EU-China trade and investment relations and Covid-19: old struggles or new challenges?

Abstract

The article investigates EU-China trade and investment relations, highlighting the importance of their partnership for the global economy. The article argues that Covid-19 is an accelerating factor of existing trends, analysing EU-China relations as empirical evidence. It will address the institutional and legal framework of EU-China trade and investment relations. The article will use primary and secondary sources to inform the research. It will benefit from an interdisciplinary approach, combining both legal and political literatures. The analysis is based on EU-China trade and investment relations, as reported by EU’s official documents and is divided into three main sections. The first section gives an overview of economic interactions between EU-China. The second section provides an analysis of the main documents between the EU and China before the pandemic. The third section is dedicated to showing how the relations between the two actors continued during Covid-19 pandemic.