I don't disagree with the EU's laggardness around changing economic tides, but if just about every major economic bloc and country is initiating trade barriers against China to protect their domestic industries, at some point the common denominator is China.

And as I mentioned elsewhere, much of this overproduction would go away were Chinese consumers able to dip into their savings if China's social safety net was expanded and the CCP's Reaganesque opposition to "Welfarism" was toned down.

Of course but the EU thinks it’s a better strategy to engage with China which remains a major partner to move the needle in the right direction rather than burn bridges. There are a lot of tools which could be used to limit the impact of Chinese surproduction and push China towards shoring up its internal market.

The US used to do the same and will hopefully be sane again in three years.

Command economies hell-bent on economic dominance are not going to engage. The only way to limit Chinese super production is to either block their goods outright or to subsidize your own to out-price theirs locally.

A lot of people don't understand the CCP mentality clearly. China was once the epicenter of human production, making things the rest of the world desired, from Chinaware to silk to tea. The rest of the world fought wars and crossed oceans to obtain exclusive rights to those goods, while the Chinese dynasties simply sat on their thrones and levied tributes from every farflung nation. The CCP wants to return China to THAT level of dominance, this time with tech, electronics and an addiction to rare raw materials.

Nope. Would have been the case if the US imposed usage taxes on foreign users of its goods and services, like tech products and cloud services, but that's not what's happening.

The Chinese tributes were more like payments for the right to trade those goods (which were separate from the cost of goods itself). That's why when the European traders arrived in China, the Emperor simply thought that they were another tributary state seeking protection and trade rights.

The US is imposing terms on foreign countries for use of its goods, that's what the chips restrictions are all about.

There is no such thing as "overproduction", all production in China is reaching a destination, so by definition it is the right production level.

Retaliatory measures are a better way to balance things rather than playing a game of command-economy brinksmanship.