Tuesday, October 27, 2026
China's commerce and science ministries published a draft on Friday 16 October that would add 40 technologies in AI, biomedicine and solar to the catalogue of technologies banned or restricted from export. The ministry says 14 would be banned and 26 restricted. Comment runs until 15 November.
At their Brussels summit on 15 October, EU leaders pushed for import quotas to protect chemicals and industrial machinery from Chinese competition, Euronews reports, and a senior EU official said the Commission will present two new trade tools by the end of the year. The bloc's annual trade deficit with China is a record €360 billion.
China exported about 919,000 passenger cars in September, up 64 per cent from a year earlier, while domestic passenger-car sales fell 27 per cent to about 1.67 million, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers reported on Monday. Nine-month exports reached 7.17 million. Two EU officials say last week's hybrid deal includes a 350,000-a-year quota, though no text has been published.
After two days of talks in Beijing, the EU's trade chief said China had agreed to "moderate" exports of hybrid and plug-in hybrid cars, with the prospect of cutting them by more than half over four years. China's own list of 16 outcomes mentions an "understanding" and no number.
China's suspension of its sweeping rare earth export controls expires November 10, about a month away. August export volumes already ran 18 percent below last year despite the truce. The West spent the reprieve mostly watching.
The United States imported $420.8 billion of goods and services in August, the most in any month on record, and the trade deficit widened to $105.6 billion, the largest since March 2025. The last record was set by consumer goods rushed in ahead of tariffs. This one is made of capital goods. Four lines of hardware account for more than the whole rise in goods imports this year.
From January to July, China reported $258.1 billion of exports to the United States. The US Census Bureau recorded $158.3 billion of imports from China and Hong Kong. The difference, almost $100 billion, is five times its usual size, and a Peterson Institute analysis says tariff evasion is the most likely reason. Vietnam's figures run the other way.
In her State of the European Union address in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Ursula von der Leyen invited Canada to become the EU's first associate member. The treaties make full membership impossible, because Canada is not a European state. What she is offering is a new category, to be negotiated, with a summit in Montreal next month.
Britain has banned imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and sanctioned individuals and companies involved in settlement expansion. The goods ban takes six to nine months and covers a small trade flow. The measures on construction, financing, real estate and advertising start sooner and reach further.
Eurometal says 300,000 European manufacturing jobs will go before the end of this year, and marked the claim by carrying ten coffins around the European Commission. The stunt makes the figure easy to discount. The cost gap underneath it does not depend on the stunt being fair.
When Suez closed, ships went around Africa. It cost more and took longer, and it worked. The Gulf offers no equivalent, which is why traffic through Hormuz has fallen by most of itself rather than moved somewhere else.
The long-term contracts that financed the world's liquefied natural gas terminals assumed buyers who would take the volume for decades. Those buyers are now asking to be let out, and the terminals still have debt to service.
Commercial interest in northern shipping routes is running well ahead of the capacity to escort, chart and rescue along them. The constraint is a shipyard problem that takes a decade to solve and was deferred for thirty years.
After years of supply chain speeches, the physical evidence has arrived: factory construction, border logistics investment and trade flows reorganizing around proximity.