The EU has new anti-Beijing instruments, but will China have to face the music?

Chinese-made cars ready to be loaded on to a European freight ship for export at a port in Yantai, in China's eastern Shandong province, 11 June. AFP - -

When Western companies rushed into China in the 1980s and 1990s, they traded their latest technology for market access. Now, China has absorbed, adapted and improved foreign know-how and is flooding Europe with advanced products, while the European Union's trade deficit balloons. As Paris and Berlin finally align on a response, analysts question whether Brussels' defensive "instruments" can contain a rival it helped create.

When in 1994 Klaus Wulf, chief technical officer of the German-Chinese joint-venture FAW-Volkswagen was asked if he was worried about the effect of China’s demands for transfer of the latest German technology, he did not appreciate it.