What 's your view on EU Chamber of Commerce 's statement that Xi 's repetition of opening, without sufficient concrete measures or timelines being introduced, has left the European biz community increasingly desensitized to these kinds of promises?

The statement shows how out of touch the EU leaders are. Even the US has stopped promoting free trade but the EU keeps this ridiculous discourse about “opening up to business”.

Everything is on sales in Europe. You can buy a whole street somewhere nice in France or Portugal for the price of an appartement in Beijing. Plus, the entire point of law in Europe is to protect land owners against any possible turmoils. This means that to prevent agressive property acquisition from foreign investors, one will have to scrap and amend entire parts of land ownership laws. Good luck with that! So everything of value is slowly but surely bought by all kind of people coming from all kind of places : US pensions, emirs, Chinese princelings, etc.

The EU is whining for reciprocity because they are giving away all their bargaining power for a stupid ideology that they invented a century ago to rip off the entire world. Too bad they still didn’t notice that “free market” only works when you are the most powerful in the game…

This text was originally published in quora.