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

Today we'll talk about China, China's relationship with Germany, China's relationship with the EU, tariffs,

protectionist methods for European industries, sanctions, and a European Union that is sort of at a crossfire

between the United States and China, with a policy that we can describe as best as dithering

and uncertain of where it is going. Jack, you covered the inexperia situation for us in great detail. Where are we on this story now?

So where we are is that there's some temporary respite for Nexperia, or rather for Nexperia's customers to be more precise, but there's still no long-term resolution.

However, it is at least possible that there is a long-term resolution in the offing. So it seems like China's starting to allow the exports of Nixperia chips back to customers. But at the same time, China and the Netherlands are negotiating on the future of the company because basically what happened was that Nixperia was and still is on paper a Chinese own company, but at the end of September,

the Netherlands had seized control of Nixperia. Now, they had seized control of Nixperia the day

after the United States had put into place a massive expansion of its export control regime against China.

This expansion was basically designed to bring subsidiaries of Chinese companies that were

already subject to these controls within scope. Now, Xperio was one such subsidiary, and the American government had been very clear to the

Dutch government that it would fall within scope, right?

So at least if you're going to believe what the Dutch government says about this, that

wasn't the only motivation behind seas and control of Nexperia, but it was clearly quite a big

motivation.

Now, in negotiations between the US and China, the United States has backtracked a bit

basically on this expansion of the export control regime, which has removed sort of the major

external obstacle to resolving the situation.

And at the same time, the Dutch government seemingly hadn't given in on the

principle of control of Nixperia. Late last week, Bloomberg had reported that the Dutch

government was willing to relinquish control of Nixperia, basically to hand it back over to its

Chinese owners in return for the chips flowing back over to their customers.

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