The EU-China Relationship in the Age of Trumpian Disruption, with Finbarr Bermingham of the SCMP

Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we'll 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 Gul, coming to you 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 and Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia.

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One of the more interesting aspects, I believe, of the Trump administration's nearly simultaneous geostrategic and geoeconomic disruptions is how they are really reshaping the relationship between China and the EU, both of which have been on the, well, the pointy end, the receiving end of the administration's capricious hostility. One of the most diligent chroniclers of these changes, observing how things have unfolded and writing about it prolifically for the newspaper for which he works, is Finbar Birmingham, European correspondent for the South China Morning Post. It's been fascinating to read his reports as a kind of flipbook animation for how all this has gone, watching as Brussels and Beijing respond to shocks like the Munich Security Conference, the shameful Oval Office meeting with Vladomyr Zelensky, and of course the so-called Liberation Day tariffs and their weird aftermath.

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