From the Centre for European Reform, this is the CER podcast.

It is a critical moment.

If we do not act with urgency, we would then severely undermine the liberal order.

Brexit means Brexit, and we're going to make a success of it.

The wind is back in Europe's sales.

We have now a window of opportunity, but it will not stay open forever.

Welcome to this Centre for European Reform podcast. I'm Charles Grant, the CEO's director. I'm sitting today with my colleague Ian Bond, the director of foreign policy at the CEO. We're going to talk about the EU's troubled relationship with China. Well, Charles, perhaps I can start off by asking you why you think the relationship has got so troubled. I mean, a few years ago,

EU and China seemed to be working together quite well. They were describing each other as strategic

partners and so on. So what's gone wrong in this relationship? Well, I think it's,

tension's been building for a couple of years since in March 2019,

the EU produced a document calling China both a systemic rival and an economic competitor.

I think the root of the problem has been growing economic tensions and complaints by European businesses,

but then the COVID-19 crisis has sort of accentuated the difficulties

and led to a bit more angst than there was before.

But the background is that many of the businesses feel that China doesn't play fair.

They feel that it steals their intellectual property, that the Chinese firms can buy up

European firms unfairly using cheap subsidies they get from the Chinese

government, which is distorting the so-called level playing field. And they feel that China's

guilty of a number of unfair practices. And this has sort of reinforced the feeling in France and

Germany that Europe needs to build up European champions,

globally significant firms that are big enough to resist Chinese competition, and that the European

Union needs to change its competition rules and its merger rules to allow larger firms to emerge

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