Chinese Investment and Influence in Europe

China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, and since then America has experienced a debilitating consequence of unfair trade, and that is unfair trade with the People's Republic of China. And it has been a relationship since that time that has sometimes been dubbed as an economic blood transfusion from West to East-a vast transfer of wealth that has financed the Chinese security state at home and a coercive military foreign policy abroad. Yet, America has not been the only target. China, likewise, seeks economic and political advantage over Europe. According to an open source data, which is likely to underestimate such true figures, direct investment from China into Europe now stands at $95 billion a year and China has bought or invested well over $300 billion in European assets in the last decade. But those figures do not do justice to the scale and breadth of influence that China has thus achieved. Chinese investment, much of it directed by the state-owned enterprises of China, reflects and serves the political goals of Beijing. China has a global strategy to control the extraction of raw resources, to control transportation corridors, to dominate the innovation and production cycles of others, and then to sell the products it has abroad to enrich the corrupt elite that rule over China today. For China, Europe represents a large market with few economic defenses like we have in the United States. So Europe is relatively vulnerable compared to our country to this type of economic challenge. For example, while the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States-better known as CFIUS-has blunted some of China's attempts to buy key companies in the United States, only 12 of the 28 European Union member states have a comparable mechanism to screen for an investment and also screen the efforts to create and an EU-wide system has proven unsuccessful.