Xi’s visit stress-tests Macron’s plans for a sovereign Europe
习的访问对马克龙的主权欧洲计划进行了压力测试

Welcome to Trade Secrets. Last week Olaf Scholz was in Beijing; this week Xi Jinping is in the EU, stress-testing EU unity and particularly the Franco-German relationship. Today I’ll make a couple of observations on that score and then Thursday’s Trade Secrets column will look in detail at Brussels’ apparent new get-tough regime towards Chinese companies in Europe. The rest of today’s newsletter is an author Q&A on the new book by former Australian trade negotiator and Trade Secrets favourite Dmitry Grozoubinski, a rare exception to the rule that nothing interesting on trade ever comes out of Geneva. Charted Waters is on China’s currency.
欢迎来到商业秘密。上周，奥拉夫·朔尔茨（Olaf Scholz）在北京;本周习近平访问欧盟，对欧盟团结，特别是法德关系进行压力测试。今天，我将就此发表几点看法，然后周四的“商业秘密”专栏将详细探讨布鲁塞尔对欧洲中国公司采取的明显新强硬政策。今天时事通讯的其余部分是前澳大利亚贸易谈判代表和商业秘密最受欢迎的德米特里·格罗祖宾斯基（Dmitry Grozoubinski）对新书的作者问答，这是一个罕见的例外，即日内瓦从未出现过任何关于贸易的有趣内容。Charted Waters是中国的货币。

Xi loves EU, yeah, yeah, yeah?
习爱欧盟，是啊，是啊，是啊？

The dynamics around Xi Jinping’s visit to the EU aren’t exactly difficult to make out. It’s clear from Olaf Scholz’s muted rhetoric during his trip to China last month that Germany’s dependence on the Chinese market still restrains Berlin from regarding China as a full-on economic competitor, let alone a strategic rival.
习近平访问欧盟的动态并不难弄清楚。从奥拉夫·朔尔茨（Olaf Scholz）上个月访华期间的低调言辞中可以清楚地看出，德国对中国市场的依赖仍然限制了柏林将中国视为全面的经济竞争对手，更不用说战略竞争对手了。

Emmanuel Macron, whom Xi met yesterday, gives off a more combative air, and is trying to stop China from driving a wedge between France and Germany. The French president’s recent speech at the Sorbonne (here in translation) set out a strategy aiming to operationalise “strategic autonomy”, a concept the EU invented in 2020 and has been trying to define ever since, with much more interventionist trade and industrial policy to create European industries and actively to manage supply chains.
习昨天会见的埃马纽埃尔·马克龙（Emmanuel Macron）散发出更具战斗性的气息，并试图阻止中国在法国和德国之间挑拨离间。法国总统最近在索邦大学的演讲（此处为翻译）提出了一项旨在实施“战略自主”的战略，这是欧盟在 2020 年发明的概念，此后一直试图定义，通过更多的干预主义贸易和产业政策来创建欧洲工业并积极管理供应链。

But though Macron’s vision sounds cohesive, it will struggle not just with Germany’s continued reliance on the Chinese market but a lack of trust elsewhere in the EU. For one, Macron has a history of lurching back and forth on China. It’s not just his notorious comments on Taiwan after his trip to China last year but also a sudden last-minute switch to support the doomed Comprehensive Agreement on Investment deal with Beijing in 2020, reportedly because some trade and investment goodies were dangled in front of France to get it to shift.
但是，尽管马克龙的愿景听起来很有凝聚力，但它不仅会因为德国继续依赖中国市场而苦苦挣扎，而且还会因为欧盟其他地方缺乏信任而苦苦挣扎。首先，马克龙有在中国问题上来回摇摆的历史。这不仅是他在去年访问中国后对台湾的臭名昭著的言论，也是他在最后一刻突然转而支持2020年与北京达成的注定要失败的《全面投资协议》，据报道，因为一些贸易和投资的好东西在法国面前晃来晃去，以使其改变。

The immediate deliverable of yesterday’s Macron-Xi meeting was for China to hold off on retaliatory tariffs on cognac, another France-specific concession. (Meanwhile, Scholz’s trip to Beijing apparently won him some favours on German exports of beef, pork and apples: the Chinese approach to buying off trading partners’ discontent really isn’t subtle.)
昨天的马克龙与习会晤的直接成果是中国推迟对干邑白兰地的报复性关税，这是法国特有的另一项让步。（与此同时，朔尔茨的北京之行显然为他在德国牛肉、猪肉和苹果出口方面赢得了一些青睐：中国收买贸易伙伴不满的做法其实并不微妙。

This feeds the old suspicion, fair or not, that France’s EU-wide solutions reflect its own interests. It’s less a strategic vision of the EU car industry that caused France privately to push for the investigation into subsidies for electric vehicle imports than French carmakers suffering more than their German counterparts from Chinese competition.
这助长了人们的怀疑，无论公平与否，法国在欧盟范围内的解决方案反映了自己的利益。与其说是欧盟汽车工业的战略愿景，不如说是法国汽车制造商比德国汽车制造商在中国竞争中遭受的更多痛苦。

One of France’s previous attempts to create a pan-EU industrial policy through a sovereignty fund essentially fizzled out, again partly because of a belief elsewhere in the EU that here was Paris wanting to bail out French companies again. Macron has identified pressing issues with an overarching analysis and proposed some solutions. But France unfortunately isn’t the best country to be pushing them, at least unless Macron can convince Scholz to embrace his vision as well.
法国此前试图通过主权基金制定泛欧盟产业政策的一次尝试基本上失败了，部分原因是欧盟其他地方认为巴黎希望再次救助法国公司。马克龙通过总体分析确定了紧迫的问题，并提出了一些解决方案。但不幸的是，法国并不是推动这些目标的最佳国家，至少除非马克龙能够说服肖尔茨也接受他的愿景。

