THE EU-CHINA COOPERATION TO PROMOTE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

In the past 37 years, we witnessed a spectacular economic development of the People’s Republic of China, which experienced an average annual growth of 9.96%. Unfortunately, in order to maintain this rate of growth, the Chinese government did not observe the environmental protection laws, thus causing pollution and environmental degradation. Nevertheless, in recent years, China became aware that it is one of the biggest polluters in the world and that it should choose the path of sustainable economic growth and green development. To foster sustainable development, cooperation at a global scale is indispensable. To this effect, EU, the main importer of Chinese goods, is directly interested in seeing environmental issues in this country mitigated and in having a close and efficient cooperation with China to find solutions for preventing and fighting the problemsassociated with sustainable development. This paper undertakes to analyse the cooperation relationship between the EU and China in the field of sustainable development, focusing on the environmental issues and on climate change, as well as on the way in which the EU-China bilateral relations can influence the fostering of sustainable development on a global scale. In this study, I used qualitative research methods, namely document analysis. Data collection was conducted by examining several types of documents: specialised articles, communications of the European Commission, reports of the Council of the European Union, statistics and books.

Keywords

• sustainable development
• EU-China cooperation
• climate change
• environment