 I'd like to thank the organisers of this wonderful seminar, I must say the institute here and Kerry Brown for all the support. So I was asked to look at the interface between the European Union and China. When I was asked to talk about this I thought that perhaps I could look at the crisis, the current economic crisis and ask the following question. Is the current crisis a turning point in the EU-China relationship and in particular in the EU-China economic relationship, right? I think it's a very nice research question. Of course I don't have all the answers because the crisis is not yet over, right? But we can see that there are some interesting events that some interesting things have been happening in the last few years. For example, we cannot dispute the fact that China has grown so magnificently in the last decades, in particular since the crisis has erupted. In 2009 for example, China invested 50% more in Europe than in Northern America. But I think it's an interesting little statistic. As of last year, and that goes in line with what has been said in the previous presentation, China is now the world's largest exporter, right? And I just want to question a bit this, right? It's just from my point of view of European integrationists, right? Can we say that China is the second largest exporter in the world if we take the European Union as a whole? And indeed there are lots of things that went wrong in the European Union. We know that it didn't really look after its European Monetary Union project very well. But anyway, at least there is a big success story in the European Union which is that we have the largest market in the world. It's an integrated market, right? And if we look at all the statistics which have been produced and you mentioned them as well, you showed them as well from the Eurostat's office in Luxembourg in Brussels, we'll see that indeed when we look at the European Union 27 nations actually that accounts for the largest trading bloc in the world. Can I say that? Right. Let's say China in any way has still, we'll come back to some of the trade figures but China still shows that there's a kind of comparative advantage in manufacturing trade as opposed to services and the European Union would be stronger in the services area than in manufacturing trade. For example, China would account for about 5% of world services exports, 11% of goods exports at the world level, right? So we can see here that definitely there is a comparative advantage in manufacturing. If we take the total EU trade and total EU exports, sorry and how much does this account in terms of world exports at about 17%, right? These are the last year's figure. If we compare 17% for the European Union to a combination of 5 and 11 bearing in mind that the 11 is a substantial area of, well it's manufacturing trade and it's accounts for a lot of the trade of China we would get 17% which is much higher than about 10% trade share for China, right? But anyway, there are other indisputable facts which is that China indeed has emerged as the biggest creditor in the world as of last year. My question is related to the turning point in the EU-China relations could be related to the world crisis in Chinese itself which I find quite interesting. The origin of the world crisis in English is interesting but the Chinese origin is also interesting. It comes from this combination of two characters which imply opportunity and danger, right? This is why we will show here that indeed there have been some opportunities that the Chinese firms, Chinese government, Chinese traders have been capitalizing on and also there are some dangers, right? Some of these challenges, let's say, have been preferred in the previous presentation. We have a few questions here. To what extent is China reshaping the international order, trade order, monetary order? That's an interesting question. We had these questions a few years ago but even more so I think since the economic crisis. Is China proposing something? I think it would be good to see what progress in other area and what is happening with this EU-China axis, right? So we'll talk about a few things, the opportunities and the challenges. And again, this is very much part of this. Further, the next presentation I just want to introduce this. We have heard maybe even more so since the crisis erupted. We have heard that the Chinese investors have been quite aggressive, let's say, in Europe. And we know, for example, that the Ford, well, sold its Volvo which is originally a Swedish firm, the motor car part of Volvo was sold to Geely, the Chinese firm in 2010. We heard that the Chinese investors are now controlling a large share of the major port in Europe, in Southern Europe, which is the Piraeus in Greece. We know that the Chinese investors have won a wonderful contract for the building of the Warsaw Lodz Motorway in Poland. And this was public tender. You know, they are invited to tender as well. And they won over the Germans who have accused Beijing of subsidised dumping. I quite like this expression, right? But indeed, that's something that could be analysed further. In France, there's a lot of resentment, so let's say perhaps more critical analysis of what's going on from the Chinese side, much more than in the UK. And we've heard that the plans are to build, again, by Chinese investors, an industrial park in Chateau Rue. It's not too far from Paris, which would be the main commercial area. We