(Yicai)April 11 -- China has expressed discontent and opposition to the recent investigations launched by the European Union into Chinese new energy companies under the Foreign Subsidies Regulation.

All of the EU’s FSR-based investigations targeting Chinese new energy firms hurt their confidence to expand in Europe and impact global climate change efforts and green transformation, China’s Ministry of Commerce said in a statement on its website today. Therefore, China urges the EU to immediately stop persecuting Chinese new energy companies and correct wrong practices.

In the past two months, the EU launched four rounds of investigations under the FSR into Chinese new energy firms, including Chinese state-owned rail transit equipment manufacturer CRRC and two China-funded solar cell panel makers. The latest probe covers the conditions for the development of wind farms in Spain, Greece, France, Romania, and Bulgaria, said Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s anti-trust commissioner, Reuters reported.

With the investigations, the EU is defining at its own discretion some non-financial subsidies as financial ones and asking Chinese new energy firms to provide supporting documents, many of which are business secrets, in a short period of time, the China Chamber of Commerce to the EU said today, adding that it stands firmly against such behavior.

The probes mainly target Chinese investment projects in the EU and government procurement projects that Chinese new energy companies are involved in, Sun Lei, a senior partner at Beijing Dacheng Law Offices, told Yicai.

The EU initiated the investigations to prevent China from taking part in bidding for large projects organized by the EU or its member countries and make Chinese new energy firms worried about investing in related fields, said Zhao Yongsheng, professor at the University of International Business and Economics.

For example, one of the investigations caused a Chinese railway company to withdraw from bidding for an electric train project in Bulgaria. The Chinese firm’s bid was 47 percent cheaper than the cost predicted by Bulgarian State Railways and 48 percent lower than the bid from Spanish rival Talgo, so the EU thought the Chinese firm had received some sort of subsidies, Yicai learned.

The main issue is that European funds, labor, production factors, organization, and logistics operations are in urgent need of reform, but the EU hasn’t realized it yet, Zhao explained.

China seized about two-thirds of the global wind turbine market and more than 90 percent of the EU’s solar cell panel market in 2022, according to documents from the EU.

Editor: Futura Costaglione