.
The EU only began reporting these two rare-earth compound import buckets separately in 2023. Before then, several compounds were buried inside a broader customs category, making it harder to see which specific rare-earth flows were coming from where.
The most visible dependence is in the dark-red bucket, shown in the chart. China supplied around 90% of extra-EU imports by quantity in each year from 2023 to 2025. This is not a marginal exposure. It is structural.
The blue bucket looks less alarming at first glance, but it would be a mistake to dismiss it. It includes dysprosium and terbium, two rare earths used in small quantities to improve the performance of high-end permanent magnets.
Early 2026 makes the trend harder to ignore. China’s share is rising further in both buckets, including the apparently less exposed blue one.
On the occasion of Europe Day 2026, EU Ambassador to China Jorge Toledo delivered one of his latest public speeches after four years in the post.
The speech was conciliatory in style, but not soft in content. Toledo did not offer Beijing a retreat from the EU’s tougher trade and economic-security line. Instead, he wrapped that line in diplomatic language. Rebalancing, he said, is not disengagement. EU measures are not market closure. Cooperation with China remains indispensable.
Against Beijing’s growing anger over EU restrictions, sanctions and high-risk supplier language, this was less a peace offering than an attempt to keep escalation politically manageable.
The chart uses 2020 as a simple starting point. What it shows is a familiar China-trade pattern: exports rise, imports do not rise much, and the surplus widens. China’s exports to the UK are estimated to reach around US$100bn in 2026, while imports from the UK remain close to US$20bn. In other words, China sells much more to the UK, but buys little more back.
The inquiry concerns SHEIN Ireland’s transfers to China of personal data relating to EU data subjects. The regulator will examine the extent to which SHEIN Ireland has complied with its relevant obligations under the GDPR.
In its app, SHEIN presents the issue in these terms: many products require the transfer of data to China, and such transfers are permitted under Article 49 of the GDPR because they are necessary for the performance of the contract and are subject to safeguards.
China imported more complete aircraft from the U.S. than from the EU in 2025, but the figures need care: Boeing is recovering from abnormal years, while Airbus’s China footprint is partly hidden by Tianjin assembly and completion.
With Trump expected in China this week, Boeing is likely to be on the commercial agenda. The chart helps explain why: after several abnormal years, U.S. aircraft deliveries to China are visible again in customs data.
China’s crude-oil imports from Libya nearly doubled in Q1 2026, albeit from a low base. The increase is geopolitically interesting because China and Libya upgraded ties to a strategic partnership in 2024, and because, on China’s import side, oil is not just the main item in the relationship. It is the relationship itself. China buys almost nothing else from Libya in meaningful quantities. Still, the scale remains small compared with EU purchases of Libyan crude, which are about 73 million barrels per quarter. This is therefore less a displacement story than an early sign that China is taking a larger position in a high-quality North African oil stream.
China’s trade with Central Asia has not merely expanded since 2020. It has changed scale. By 2025, China was exporting more than US$70bn to the region, while its trade surplus had risen to US$36bn. For China, Central Asia is not only a neighbourhood of energy, minerals and transit routes. It has also become a fast-growing market for Chinese goods.
China’s trade with Central Asia has not become asymmetric; it already was. What has changed since 2020 is the scale: Beijing still sells the region roughly twice as much as it buys from it, but now at more than three times the value.
In 2025, China’s average per capita disposable income was 43,377 yuan. But the median, the income level below which half of residents fall, was only 36,231 yuan. That is 16.5% below the average, slightly worse than 16.0% in 2024. The gap does not measure inequality on its own, but it is a warning that the headline average overstates the income position of the typical resident. A recent study by Li Shi points in the same direction: income inequality remains high, while wealth inequality has continued to rise.
