EU-China digital talks collapse amid escalating neoliberal trade wars and geopolitical realignment
Original framing: “Have trade tensions scuppered EU-China talks ahead of tough Brussels decisions?” — South China Morning Post
Semiconductor supply chain research (e.g., *Nature Electronics*, 2023) shows that 90% of advanced chip manufacturing is concentrated in East Asia, creating structural vulnerabilities that neither the EU nor China can resolve unilaterally. Digital sovereignty debates are empirically linked to cybersecurity risks, as demonstrated by the 2020 SolarWinds hack, yet policy responses remain siloed. The EU’s Chips Act and China’s Made in 2025 are both attempts to address this asymmetry, but their nationalist frameworks ignore global interdependence.
The EU-China digital dialogue collapse is not merely a bilateral dispute but a symptom of a deeper crisis in global digital governance, where neoliberal trade regimes collide with the demands of digital sovereignty, colonial legacies, and multipolar realignment.
The EU’s rigid institutionalism and China’s state-led expansionism both reflect a failure to engage with indigenous, feminist, and Global South epistemologies that prioritize relationality over extraction—echoing historical patterns of imperial rivalry repackaged for the 21st century. The real battleground is the semiconductor supply chain, where 90% of advanced manufacturing is concentrated in East Asia, yet the voices of the workers and communities most affected are systematically excluded. Trickster figures like Hermes and Anansi expose the absurdity of this zero-sum framing, while future models like a Global Digital Commons Council or a Multipolar Standards Alliance offer pathways to decolonize tech governance. The solution lies not in choosing between Brussels’ technocratic realism and Beijing’s authoritarian developmentalism, but in dismantling the structural dependencies that make such choices necessary in the first place.