Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zuzana Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today we will talk about China, or rather EU-China relations. This week, the European Commission has made a proposal or is in the process of making a proposal to impose secondary sanctions on non-EU companies that flout our sanctions against Russia.

We understand that some of these companies, so six of these companies, are Chinese technology

companies that are accused of sending dual use goods to Russia. Jack, secondary sanctions

were sort of the big invention of the Obama administration and have since then

been significantly developed by successive U.S. administrations. Is this not coming to the EU and

is this a good idea? The first thing to say is that even though some of the ideas I think are

conceptually similar to what's been going on in the U.S., the American secondary sanctions are

quite something else. They obviously exist on a different level to what the EU is proposing,

or rather what the commission has said that they are thinking about doing. I think we could see

that example when I'm not sure if you guys saw what was happening with South Africa, where

the United States effectively

accused them of exporting weapons to Russia. And you could see what happened, for instance, to the

South African Rand pretty quickly afterwards, right? As a demonstration of the fact that when you

get on the U.S.'s bad side and you are accused of doing things with countries that are the subject of

the US sanctions. That can have very negative consequences for you very quickly. I think what we're

talking about with the European Union is not at that level, but at the same time, it's clearly

a different development where you're going from saying, well, this is a matter for EU countries

and EU companies and how they do business with Russia to saying, okay, well, we want to stop, well, this is a matter for EU countries and EU companies and how they do business

with Russia to saying, okay, well, we want to stop, say, the re-export of dual-use goods

through third countries and through the companies operating in those third countries.

So we will start to go after those companies and those countries.

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