There is an economic fact that has gone somewhat unnoticed. For the first time since there are records on foreign trade, China appears as Spain’s main supplier, ahead of Germany, France and the United States.
11% of the goods that Spain buys from the rest of the world come from China. These are data from last year that confirm a trend that started in 2019. Only 2% of the goods that Spain sells to the rest of the world end up in the People’s Republic of China, an immense market made up of 1,412 million people. The peak of exports was reached in 2020 and began a dizzying decline from 2021, coinciding with the spread of the pandemic. We bought a lot of masks in China and couldn’t sell them any more meat and cheese as they were locked up at home, with the ports half-paralysed. This could be a cartoonish simplification of the movement of the balance. In reality, China has sold more telecommunications systems, more electronics, more cars and more motorcycles to Spain.
Since imports have increased and exports have decreased, the trade deficit with China has increased significantly and in a single year has gone from 26.2 billion euros to 41.6 billion. This dynamic has relegated Germany to second place among supplier countries with a share of 9.4%.
The conclusion seems obvious. Spain needs to sell more goods to China to overcome the drop in exports resulting from the epidemic and for this reason it is advisable to maintain good diplomatic relations with Beijing within a very tense international framework.
The United States, as is well known, does not want European countries to have good relations with China today. We are in a second cold war and Henry Kissinger, about to turn one hundred years old, has already warned that this second cold war can be more dangerous than the first. Kissinger was the author of the bold American opening to China in the 1970s, a spectacular diplomatic move that ended up splitting the communist bloc in two after the bitter Sino-Soviet break of the 1960s.
Obviously, the United States is much more concerned about German high-tech exports to the Asian giant than the modest Spanish sales of agri-food products. Pedro Sánchez has been cautious with China. In November 2018, six months after the motion of censure against Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish Socialist Government rejected the Chinese offer to join the New Silk Road, an ambitious project of commercial connection between Asia and Europe .
Italy did sign and all the alarms went off in Washington. First they withdrew their confidence in Matteo Salvini and then they applauded the formation of Mario Draghi’s government of national unity. And now they are demanding Giorgia Meloni, a conversant Atlanticist, to break this accession treaty.
Sánchez is going to Beijing this week with three ideas. Remain loyal to NATO in the Ukraine war, defend a greater autonomy of Europe in the commercial relationship with China (German line), and strengthen its role in international politics while the first party of the The opposition seeks the support of the evangelical sects in Madrid. It’s a complicated balance. Washington is watching and the FAES foundation has already warned that Sánchez wants to “betray” the West.
