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With economic security as a major concern, the EU has recently turned to “derisking” from China. The EU strategy entails reducing critical dependencies and vulnerabilities, including in EU supply chains, and diversifying where necessary, while recognizing the importance and need to maintain open channels of communication. An analysis of the bilateral trade relations over the past decade suggests that derisking still remains elusive. In contrast to the USA, the EU has not reduced the share of Chinese products in its imports. Overall, there has been little or no diversification in some unsophisticated, labor-intensive, low-value-added sectors where it was not expected. At the same time, the EU’s exports to China have remained relatively constant, although direct export exposure to China differs significantly across member states. The picture emerging from the observation of direct investment flows to China is more mixed, with EU greenfield investments on the rise, while European M&As have slowed sharply. Moreover, there is a growing concentration of EU FDI in China among a small number of firms, countries, and sectors. While the jury is still out on the success of the EU’s derisking attempts, many factors do not bode well for the future of the strategy. For derisking to materialize, several conditions need to be met, including better and tighter coordination between EU member states, and this is no easy task. However, with problems and possible solutions now clearly identified, what remains to be done is to walk the talk.

This paper explores how rising European populism affects EU-China relations after the 2024 elections. It maps the ideological diversity of populist actors, identifies plausible 2025–2029 pathways, and sets out targeted actions for EU policymakers to engage populist actors with the goal to improve EU’s strategic coherence and firmness, and paradoxically, bring it closer to what many Europeans prioritize.

This article introduces the special issue titled ‘Asia in flux: network power, new regionalism, and global development’. Alongside the other 13 articles, it examines the dynamics of Asian regionalisation through three interlinked themes: trade/production regimes, financial flows, and sociocultural networks. The collective message is that industrial upgrading across the region is rarely automatic, and very few economies have fully overcome the unequal terms of exchange imposed by more advanced nations. Financial flows, from foreign direct investment to infrastructure loans, offer both opportunities and challenges, often exposing domestic economies to the strategic agendas of major powers. Sociocultural assemblages, in various forms, mediate these political-economic forces, in turn shaping the winners and losers of region-building. Taken together, these articles provide a nuanced lens for understanding Asia’s past and ongoing regionalisation, offering insights into the complex interplay of forces shaping the region’s future.

This paper is focused on the inception of the European Union’s investment screening regime and the operation of the EU’s screening mechanism as gleaned from the European Commission’s annual reports. We first demonstrate that political discussions in Europe on the need for a screening mechanism were informed by a number of high-profile projects with Chinese involvement in the mid-2010s. While these were the primary impetus toward the creation of a screening regime, we then show that Chinese investments do not feature disproportionately in light of the EC’s annual reports, and the landscape of the EU’s investment market has remained largely unchanging in recent years. We conclude that the decrease of interest by Chinese investors may be due to multiple factors rather than simply to a stricter investment environment in Europe and that the image of a threatening China is useful for rationalizing regulatory innovation in the EU. This latter also indicates that the EU is out of patience for China to render its market more welcoming toward European investors and instead chooses to restrict China’s access to its own market.

This policy paper takes stock of post-election trends in the EU’s China policy, assessing them against the backdrop of experiences of EU-China interaction across the past decade and in view of the prospects they bear for EU-China relations over the next few years. Since the elections, the European Parliament has strengthened its criticism of China’s human rights record and its explicit EU support for Taiwan, while the incoming Commissioners tend to highlight China’s role as a competitor and rival to the EU, with a focus on specific instances of problematic and unfair behaviour on its part. The paper argues that past experience suggests that Beijing is generally ready to engage and negotiate on specific grievances, especially when they are in the economic or technical sphere. By contrast, policies that are seen as violating Chinese sovereignty are met with strong rhetorical rebuttal and often harsh countermeasures. Since it is not imaginable for the EU to abandon a critical engagement with China in the normative sphere, the paper recommends strategies for defusing related rhetoric while developing a proactive agenda of pragmatic engagement, both with regard to economic interests and issues of international governance. Especially with a more hostile US administration under Trump II, it will be crucial for the EU to develop solid ties with China.

