EU demands ’serious reform’ of the WTO to stop flood of Chinese exports

Euractiv - European fears over the impact of a surge in imports from China on the bloc’s faltering industrial base will be raised during World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks in the coming days.

“Overcapacity and non-market policies must be better tackled than in the past,” Maroš Šefčovič, the EU’s trade chief said on Monday.

Šefčovič will demand “serious reform” of the WTO during a meeting in Cameroon this Thursday and make it “crystal clear” that China’s economic rise has meant the global trade environment has “dramatically changed” in recent decades.

“We very much [will] be insisting on serious reform of the WTO, where level playing field, overcapacity, and non-market policies must be better tackled than in the past,” he told journalists.

China, the world’s second-largest economy and the EU’s third-largest trading partner, joined the WTO in 2001, six years after the Geneva-based international trade organisation was created.

Šefčovič’s case is that “a new balance” is now required with the rise of China to adjust the “rights and obligations” of WTO members, which he said is necessary to combat the “overcapacities” that “are creating a lot of problems in the European economy”.

The Slovak commissioner’s remarks come amid a surge of Chinese exports to the EU, at a time when US President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs are already hurting the bloc’s exporters and causing vast quantities of cheap Chinese manufactured goods to be re-directed toward Europe.

Brussels’ trade deficit with Beijing surged from $335 billion in 2024 to $375 billion in 2025, according to data collected by Bruegel, an EU policy think tank. Beijing’s global trade surplus also hit a record $1.2 trillion last year – a figure it is set to far surpass in 2026.

In addition to confronting China, Šefčovič also called for “new governance models” to facilitate trade disputes between member states. The US has long hobbled the WTO court system by blocking the appointment of judges to its appellate body – thus allowing WTO members to effectively obviate court rulings by ‘appealing into the void’.

Šefčovič said Brussels will invite more countries to join the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement, a 2020 mechanism involving more than 60 of the WTO’s 166 members that have pledged respect for the rulings of an alternative dispute settlement mechanism.

“We are all for multilateralism,” Šefčovič said. “But if we see that in certain areas like the dispute settlement mechanism, this is not possible, we will be also proposing this plurilateral approach.”