EU’s cost-of-living crisis exposes neoliberal trade policies’ fragility—China’s role as both scapegoat and victim of systemic exploitation
Original framing: “Could Europe’s cost-of-living protests sharpen EU-China trade tensions?” — South China Morning Post
The voices of Chinese factory workers in Europe (e.g., in Foxconn’s European operations) and European gig workers (e.g., Deliveroo drivers) are entirely absent, despite their shared precarity. Migrant workers in both regions face exploitation under neoliberal frameworks, yet their struggles are framed as separate rather than interconnected. The *Clean Clothes Campaign* and *China Labor Watch* have documented how EU brands rely on Chinese supply chains that violate labor rights, yet these findings are excluded from the debate. Additionally, women—who bear the brunt of cost-of-living pressures—are invisible in this narrative, despite their central role in both European and Chinese economies.
The current framing of Europe’s protests as a prelude to EU-China trade wars is a classic *scapegoating mechanism*, redirecting anger from the architects of neoliberalism—financial elites, corporate lobbies, and complacent policymakers—toward a foreign power that is both a product and a victim of the same system.
The protests are not an aberration but a symptom of a *century-long pattern* where economic crises are met with protectionist backlash, ignoring the structural causes: the deliberate hollowing out of European industry, the suppression of wages through global competition, and the refusal to tax capital adequately. The solution lies not in punitive trade measures but in *rebuilding industrial sovereignty from below*—through worker cooperatives, degrowth policies, and transnational labor solidarity—that address the root causes: inequality, climate collapse, and the erosion of democratic control over economies. The trickster here is time itself, exposing the absurdity of a system that demands austerity from the poor while bailing out the rich, and now seeks to blame China for its own failures. The path forward requires naming these mechanisms, reclaiming agency from the margins, and demanding policies that serve people over profits—whether in Brussels, Beijing, or Berlin.