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

Today we want to talk about China, EU and American trade with China, tariffs and the international trade relationships that involve China.

The EU will have a China-EU summit in Beijing at the end of the month on the 24th of July.

It was originally meant to last for two days, but after a fairly rowdy encounter between the Chinese foreign minister and Kaya Kallas, that was immediately cut to one day.

The Chinese certainly made a big spiel of this

change of day setting, which is usually in diplomatic terms about as violent diplomacy can ever

get. What happened is that the Europeans have significantly sharpened their tone towards China

in the last few weeks and months. This started already when Ursula von der Leyen talked about the Chinese trading relationship

after her conversation with Donald Trump.

And she immediately complained that the Chinese were instrumentalizing rare earths for trade policy purposes.

And we've heard very sharp words from Kaya Carlos during her meeting,

criticizing China's human's right records.

The usual list of European complaints and then Fondelain came back

and had another very, very, I thought, a very tough message.

So relationships are deteriorating between the United

States and China on behalf. Europe is now following the United States. That's very clear. The idea

that we all had in the beginning of the Liberation Day debates that Europe and China might form,

I wouldn't say an alliance, but certainly an alliance of countries that would

oppose the terrorists or would at least act jointly that didn't happen, or that Europe and Canada

would act jointly.

That didn't happen either.

So everybody in Europe at least trying to get together with Trump, we saw this embarrassing

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