concerning defense, there is no bilateral treaty involving defense. In terms of
judicial cooperation, the EU and the USA have reached six treaty agreements
relating to extradition, judicial assistance, thefight against terrorism and interna-
tional crime, the exchange of personnel and data, etc., which fully proves a rela-
tively high density and degree of fusion in social contacts between the EU and the
USA, while current China-EU judicial cooperation remains at relations between
China and single EU member states.
From the perspective of the economy, trade and investment, the EU has served
as the largest trading partner for China for eight consecutive years since 2004 and
has played an enormous role in China’s foreign trade relations, and especially, the
China-EU trade volume increased for two consecutive years (2010 and 2011) after
the globalfinancial crisis which occurred in 2009. However, the structure, con-
notation and stability of China-EU trade cannot be explained merely by superficial
data; in 2012, China-EU trade accounted for 34.4 % of the global GDP, while
EU-US trade made up an astonishing 45.5 % of the GDP,^29 suggesting that the
EU-US trade demand was much higher than that between China and the EU, and
that European development cannot do without China, but the USA was more
indispensable for European development. With regards to trade in goods, China-EU
exports and imports accounted for 42.7 and 41.7 % of global exports and imports
respectively, while EU-US exports and imports made up 40 and 44.5 % of global
exports and imports respectively^30 ; moreover, there was a surplus in China’s
exports to the EU, while a surplus occurred in the EU’s exports to the USA; thus the
EU struck an overall trade balance in the interdependence pattern amidst such
global circulation; trade in services between China and the EU and between the EU
and the USA accounted for 45 and 52 % of global trade in services respectively,
including as high as 39.6 and 12.4 % for the EU and the USA respectively but only
5.4 % for China (see Footnote 30). EU-US relations involving trade in services
were far more than that between China and the EU, thus no balance was achieved in
thisfield. More importantly, intra-enterprise multinational trade accounted for 60
and 30 %^31 of the USA’s and the EU’s imports and exports respectively. US
multinational corporations have steadily secured a leading position in the world,
while half of China’s exports deals with processing trade and is easy to shift.
Therefore, China-EU trade relations lag far behind EU-US trade relations in terms
of structure and quality and are less close than EU-US trade relations by a very
large margin.
As far as investment relations are concerned, the USA is still the largest capital
exporting country in the world and the capital of the USA mainlyflows to the EU,
while the capital of the EU mainly enters the USA; the EU-US investments across
the Atlantic Ocean hit 3700 billion USD or 2800 billion EUR (see Footnote 31),
(^29) National database of the World Bank,http://data.worldbank.org/country.
(^30) Database of the World Trade Organization, http://stat.who.org/StatisticalProgram/
WSDBViewData.aspx?Language=E.
(^31) See Hamilton and Quinlan ( 2011 ).
22 H. Zhou