Since the 1990s, Japan and the European Union (EU) have steadily broadened their bilateral relationship beyond the economic and trade areas. The conclusion of a Security and Defence Partnership in November 2024 marked a further major step forward in the bilateral relations. Japan’s evolving security partnership with the EU is driven by the rapidly changing regional and global strategic environment in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the intensifying USA-China rivalry under the second Donald J. Trump administration. Shared Japan-EU concerns over the erosion of the rules-based international order, supply chain vulnerabilities, and technological dependencies have fostered closer bilateral cooperation. As a result, China’s rise has become a key factor behind the strengthening of Japan’s security partnership with the EU, reflecting the complexity of Japan’s geopolitical and geoeconomic uncertainties in times of global power shifts.

Over the past few years, Italy-China relations have been dominated by the debate over Italy’s first embracing and then leaving the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), for which Italy was the only G7 country to join the China-led project and then the first and only country to leave it. A combination of diplomatic factors, including Rome’s alignment with the US and NATO in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war and the Italian presidency of the G7, has decisively contributed to reorienting Rome’s foreign policy and abandoning the controversial MoU with Beijing. Following the EU’s official approach to China, the government led by the far-right Brothers of Italy party has adopted a mixed approach towards Beijing. Therefore, its departure from the BRI has been accompanied by the promotion of the idea of a years-long strategic partnership between the two countries through a series of high-profile visits to Beijing, including those by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in July and President Sergio Mattarella in November 2024. Nonetheless, Italy’s pragmatic approach towards China is part of Rome’s wider repositioning within the EU’s Indo-Pacific strategy framework. Interestingly, whilst Meloni was in Beijing, the Italian navy flagship Cavour aircraft carrier strike group was cruising towards the Pacific, via the Indian Ocean, for a series of port calls and joint exercises along with partners such as the USA, Japan and Australia. In light of the above, this paper argues that the recent development of Italy-China relations and Italy’s “partial” backing of the US’s Indo-Pacific strategy appears as a newly brushed Cold War era “in-betweenness”.

The context of EU - China relations since the elections of the European Parliament in June 2024 and the start of the new Commission is fundamentally different from the situation five years ago. Covid, but above all China’s implicit support for Russia after it attacked Ukraine in February 2022 have changed the perception of China, which had already been labelled a systemic rival in the EU’s China strategy 2019. Europe’s increasing dependence on China for critical raw materials and strategic supply chains have highlighted the need to focus on economic security as well as on the new geopolitical context which has changed again with the start of President Trump’s second term. The policy speech by President van der Leyen in March 2023 and the Commission’s economic security strategy are clear expressions of the shift in Europe’s perception of China. While much will depend on future US - China relations, the EU and its member states will have to develop a more consistent and operational China policy. It will no longer be possible to separate trade and investment relations, cooperation on regional and global issues, geopolitical rivalry and competing conceptions of the international order. A coherent cross - sector approach with full buy - in by member states will be required.

Relations between the European Union (EU) and the People’s Republic of China (China) face substantial strains. Cooperation in the fight against global warming seems to be one of the few areas where a strategic partnership might still be possible. Within the field of climate change governance, the issue of climate finance has gained substantial significance and was at the core of COP29. Here, important developments indicate a complex scenario for future collaboration: the EU’s hopes to preserve climate change as an “island of opportunity” for collaboration meet a Chinese revision of climate policy that seeks to raise it to a key foreign policy issue—thus linking it with core interests. At the technical level, despite several MoUs and declarations of intended cooperation, in climate finance, China and the EU have not agreed on a Chinese contribution to the Loss and Damage Fund at COP28. Finally, regarding the New Collective Quantified Goal on Finance, the EU and China are aligned on the importance of an updated goal but differ on how climate finance obligations should be structured. In the paper, we explore the current state of affairs in EU-China cooperation regarding climate finance (governance). We highlight the recent revision of China’s foreign policy approach and trace the positioning of both sides toward and at COP29. The paper identifies where the EU and China are diverging and converging in their approaches to climate finance and indicates future policy options.