BEIJING (Reuters) - China's Belt and Road investment scheme, which aims to connect Europe with Asia, is sidelining European companies and Brussels should review its competition law to level the playing field, a business lobby group said on Thursday.
Opaque procurement processes and the dominance of giant state-owned Chinese companies mean European companies get only "crumbs from the table," the European Chamber of Commerce in China said in a report.
It said the European Union should move to force Chinese companies that access the EU procurement market to operate under the same restrictions that EU companies do in China.
"If the EU fails to play an active and competitive role, there is a real danger that it could eventually become little more than a peripheral market tacked on to the end of Eurasia," the Chamber of Commerce said.
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) seeks to build a modern version of the Silk Road to link China with Asia, Europe and beyond through large-scale infrastructure projects that it has launched in more than 60 countries since 2013.
European companies are merely "niche players" in the BRI, with just 20 chamber members of 132 survey respondents reporting that they had bid on BRI projects, chamber President Joerg Wuttke told reporters on Monday ahead of the report's release.
Those European companies that did get involved did so mainly through Chinese business partners or the government, and usually their role was to provide specific technologies or expertise that the Chinese side lacked, the report said.
Both Chinese and foreign companies can participate in BRI projects through open, transparent means, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a daily briefing in Beijing on Thursday. Many European firms have participated in the BRI, he said.
Chinese national champions were also gaining "monopolistic power" in some BRI countries by building digital infrastructure that involved complete packages of software and hardware based on Chinese standards, according to the Chamber's report.
Such companies benefited from heavy state support at home, which helped them beat international competitors.
"Smaller, less developed countries that do not have the capacity for setting their own standards will certainly be put under considerable pressure to simply adopt Chinese standards," the report said.
The EU needed to allow its own companies to scale up by reviewing its competition law, it said. The EU's own infrastructure initiative, the "Connectivity Strategy," should also be prioritized as a "credible alternative" to the BRI.