Transcript | Finbarr Bermingham of the SCMP on Nexperia, Export Controls, and Europe's Impossible Position

Note: Just so you have all the links and the timestamps, I’m including the no-transcript podcast page below, and will do so going forward. Transcript courtesy of CadreScripts follows that! Image by Keya Zhou.

This week on Sinica, I welcome back Finbarr Bermingham, the Brussels-based Europe correspondent for the South China Morning Post, about the Nexperia dispute — one of the most revealing episodes in the global contest over semiconductor supply chains. Nexperia, a Dutch-headquartered chipmaker owned by Shanghai-listed Wingtech, became the subject of extraordinary government intervention when the Netherlands invoked a Cold War-era emergency law to seize temporary control of the company and suspend its Chinese CEO. Finbarr’s reporting, drawing on Dutch court documents and expert sources, has illuminated the tangled threads of this story: preexisting concerns about governance and technology transfer, mounting U.S. pressure on The Hague to remove Chinese management, and the timing of the Dutch action on the very day the U.S. rolled out its affiliate rule. We discuss China’s retaliatory export controls on chips packaged at Nexperia’s Dongguan facilities, the role of the Trump-Xi meeting in Busan in unlocking a temporary thaw, and what this case reveals about Europe’s agonizing position between American pressure and Chinese integration in global production networks.

4:34 – Why the “Europe cracks down on Chinese acquisition” framing was too simple

6:17 – The Dutch court’s extraordinary tick-tock of events and U.S. lobbying

9:04 – The June pressure from Washington: divestment or the affiliate list

10:13 – Dutch fears of production know-how relocating to China

12:35 – The impossible position: damned if they did, damned if they didn’t

14:46 – The obscure Cold War-era Goods Availability Act

17:11 – CEO Zhang Xuezheng and the question of who stopped cooperating first

19:26 – Was China’s export control a state policy or a corporate move?

22:16 – Europe’s de-risking framework and the lessons from Nexperia

25:39 – The fragmented European response: Germany, France, Hungary, and the Baltics

30:31 – Did Germany shape the response behind the scenes?

33:06 – The Trump-Xi meeting in Busan and the resolution of the crisis

37:01 – Will the Nexperia case deter future European interventions?

40:28 – Is Europe still an attractive market for Chinese investment?

41:59 – The Europe China Forum: unusually polite in a time of tenterhooks

Paying it forward: Dewey Sim (SCMP diplomacy desk, Beijing); Coco Feng (SCMP technology, Guangdong); Khushboo Razdan (SCMP North America); Sense Hofstede (Chinese Bossen newsletter)

Recommendations:

Finbarr: Chokepoints by Edward Fishman; Underground Empire by Henry Farrell and Abe Newman; “What China Wants from Europe“ by John Delury (Engelsberg Ideas)

Kaiser: The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan and Milady (2023 French film adaptation)

Transcript Follows:

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Sinica Podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I’m doing with the show and with the newsletter, please consider lending your support. You can reach me, as always, at sinicapod@gmail.com.

So, today, we are going to be talking about the Nexperia dispute, which turned out to be one of the most revealing moments in the global contest over semiconductor supply chains. Nexperia is a major Dutch headquartered semiconductor manufacturer known, not for cutting-edge chips, not for the GPUs used in AI trading, but actually for the indispensable components, the transistors, the diodes, the power management chips that are foundational to automotive and many industrial electronics. In 2019, Nexperia became a wholly owned subsidiary of Wingtech, a Shanghai-listed Chinese manufacturing and semiconductor firm with partial state-linked ownership, I believe. For several years, the acquisition drew relatively little public controversy, but by late 2025, two things had shifted quite dramatically.

First, Europe, and especially the Netherlands, was coming under increasing pressure to rethink dependencies in key technologies. Second, and more decisively, the U.S. Commerce Department extended its export controls with what became known as the affiliate rule, so that any entity that is 50% or more owned by a company on the entity list is itself subject to these same restrictions. Because when tech was already on the entity list, Nexperia suddenly became implicated. This threw into question the company’s access to U.S. technology inputs, and raised fears in The Hague about the stability of supply to Europe’s automotive and industrial sectors.

So, in response, on September 30th, the day after the affiliate rule was rolled out, which was September 29th, the Dutch government took the extraordinary step of invoking emergency powers under the Goods Availability Act to assume temporary control of Nexperia and suspend Wingtech founder Zhang Xuezheng from management. Beijing retaliated by restricting exports of Nexperia chips packaged at Chinese facilities, a move that immediately hit European supply chains and forced high-level diplomatic intervention, including direct discussions between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping on the sidelines of APEC. Now, a temporary thaw now seems to be in effect, and China has said that Nexperia China will begin shipping again, but the underlying issues remain unsettled — industrial sovereignty, control of manufacturing know-how, and the broader question of how Europeans position themselves between U.S. pressure and Chinese integration into global production networks.

So, to help us unpack all of this, I am delighted to be joined by Finbarr Bermingham, the Brussels-based Europe correspondent for The South China Morning Post. Finbarr has been reporting on Europe-China relations with nuance, with texture, with astonishing sourcing for some years now. His coverage of the Nexperia episode in particular has been an absolutely essential reading. His reporting, drawing on court documents, on official statements on expert discussions, has really illuminated the interplay of national security concerns, geopolitics and economic stakes. So, I’ve really been looking forward to having him walk through all that happened and what it means. Finbarr — man, welcome back to Sinica.

Finbarr Bermingham: Thank you, Kaiser. It’s great to be with you again.

Kaiser: Finbarr, in much of the early coverage, especially in the more general international press, this story was framed very simply as Europe cracks down on a Chinese tech acquisition. But as your reporting made clear, the background context was actually much more complicated than that. Could you sketch out what was missing from those first narratives, the geopolitical atmosphere and the growing anxieties around supply chain sovereignty, the whole preexisting U.S.-China tech tensions that weren’t really part of the initial reporting? And I feel like are really necessary to understand how this dispute erupted when and where it did.

Finbarr: Yeah, I’m happy to do so. I mean, just to sort of preface it with this sort of statement that if you were to go to a Hollywood studio with a script that was supposed to depict the position that Europe finds itself in in 2025, and you came up with this Nexperia story, they would probably tell you that it’s a little bit too on the nose. It’s really been quite remarkable how it unfolded. But yeah, it’s not a simplistic story. Like nobody’s coming out of this looking very good. I think that there are several truths here. And, as I said, there are no real winners coming out of this. I think what you’re getting at is that the company was effectively seized by a Dutch government ruling on September 30th, and then on October 7th, the Dutch court stepped in really hard and issued an export ruling, which suspended the CEO and appointed an interim independent director with a casting vote over all of Nexperia entities.