“These wonderful Chinese electric cars that will kill our industry”

Christine Clerc is a journalist. Latest book published : Sunday the devil (Editions de l’Observatoire, 2021).

I thought at first that it was paid advertising: right at the start of the 1 p.m. news on France 2, several times during the week of the October world motor show, long sequences showed us buyers delighted with their future Chinese cars, so varied in their colors, so well equipped… and above all, so attractive with their unbeatable prices! But no: it was indeed, on this so-called “public service”, “information”, knowingly directed to make us buy Chinese… and this, without it costing a penny of advertising to the manufacturers of the end of the world, of which we still do not know under what conditions they make men, women and children work in giant factories that no Western journalist has the possibility of meeting or even seeing from afar… While our national industry is going through great difficulties adapting to the new electric world, sales of the Stellantis group (Citroën, Peugeot, Fiat, etc.) having fallen by 279,000 in the third quarter of this year out of a total of 1,148,000, how can we explain a such advertising?

The United States was able to resist this massive offensive by doubling its customs duties. Could the increase in Chinese sales in France (more than 36,000 electric cars last year) be the result of European compromises or a blind “green” commitment? It was time, high time to react, as did, a few days ago on LCP, the guests of Emile Malet in his show “These ideas which govern the world” Luc Chatel (former Sarkozy minister), Christian Saint -Etienne (professor at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts) and Vincent Saliman (president of BMW France). Time to reveal to us that, if the Chinese have seen 80% of the European market opened up, the Europeans only have access to… 2% of public orders in China! Time to remember that the French automobile industry, which employed more than 3 million workers in 1999, only employs half of them today.

We will say, as we already said to those “backward-looking” who were alarmed half a century ago by the decline of our textile industry, that it is a question of modernization: many other perspectives do not open up. They don't belong to an inventive country like France?

Christine Clerc

We will say, as we already said to those “outmodedists” who were alarmed half a century ago by the decline of our textile industry, that it is a question of modernization: many other perspectives do not open up – They don't belong to an inventive country like France? I remember the images of the first state visit of Queen Elizabeth II of England and her triumphant tour, under the leadership of the big boss Jean Prouvost, in the alleys of Lainière de Roubaix, where she was welcomed by nearly 7,000 moved workers, posing in front of their impressive looms, crossing their hands over their short-sleeved blouses. A few years later, the city of a thousand factory chimneys would experience an impressive transformation. One would say that it was so much the better for the climate and health, even if the future socialist prime minister Pierre Mauroy, so attached to his industrial North, was already alarmed and if this brutal change was going to lead to thousands of human tragedies. I remember the first waves of layoffs in 1977 and my visits to Roubaix – in 1998, when there were only 15,000 workers left, then in 1999, when there were only 210 left working for photos in a kind of window display… before the final liquidation in 2000.

A few years earlier, I had accompanied the RPR deputy, mayor of Épinal, Philippe Séguin, to the Vosges, before he published the report of the Parliamentary Commission on Textiles on March 24, 1981. I see him again, alternately laughing and overwhelmed with anger or sorrow, in the canteen of a factory that we didn't yet know was going to close soon. His report would highlight “the insufficient regulation of international trade”would call into question “multiple agreements favorable to the three specialized countries – Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea accounting for 61% of clothing exports. – and would insist that 25,000 employees had been lost at the beginning of 1981, just before the election of François Mitterrand. It was necessary, insisted the future president of the National Assembly, “refuse the fatalities linked to an international division of labor“. It was 41 years ago. How many more years for our public television channel, solely concerned with the Le Pen danger and the Trump danger, to sound the alarm against China?