Finbarr Bermingham of the SCMP on Nexperia, Export Controls, and Europe's Impossible Position
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Welcome to the Cynical Podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics. Foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Gua coming to you this week from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Seneca is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison a National Resource Center for the Study of East Asia. The Seneca podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I'm doing with the show and with the newsletter, please consider lending your support. You can reach me, as always, at sinecapod at gmail.com. So, today we are going to be talking about the Nexperia dispute, which turned out to be one of the most revealing moments in the global contest over
semiconductor supply chains. Nexperia is a major Dutch headquartered semiconductor manufacturer known not for cutting-edge chips, not for the GPUs used in AI training, but actually for the indispensable components, the transistors, the diodes, the power management chips that are foundational to automotive and many industrial electronics. In 2019, Nexperity became a wholly owned subsidiary of WingTech, a Shanghai listed Chinese manufacturing and semiconductor firm with partial state linked ownership, I believe. For several years the acquisition drew relatively little public controversy, but by late 2025, two things had shifted quite dramatically. First, Europe, and especially the Netherlands, was coming under increasing pressure to rethink dependencies in key technologies.
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