Transcript: The EU-China Relationship in the Age of Trumpian Disruption, with Finbarr Bermingham of the SCMP

Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, to Lili Shoup for checking and formatting, and to Zhou Keya for the image! Listen in the embedded player above.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll 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 from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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One of the more interesting aspects, I believe, of the Trump administration’s nearly simultaneous geostrategic and geoeconomic disruptions is how they’re really reshaping the relationship between China and the EU, both of which have been on the, well, the pointy end, the receiving end of the administration’s capricious hostility. One of the most diligent chroniclers of these changes, observing how things have unfolded and writing about it prolifically for the newspaper for which he works is Finbarr Bermingham — European correspondent for The South China Post. It’s been fascinating to read his reports as a kind of flipbook animation for how all this has gone, watching as Brussels and Beijing respond to shocks like the Munich Security Conference, the shameful Oval Office meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, and, of course, the so-called Liberation Day tariffs and their weird aftermath. I am delighted that Finbarr could join me today to talk about all that’s happened and to put it all in broader perspective. Finbarr Bermingham, welcome to Sinica.

Finbarr Bermingham: Thank you, Kaiser. It’s a pleasure to be with you. It’s been a long time that I’ve been listening to the podcast. Really enjoyed it over the years, so, great honor for me to make an appearance. Thanks for having me on.

Kaiser: The honor and the pleasure is entirely mine. But before we jump in, I should give a little warning. It’s become kind of obligatory for podcasts to timestamp their recordings when they touch on the Trump trade war, as things are changing so fast, none of us wants to sound like we’re not up to date. So, in that spirit, today is Thursday morning, April 24th, 10:00 AM Eastern as I speak. Just yesterday, Wednesday, Trump had already signaled that he was going to back off on the tariffs on China, but then this morning we saw the predictable stock market gains from those remarks evaporate completely, as China denied on Wednesday that it was in talks with the U.S. at all, dismissing it as fake news, in fact. As of this moment, we have not seen any specifics. I am sure that things are going to be different enough like a week or so from now when you’re listening to this. So, apologies in advance.

But Finbarr, let’s set the stage first and go back in time to Europe-China relations as they stood in January just before Donald Trump took office, if anyone can remember that far back. In several of your pieces, more recently your… I guess it was the March 7th piece on the European Parliament lifting restrictions on meetings with Chinese officials, you were suggesting that a gradual thaw was underway even before Trump’s tariffs hit. This was already in the works late last year. We saw talks about possibly lifting sanctions. So, how would you characterize EU-China relations in early 2025? Was there already a quiet recalibration underway?

Finbarr: Thanks, Kaiser. I don’t think it would be fair to say they were recalibrating before Trump came in. Certainly, I think there’d been an unspoken agreement to pause hostilities, and that sort of dates back to November when Trump won the election. Before that, there was all of this, a really big scuffle over electric vehicle tariffs, and the European Union was pushing back very strongly against what it’s described as market-distorting overcapacity and those sorts of things in the Chinese market. So, those things really, I mean, last year, I think the overall relationship hit a new low. And I think then when Trump got elected, I think both sides, the EU and China, both decided to keep their powder dry. Before that, we were expecting this to spiral into a full-blown trade war. I think there was very little contact in that period. They weren’t talking to each other very much. It was very much both sides waiting to see what would happen when Trump came in.