Analysis on China–Europe trade, policy and markets.

China–Russia trade fell in 2025, and the reason is mostly arithmetic

Energy is over 70% of Russian exports to China, and crude prices fell — so import value dropped nearly 20% while volumes held. Read it as a price correction and a car-export collapse, not a political rupture.

30 Jun 20264 min

China's leverage in Latin America runs through contracts, not instructions

The debt-trap framing gets the mechanism wrong. Influence operates through financing scarcity, twenty-year concessions and technology ecosystems — which is harder to see, harder to prove, and considerably harder to unwind.

21 Jun 20267 min

What Beijing is actually buying when a Chinese EV maker is acquired

Subsidies ended, but the strategy did not. Underneath China's NEV consolidation, what changes hands is rarely the company — it is a production licence, an approved factory, and a set of regional relationships.

21 Jun 20268 min

Clean Energy

China's hydrogen turning point is a pipeline problem, not a technology one

China dominates electrolyser manufacturing and holds the largest hydrogen consumption in the world. Green hydrogen is still under 1% of it. What stands between the two is less than 500 km of pipeline.

6 Jun 20267 min

Investment Policy

China is making companies pay for the retraining that automation requires

Firms deploying AI must put 1.5% of payroll into retraining. Social security enforcement is being automated through the tax system. For European employers in China, the cost of labour is being restructured rather than reduced.

1 Jun 20267 min

Semiconductors

China's chip design bottleneck is software, and it is closing slowly

Domestic design tools have reached full coverage in analogue and are certified at advanced nodes for simulation. Hardware emulation and functional verification remain far behind — and that gap, not manufacturing, sets the ceiling.

31 May 20266 min

Advanced Manufacturing

Chinese robotics firms stopped selling products and started buying companies

A Chinese collaborative robot maker spent three years passing fifty rounds of Toyota assessment to become its sole global supplier. That is not a price play, and it is the pattern European industry should be reading.

31 May 20267 min

China has started writing blocking orders, and the first one targets an EU investigation

Beijing's response to Europe's regulatory turn is no longer rhetorical. Two State Council regulations, a blocking order, an export control listing and a WTO filing — plus a segment-by-segment plan for which chips it expects to lose.

26 May 20266 min

AI & Digital

China's AI strategy is diffusion, not frontier — and the bill is arriving

Every province produced an implementation plan within seven months. Data centre utilisation sits below 30%, compute rental prices halved in six months, and provinces are auditing subsidy fraud. Both facts describe the same policy.

23 Mar 20267 min

Semiconductors

Europe's quiet dependence on Chinese legacy chips

94% of Europe's gallium comes from China, one plant in Dongguan handles over 70% of a major supplier's global automotive packaging, and European carmakers halted production in 2025 when it was disrupted. The exposure is in the unglamorous parts.

6 Mar 20267 min

Clean Energy

Electric trucks are what brings China's oil demand to a peak

Heavy trucks are 15% of vehicles and half of road fuel consumption. Electric penetration went from 8.6% to 26% in eighteen months. That single shift is why the peak oil forecast keeps moving forward.

17 Dec 20255 min

Chinese platforms reached African consumers faster than the renminbi reached African banks

Shein and Temu took 37% of South Africa's online fashion market in a year. The renminbi accounts for 2% of Africa's cross-border payments. The commercial layer moved; the financial layer has not.

1 Sept 20256 min

Algeria's mining projects: what is announced and what is confirmed

A $7 billion phosphate venture with a port and a railway attached is real and progressing. A widely reported Chinese lithium exploration programme appears not to exist. The gap between the two is the useful finding.

7 Aug 20253 min

German carmakers stopped building global models for China and started exporting Chinese ones

BMW localised 90% of Neue Klasse components in China and will build three quarters of its global EV line on a platform designed there. Mercedes developed an L2+ system in twelve months. The direction of technology transfer has reversed.

7 Aug 20254 min

Morocco is assembling a battery supply chain an hour from Spain

Copper foil, anodes and cathodes are being built inside one Moroccan industrial zone by Chinese firms. The first phase filled with roughly 30 companies and $3 billion — and it sits inside Europe's free trade agreement.

7 Aug 20254 min

AI & Digital

China's AI chip problem is not the silicon, it is CUDA

Huawei's CANN platform holds 70.8% of China's AI server market and covers 60% of CUDA's operators against NVIDIA's 95%. Chinese firms are compensating with cluster scale and power they can afford to spend.

7 Aug 20255 min

Semiconductors

Have the chip export controls worked? The honest answer is partly

Advanced nodes are genuinely constrained and China remains years behind at the frontier. Mature nodes are barely affected, and DUV lithography kept arriving legally in volume. The controls shaped the trajectory more than they stopped it.

20 Jun 20255 min

Shein and Temu are buying European compliance, and treating it as a cost of entry

Temu's profit fell 47% in a quarter adjusting to EU rules, and it kept going. Regulatory pressure is not deterring the Chinese marketplaces — it is converting them into local operators, which is a harder competitor to face.

20 Jun 20256 min

Advanced Manufacturing

China's medtech tenders now specify how much must be domestic

Localisation of finished medical equipment is well advanced, while CT tubes remain under 10% domestic. The gap between those two numbers is where European manufacturers still have a business — and it is closing deliberately.

15 May 20256 min

Chinese workers in Algeria fell from 91,000 to 7,000, and the projects kept coming

The model in North Africa has shifted from imported labour to local employment at 70–90%, from resource-backed loans to concessional finance, and from highways to ports, data centres and solar.

15 May 20254 min

Investment Policy

Why Europe became more attractive to Chinese carmakers, not less

Washington's tariffs pushed Chinese manufacturers toward Europe at the same moment Brussels raised its own barriers. The result is not retreat but a shift in how they arrive — and Africa is not the alternative it is assumed to be.

15 May 20256 min

What BYD is weighing when it looks at a German factory

German wages run three times Hungary's and internal assessment puts the hit to per-vehicle profit at 15–20%. BYD is looking anyway, because the plant is not really a manufacturing decision.

29 Apr 20255 min

China's answer to the 2025 US tariffs was mostly not about the United States

Retaliatory duties and rare earth controls drew the headlines. The substantive response was rerouting trade toward ASEAN, moving low-end production abroad, and spending at home — decisions that reshape what China sells to Europe.

29 Apr 20254 min

How Chinese battery makers build in Europe without transferring the technology

Fifty-fifty joint ventures where the Chinese partner appoints the chairman and CEO. Licensing rather than transfer. Encrypted process parameters on the factory floor. Europe asked for know-how in exchange for subsidy, and got a structure instead.

29 Apr 20255 min

African borrowers are quietly diversifying away from Chinese lending

Kenya and Ghana went to the IMF and European investors over Chinese interest rates. Egypt added Gulf sovereign funds. India and Turkey are competing on terms. The renminbi infrastructure kept building anyway.

18 Mar 20253 min

Investment Policy

Hengqin is where Macau's Portuguese inheritance becomes a business case

A 15% corporate tax rate, R&D subsidies covering half of eligible projects, and an explicit remit to build Sino-Portuguese cooperation. For European firms with Lusophone connections, the door is unusually specific.

18 Mar 20254 min