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.

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the CER podcast. My name is Sophia Bess and today I'm in

conversation with Ian Bond and we're talking about a difficult relationship and that is the China-US

Europe triangle. How should we think of China? What options are there for Europe? What are the

impacts of the COVID-19 crisis? And Ian, perhaps is an introduction

into the subject. Where are we at? And how did we get here? How did we get from an era of China,

the responsible stakeholder, to where we are today? Well, we were probably too optimistic

to think that China was going to become a responsible stakeholder in quite the way that we thought,

defending the same sort of post-second World War institutional arrangements that had worked pretty well for the West,

which from a Chinese point of view didn't really accommodate China's rise.

But I think what we've seen over the last 30 years or so is a shift in priorities in a way.

I mean, at the beginning, this was a sort of win-win-win relationship for the EU, the US and China.

The EU and the US both wanted a source of low-cost manufactured goods,

and China could provide that, and China wanted investment and know-how, and the EU and the US could

provide that. And the EU and the US pretty much worked together, not always, but on most issues to do with China,

they worked together, you know, on questions such as how to react to Tiananmen Square and so on,

for example. Now where we are is that over time, all three legs of the relationship have become more complicated.

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