Lying trade lies and the lying pols who tell them
撒谎的交易谎言和撒谎的警察告诉他们

Dmitry Grozoubinski’s “Why Politicians Lie About Trade” comes out in May. If you want a two-word review, it’s great. It describes official myths and distortions, from overselling trade deals to claiming distance no longer matters in trade to saying corporations control the world by infiltrating the WTO. To give you a flavour of the tone, corporate lobbyists’ occasional visits to a WTO meeting have “the bemused and mildly horrified ‘what’s all this then?’ air of an English constable arriving on the scene of an out of control food fight at the local clown college”.
德米特里·格罗祖宾斯基（Dmitry Grozoubinski）的《为什么政客在贸易问题上撒谎》（Why Politicss Lie About Trade）将于5月出版。如果你想要一个两个字的评论，那就太好了。它描述了官方的神话和歪曲，从夸大贸易协议到声称距离在贸易中不再重要，再到说公司通过渗透世贸组织来控制世界。为了让你了解一下这种语气，企业游说者偶尔会去参加世贸组织会议，“有一种困惑和轻微的恐惧，'那到底是什么？'的气氛，一个英国警察到达当地小丑学院失控的食物大战现场”。

AB You want the book to be “accessible hard work worth doing”. (Obviously a cynical play for the mass market.) Who most needs to know this stuff? Politicians themselves, journalists, businesses, voters?
AB：你希望这本书是“平易近人、值得去做的艰苦工作”。（显然是大众市场的玩世不恭。谁最需要知道这些东西？政客本人、记者、企业、选民？

DG My publisher’s preferred answer would be “every man, woman and child on planet Earth”, but that’s probably a touch ambitious. I wrote this book for people who have policy issues they care about, whether it’s climate change, job creation, national security or anything else. Trade and the decisions governments make about it impact all of these.
DG：我的出版商首选的答案是“地球上的每一个男人、女人和孩子”，但这可能有点雄心勃勃。我为那些关心政策问题的人写了这本书，无论是气候变化、创造就业机会、国家安全还是其他任何事情。贸易和政府对此做出的决定影响着所有这些。

AB Brexit and Trump’s trade wars might be expensive ways to learn about trade, but have they oddly led to more appreciation of the issues?

DG Absolutely. One of the reasons trade has historically been so easy to lie about is how separated causes and effects are. You sign a free trade agreement today and 10 years from now you can look back and (if you squint) make some guesses about what it actually did.

Brexit and Trump’s trade wars, because they were about unpicking the existing order and potentially doing so very abruptly, forced all sorts of people to take these issues a lot more seriously and start asking far harder questions about what’s under the hood. There’s nothing like staring down the barrel of mile-long queues at the border and empty supermarket shelves to make everyone, from voters all the way up to prime ministers, ask a few follow-up questions.

AB You had a very interesting observation about economists being brought in only at the end of trade talks to make up some figures to justify the deal.

DG What I was trying to illustrate as gently as I could is that trade negotiations and trade policy are first and foremost about politics and power. In a fight between a policy the economic modelling says will have greater long-term GDP benefits, and a policy the political affairs folk say has the strong backing of a large and vocal interest group, my money is on the latter. Polish farmers aren’t being coddled on Ukrainian grain imports because some wonky IMF econometric analysis said so.

AB I remember talking to Doug Irwin once who said that Nafta boosters said it would create half a million jobs and Nafta bashers said it would destroy half a million jobs. In fact jobs-wise it was probably a wash. How much is overstatement on both sides a problem?

DG Overstatement is the greatest problem humanity has ever faced, or ever will. More seriously, yes I think it’s a problem that especially before the text is public, both supporters and detractors of a trade agreement can say literally anything about its impacts in an ultimately unfalsifiable way. A trade agreement could do just about anything. 

More practically though, I think the challenge is that we focus on tools like trade agreements when we should be having a discussion about the problems we’re trying to solve. A trade agreement isn’t a goal in and of itself, any more than “surgery” is an objective.

AB I literally can’t think of a question to ask you about the WTO. Is that OK?

DG Probably not a great sign for the organisation, but absolutely fine by me!

AB If you had to advise governments to make a positive but honest case for more trade that they’re currently not making, what would you say?

DG I would say that tariffs are taxes on your own citizens for being insufficiently patriotic in their purchasing choices, and that feels like there should be a high bar to clear before we reach for them as a policy tool.

I would say that climate change requires us to pool the ingenuity, creativity and productivity of the entire world and we can’t afford to caveat our climate ambitions on all solar panels and electric vehicles being made exclusively in our swing electoral districts.

And I would say that people are smarter than the current level of discourse and can be trusted to understand trade-offs if they’re clearly and honestly explained.

Charted waters

China doesn’t want a sharp destabilising devaluation of the renminbi, as George Magnus argues here, even if in theory it would help its renewed export drive. But downward pressure on the currency from falling interest rates and capital outflows suggests that at some point it might not have much choice.

Trade links

The OECD, WTO and IMF are all predicting a sharp rebound in global goods trade this year driven by strong US economic growth and falling inflation.

My FT colleagues consider the controversial plans among some of the rich democracies to seize Russia’s frozen assets.

A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank looks at new tools the US can use to combat Chinese coercion.

The Economist examines how China and the US are trying to recruit countries as allies in their tussle with each other.

The EU agriculture commissioner has asked China not to target agriculture in trade disputes, one of the more quixotic requests to come out of Brussels in recent years and one that essentially confirms where Europe’s economic weak spot is.

Trade Secrets is edited by Jonathan Moules