1 Introduction

Against the backdrop of adjustments in the global economic landscape and the development of the new energy industry, this paper introduces the European Union's policy shift on imposing tariffs on Chinese new energy vehicles, moving from multilateralism toward unilateral protectionism. The EU legitimizes this policy through discursive practices, employing argumentative strategies to conceal its contradictions. Based on the discourse-historical approach, the article explores how the EU constructs the necessity and legitimacy of the tariff policy through argumentative strategies and examines the ideologies obscured by these strategies, aiming to provide discursive insights for China.

2 Corpus and Research Framework

This section introduces the source of the research corpus and the research framework. The corpus is sourced from the official platform of the European Commission, covering three stages: policy deliberation, formation, and implementation. Through keyword searches, 13 effective texts were selected. The corpus primarily consists of documents from the EU's core decision-making bodies, involving multiple discursive fields. The research adopts Wodak's discourse-historical approach, focusing on the analysis of topoi within argumentative strategies to reveal the social, cultural, and political forces behind the discourse. Topoi serve to enhance persuasiveness and adapt to different contexts, among other functions.

3 Distribution and Case Analysis of Topoi

This section provides an in-depth analysis of the distribution and cases of topoi in the EU's discourse on imposing tariffs on Chinese new energy vehicles. First, through the statistical analysis of 81 instances of topoi, it is found that the threat topos, responsibility topos, abuse topos, and fairness topos appear with relatively high frequency, thus becoming the focus of analysis. Within the threat topos, the EU maliciously constructs a threatening image of Chinese new energy vehicle exports from economic, security, and strategic dimensions, using aggressive verbs and negative vocabulary to amplify their impact. For example, it describes Chinese new energy vehicle exports as an overwhelming impact on the European market, suggests that China disrupts market order through government subsidies, and even elevates normal market competition to the level of a national security crisis and geopolitical power expansion, thereby providing so-called legitimacy for the tariff policy. In the responsibility topos, the EU portrays itself as a collective actor while fabricating China and related Chinese entities as responsible for issues such as overcapacity and trade distortions. It employs responsive verbs to legitimize policy intervention, attempting to conceal the unilateral nature of its intervention. Within the abuse topos, the EU maliciously asserts that the Chinese government abuses subsidy policies, constructing a logical chain in which subsidies lead to low-price dumping and overcapacity. It defines China's new energy vehicle industrial policies and market behaviors as actions that undermine fair competition rules, while overlooking the rationality of China's subsidy policies and the genuine sources of its industrial advantages. In the fairness topos, the EU utilizes expressions such as "fair competition" and "level playing field" to construct a discursive framework, characterizing China's subsidy policies as rule-breaking actions. This obscures the fact that China's industrial advantages stem from technological innovation and market competition. By emphasizing concepts like "reciprocity" and "transparency," it unilaterally defines reciprocity in market access and regulatory policies, naturalizing external intervention as a necessary means to restore fairness and establishing the moral legitimacy and normative basis for trade actions. The analysis of these topoi reveals the discursive strategies and logical flaws in the EU's approach to imposing tariffs on Chinese new energy vehicles, exposing the essence of its trade protectionism.

4 The EU's Argumentative Logic and Analysis

This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the EU's argumentative strategies and the underlying complex logic regarding the imposition of tariffs on Chinese new energy vehicles. The study points out that the EU employs four core topoi—threat, responsibility, abuse, and fairness—to construct a logic that legitimizes the tariff policy on Chinese new energy vehicles. The threat topos portrays Chinese new energy vehicle exports as economic, security, and strategic threats; the responsibility topos packages EU policy intervention as a passive response; the abuse topos fabricates rhetoric about the Chinese government's abuse of subsidies; and the fairness topos glorifies EU actions as necessary means to restore market fairness. These strategies not only defend the policy but also reflect the EU's deeper strategic considerations in geopolitical games, industrial chain restructuring, and the contest for rule-making dominance.

In terms of the "de-risking" narrative, the EU discursively constructs Chinese new energy vehicle exports as a "serious crisis" to conceal the urgency of its own industrial chain restructuring, serving its own ideological and interest-driven needs. However, the EU's "de-risking" strategy falls into a structural contradiction: on one hand, it attempts to reduce dependence on Chinese technology, while on the other hand, it cannot avoid China's dominant position in global lithium battery production. This strategy serves the EU's geo-economic objectives but may also backfire on the EU itself, as Chinese countermeasures could impact Europe's green transition process.

Regarding coordination in EU-US relations, the EU's tariff policy is a contradictory product of the imbalance in transatlantic relations. The EU passively aligns with the US strategy to contain China while attempting to reduce its dependence on the US through a "soft balancing" strategy. This "two-way bet" approach traps the EU in a fundamental contradiction: it cannot break free from security dependence while struggling to maintain credibility in rule-making, ultimately exposing the hollow nature of its "strategic autonomy" discourse.

In the dimension of rule-making dominance, the EU attempts to compete for dominance in global green industry rules through the tariff policy, transforming its domestic rules into international standards and reshaping the global economic governance landscape through rule spillover. However, the EU's rule spillover strategy faces collective resistance from emerging economies, and its reliance on the Chinese market plunges it into a paradox of "dependence and containment," exposing the internal contradictions of the rule spillover strategy. Divisions among EU member states over industrial interests further undermine the coherence of its rule export efforts.