There is more commercial proximity between China and the EU than China and the US.
The current taxation run is to curtail the online markets like AliExpress, Shein and Temu to flood the market with garbage. Shein got hit with their dumping practices very hard.
Taxing the import of vehicles, when an industry already exists just makes sense. European automakers were sleeping on their job, granted, but the other option is to let them fail and surrender another industry to non-EU territories.
I am all up for starving machine learning of new knowledge but I view this as the least friction path. Otherwise, if the machines try to brute force their entry, what harm can kt cause?