China's Q1 2026 Trade Surplus with EU Hits $83 Billion

China's trade surplus with the European Union hit $83 billion in the first three months of 2026, fueled by surging exports of electric and hybrid vehicles. 6 billion in the same period of 2026, accounting for a third of the value of all Chinese EV exports. Europe, including the UK, Norway and Switzerland, represented 42 percent of Chinese EV sales, with a 50 percent surge noted in March 2026.

China exported goods worth about $148 billion to the EU in the first quarter of 2026, while importing just $65 billion from the bloc, according to an analysis of 2026 customs data by the Mercator Institute for China Studies. The trade surplus for the whole of 2025 stood at €360 billion. 2 percent in February 2026, with pork shipments declining, based on Soapbox figures.

The EU proposed a 'Made in Europe' industrial strategy to protect strategic sectors of European industry. China warned the EU it will retaliate with countermeasures if new laws discriminate unfairly against Chinese exports, according to China's ministry of commerce.

The ministry stated that the EU Industrial Accelerator Act would result in discrimination that runs counter to basic market economy principles such as commercial voluntariness and fair competition.

The UK complained that the EU Industrial Accelerator Act discriminates against British car exports. A European Commission spokesperson stated that the proposed legislation complies with World Trade Organization rules. European Commission deputy chief spokesperson Olof Gill stated that China benefits from access to one of the most open markets in the world and that openness should be mutual.

Over the last three years, the EU has deployed a 'good cop, bad cop strategy' with Beijing. German chancellor Friedrich Merz said the yawning trade gap was not healthy and he wanted to reduce the trade deficit that had quadrupled in five years. The EU imposed tariffs of up to 35 percent on some Chinese car brands in 2024 and introduced initiatives to help companies reduce reliance on rare earths such as permanent magnets.

China accounts for 93 percent of permanent magnets, with import volumes increasing 18 percent year on year, according to new customs data. There are no rare earth mines in Europe, but LKAB, a state-owned iron ore mine in the Swedish Arctic, could be close to making extraction and processing of rare earths viable.

The boss of Europe’s first plant producing lithium hydroxide warned that the EU may as well be a province of China due to its reliance on their imports.

China’s economy showed the largest quarterly growth figures since 2022, according to the Mercator Institute for China Studies. China’s trade with the world has been barely affected by the conflict in the Middle East, the institute stated. The Iran war occurred, and traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has ground to a near standstill.

China imports a lot of its oil from the Gulf, but it has been less impacted than other Asian countries by the conflict and has tapped into substantial reserves, according to the Mercator Institute for China Studies. Chinese EV sales saw a 50 percent surge in March 2026 amid this context. S.

Economy grew at a 2 percent pace in the first three months of 2026, according to new government data. Inflation jumped in early 2026, The Washington Post reported.

Hyundai plans to equip 20 million Hyundai, Kia and Genesis vehicles with the Pleos system by 2030, the company stated. At the core of Pleos is Gleo AI, a voice assistant built on a large language model. It can recognize and execute multiple commands within a single request and respond to user questions on topics such as news, weather and sports through web searches.

Pleos includes a large central screen divided into three main sections. The Driving Information Screen shows essential data including speed and warning lights, along with 3D graphics of surrounding objects and people. The App Screen is used for navigation, media and third-party applications, switchable between Single Screen mode and Split Screen mode, while the Bottom Bar provides one-tap access to recently used or pinned apps.

Andrej Karpathy participated in a fireside chat at Sequoia Ascent 2026 approximately one week ago, according to his post. Karpathy discussed LLMs enabling new horizons beyond speeding up existing tasks like coding. He highlighted Menugen as an app that can be fully implemented using LLMs with no classical code, taking an image input and producing an image output.

0 bash scripts for tasks like software installation, allowing LLMs to interpret English instructions and adapt to user setups. LLM knowledge bases enable computation over unstructured data from arbitrary sources and formats, which was impossible with classical code.

He explained the jaggedness in LLMs where a model can coherently refactor a 100,000-line code base but also suggest walking to a car wash to wash a car.

Karpathy stated that jaggedness in LLMs relates to verifiability of a domain and economics, as revenue and TAM influence training data distributions during RL. He discussed the agent-native economy involving decomposition of products into sensors, actuators and logic across computing paradigms.

Karpathy referenced fully neural computing handling most computation with help from classical CPU coprocessors.

D.