Copyright Bloomberg
Last month, Louis Gallois, French industry veteran and former boss of plane maker Airbus SE, cast a gloomy eye over the European Union’s trade war fortunes. The bloc was too slow to make decisions, too held back by red tape and too far behind China in technology. "We are the emerging market," he told BFM TV. "They are 10 years ahead." The answer, according to Gallois: Let a thousand joint ventures bloom on European soil to learn from Chinese firms, rather than just a great wall of tariffs to hold cheap goods back. This might seem naive given the rough state of Sino-Western relations, as China’s export tide frustrates governments and Brussels mulls a ban on hardware made by Huawei Technologies Co. But if anyone knows the dangers of doing business with China, it’s Gallois. Airbus inaugurated an assembly line there in Tianjin in 2008, back when coerced joint ventures and technology transfer were seen as a manageable cost of doing business. Aviation remains a Western duopoly, but China is advancing. Meanwhile, in the automotive sector, Europe is being hammered, with 100,000 jobs lost last year and attempts to create battery startups, such as Northvolt AB, failing.