know that China Investment Corporation owns now a 30% stake in GDF Suez, which is the major French company which deals with utilities, right? And that's quite recent. We know that the large infrastructural investments are made in Bulgaria. We heard sometimes before the summer, I'm not sure where this project is at the moment, but it might be a commercial hub project here in Athlon, right, in Ireland. It seems that if we combine all these elements together, and the list goes on and on, there are lots of investments in Italy and in Portugal and so on, right? If we combine all these elements, we might see, well, it seems as if, it looks as if the Chinese investors were coming through the periphery of Europe. It's not really clear whether it's the strategy. It's more that they are trying to come through Europe, by exploiting, in the same way the Japanese did in the 70s and 80s, by exploiting the different opportunities in the different countries of Europe. Now, if we turn to some very broad trade analysis, some figures have been presented before, it's true that China is now the second major trade partner of the European Union. Again, here, these are your stat figures, you know, but your stat looks at the trade of the 27 countries, extra EU trade. That means we do not take into account the Irish, German trade, the French, Italian trade and so on and so forth. So here, let's have a look at the European Union 27 countries as a trading entity. It's true that it's second after the US and it's not going to, well, this is 2010, I presume. If we have, whenever we'll have the figures for this year, we might see that it will be indeed our major trading partner, might be the case, right? If we, this is also a graph which was presented by my colleague here. The trade is in favor, this is trading goods, right? So manufacturing products and this trade is very much in favor of China. In other words, we have a deficit, we have had a deficit in manufacturing trade with China for quite some time. And indeed, nearly every European country has a trade deficit in manufacturing products with China. The deficit has been growing over the years, less so with the advent of the crisis here, as we can see here. This is only products, which products in particular, I think it's interesting to look at the composition of trade because it shows us quite interesting, I don't know if it can be read, but just to highlight the fact that, again, these figures are for 2010, for last year. And the main products, the main imports by the European Union from China, that is, more than 50% of our imports from China are in machinery and transport equipment. We find this quite interesting. But if we look at the total EU imports, the share of total EU imports represented by machinery and transport equipment, it's only 12%. In other words, the European Union does not import as much from the rest of the world, as many machinery and transport equipment from the rest of the world as it does from China. There seems to be here a comparative advantage that the Chinese would have exporters in this specific industry with its trade with Europe. In terms of the exports, again, this sector, this is an SITC-7, machinery and transport equipment is also an important sector for our exports. China accounts for 61% more than 61% of our exports in this sector. And our second strength would be chemicals, and exports by the European Union of chemicals represent more than 11% of all manufacturing exports to China. Whereas, again, this is not something which is quite important if we look at our total trade vis-à-vis the whole world, the world as a whole. So there seems to be, these figures are quite interesting. They are 2010, had I presented figures some 10 years ago, we would have seen a very different picture. We would have seen the SITC-8, sorry, 8, yes, miscellaneous manufacturing articles which would have been quite prominent, right? And miscellaneous means everything, but basically it's consumer goods, right? We would have seen that much more high up here, the industry which would have been much more important in terms of trade, bilateral trade between the two. What these figures show also is that there's a great deal of intra-industry trade. SITC-7, machinery and transport equipment is a big, big category and in that we have indeed a lot of things. It would be interesting to look at the very specific products within that industry, some analysis that I think myself and others have done. Okay, this is an interesting one, I think, because this is services. And indeed the European Union is extremely keen to develop its market access, let's say in some countries in the world, particularly on the services side, right? And we see that our trade vis-à-vis China in services is positive. We have a trade balance, right? It's in our favor. This trade balance has been diminishing as of late, but we still have here a relatively comfortable situation. And again, if you look at these figures with other emerging economies or newly emerged economies, such as, for example, South Korea, you'll find the same thing, right? This is very much, let's say, a comparative advantage of the EU. In terms of FDI, I'm not saying anything because that's the topic of the next presentation, right? But just a few words about financial investment. And again, the previous speaker has introduced this topic, which is very important indeed. And indeed, as was said earlier, the currency reserves of