China Week: Library focus on EU-China relations

China’s increasing clout on the world stage brings challenges and opportunities for EU-China relations. At the European Parliament, China features as a regular agenda item at the foreign affairs, security and defence, international trade and human rights committees. As the Library’s job is to provide information support to Members and EP staff through balanced and incisive analysis and pertinent background material, China also kept us quite busy in recent months. And this from various angles…

Most recently we looked into security issues by scrutinizing China’s military rise and China’s role in international peace-keeping missions (to be published still this week!).

Unsurprisingly, however, most of our China work focused on trade. Currently in the making is a keysource on Chinese investment in Europe. We will share this compilation of relevant information sources with you later this week, and we are considering a Library briefing on the same topic for June … so stay with us!

The EU’s trade relationship with China grows increasingly important, even though it doesn’t always run that smoothly. A few months ago we put EU-China trade frictions under the microscope, and drafted a plenary briefing on the Escalating EU-China trade row over solar panels, a potato that is still quite hot.

If you are interested in a general picture of the EU’s trade relations with China and other emerging Asian countries, we have this briefing for you: Improving EU-Asia trade relations. So how big is the trade volume between the EU and Asia, you may now be wondering? Well, just take a look at our Statistical Spotlight – EU-Asia trade relations beyond China, where our Library statistician visualizes trade streams in goods and services across the Pacific. And digs even deeper…

To look at a more specific issue, we investigated the new shoots of a social security system for China and compared it – as far as possible – with the EU and US: Social welfare protection: the EU, USA and China.

Finally, you expect to get books and journals from a Library, don’t you? Brand new, a print copy of the weekly European edition of China daily is waiting for you in our Reading Room. This is China’s official international news magazine, so in a nutshell how China wants to be perceived abroad. Its full-text archive can be searched in the Factiva press database.

For Members and EP staff only, we also hold subscriptions to a couple of subject-relevant academic full-text e-journals, notably The journal of contemporary China, International relations of the Asia-Pacific, and Asian survey. Our information specialists monitor what think tanks and research institutes say on China and post the most interesting papers on our Library Area Page. Here you will find books and articles on aspects of EU-China relations, including China’s human rights situation, no doubt a major concern.

To stay informed on China, MEP’s offices and EP staff can subscribe to an e-mail alert that delivers both our in-house analysis and hand-picked external info sources direct to their inbox.