Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me, I'm Zanzana Munchank and Jack Smith.

Today we would like to talk about China or specifically about the European-Chinese relationship which are changing, and not for the better.

The contrast with the China-German relationship, which appears to improve, at least at the level of the leaders, Olaf Schultz,

recently paid a visit to China, which was remarkable in the sense that he did not address

the issues on which we disagree with China, at least in any effective way, but a visit focused

mostly on getting German companies to sign lucrative contracts, returned to the good old

days that we had under

Helmut Cole and Schroeder and Merkel, as though nothing has changed.

There seems to be an office disconnect between Schultz's China policy and what's happening at

the EU level.

Now, Jack, you wrote about EU dawn raids on Chinese companies this week.

I wrote about Chinese spying scandals in Germany.

Jack, tell us about what happened this

week and what it tells us about the state of EU-China relations. So what happened this week was

that the EU, so I mean, when we say the EU, the European Commission specifically took action

against basically Chinese firms and I guess Chinese interests in a couple of different areas. One of them was

medical equipment and it launched a probe basically into the Chinese medical equipment market.

And the other one was arrayed on a company that sold security equipment. Now, both of these

actions were related to one of the EU's core remits, which is competition policy.

So the medical devices issue was basically around whether EU producers of medical equipment

had the same kind of access to the Chinese public procurement market as Chinese firms did

to the EU one, which again is, this is pretty

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