China today are estimated at being more than $3 trillion, right? And let's have a look at the EU debt and what it means in terms of, let's say, control of the EU debt or the Western debt if we start with the United States. Well, there was a bit of a havoc three weeks ago in Washington with the story of the US debt. But actually, 33% only of the US debt is externalized. That means only a third of the US debt is in the hands of foreign investors, right? And of this third, let's say, 26% is under Chinese control, right? So a quarter of 33%. In other words, if we look at the total US federal debt, it makes a figure of 8%. Only 8% of the total federal debt is in the hands of Chinese investors. But that's before the late events, right, that these figures are for the beginning of the year. I presume it might be slightly more now because the Congress has given the authorization for an increase in the debt. So it might be, let's say, close to 10%. But it's still quite small, right? We can't say that the Chinese investors are controlling the United States as of today. If we look at the increase, the way, indeed, the Chinese investors have bought federal debt, indeed, there has been a great increase here, right? So it's the speed at which things happen, which is important. In the EU, I've looked at several sources in different languages, and so on the EU doesn't publish this, but I've looked at, right? And it's extremely difficult to know what's going on. All we know is a few figures, for example. We know that the US, sorry, the EU sovereign debt held by Chinese investors today, right? The recent figures, let's see, is about 819 billion US dollars. That's, again, according to the sum of calculations I've made, it's about less than 10% of the total EU sovereign debt, right? In spite of, again, what has been happening as of late with our distressed economic situations in some of our countries. About 10%. So, again, here, it's not really a huge figure, right? It's against the speed at which things have been happening, which is important. Indeed, the Chinese are extremely concerned, I might say, right? About what's been happening in Europe. If we take countries in particular, I could look at the situation in Chile, for example. And that was a figure which was released by the Italian press in Seoul in April this year. China detained something like 13% of the Italian sovereign debt. But we heard, I heard very strange statistics, right? 30% in some cases, I'm not sure. So, it's still quite small, but increasing. It seems to us that the Chinese government is keen to invest in EU bond markets and in order to ensure its eagerness to stabilise the international situation, right? There's this view. So, here we have perhaps two conflicting views, the optimistic view, which is that monetary disintegration in the EU. See, tomorrow the euro was to disappear, right? That's a very, let's say, catastrophic scenario. Assume it's possible. That would go against the Chinese interests, right? Because it would imply for them that they would have to come back to the US dollar as the unique international reserve currency. And that would be something they would not see from a very favourable eye. In other words, they would have an interest in seeing the euro being still in shape, right? And there's the other view, which is maybe the Machiavellian view, which says that by becoming an increasingly important creditor in the West, China aims at splitting the EU-US anti-UN front, right? That's the one other view here. We can discuss this, if you want. That's my last slide. So, we can see that there are lots of opportunities that have been seized by the Chinese governments here, but some of these opportunities also are in the interest of the European Union. Let's look it this way. Then there are risks. Of course, we have seen these risks mentioned in studies, analysis, and so on and so forth. The large energy requirements with demand, outstripping supply in China, environmental problems, the East-West divide in China, ethnic conflict nationalism rise of the middle classes, who in principle support democracy, right? That has been researched. But these elements of democracy, there is a problem of unemployment, growing inequality, social unrest, much more reported in the press today than it used to be. And perhaps here, another reported problem, which is the one of indebtedness of local governments in China. And yes, there is a bubble in the making, right? The Chinese government is very aware of the three first risks, if you want. But I'm not sure whether it's really aware of the fourth risk, the same way as the Japanese government was not really aware of the bubble building up in the 70s in Japan, the same way the Irish government was not really aware of what was happening here some years ago, right? So here I have really a question mark about the fourth one. And all these elements risk might jeopardise the political stability in the country, and we know that China is aware of many of these risks and has put in place this soft power approach of strategy. It's eager to brush up its international image. Sometimes people talk about Pax Seneca, right? The new saviour of the west. Can China be the saviour of the west? I have my doubts as of today. But at least, at least, and this I think joins the previous conclusions, we Europeans do have shared interests, and perhaps we should capitalise on the complementarity which unites the two. Thank you.