Chips, cars and cognac: What's on the menu for Xi's Europe visit • FRANCE 24 English

on Sunday Chinese president xiin ping will come to Europe for the first time in 5 years staying in France until Tuesday aside from the war in Ukraine technology could be the most important talking point on the agenda and for more I'm joined by our Tech editor Peter O'Brien to set the scene for us uh Peter tell us what's going to be the most important topic tech-wise during this visit chips chips chips chips chips chips and chips means Taiwan of course uh T tsmc being the world leader in manufacturing semiconductors that's the Taiwanese chip maker and those semiconductors are the lifeblood of every computer in the world computers are the now the lifeblood of course of the world economy they're on our phones they're in our cars they're on in our fridges even um so this bottleneck is of extreme strategic importance increasingly so now with the boom of artificial intelligence which relies greatly on these chips so with Taiwan under threats of Invasion From China as we know the world's supply of these chips is in Peril and you might be asking well what role does Europe have to play in this that's the Dutch company asml which is the eu's most valuable tech company and they make the machines that make the machines if you like they make the machines that companies like tsmc rely on to actually manufacture their chips so as I said it's one of the EUR U the uh the eu's most important companies and is a key bargaining chip in this question about chips and speaking of chips and Taiwan Peter president Emanuel Macon courted controversy when he was in Beijing last year tell us about what happened there yeah that's right so on the plane back he spoke to journalists from Politico and Leo and and made some uh controversial comments now I won't go back over these but in some ways they kind of tie together macron's rhetoric and that that's been the same for for years actually if you look back at his sborn speech in 2017 and the one he made at the sborn two weeks ago it's been the same thing we want a sovereign Europe that doesn't necessarily always have to follow the coattails of the United States now applying this logic when it comes to Taiwan is what made his comments controversial but really um if we look at Tech you can see how there's a difference between this as a rhetoric and how it actually plays out um so let me just name you a couple of examples Huawei the connectivity giant which was sanctioned by the US um the Brussels tried to sanction it as well but we can see that it's still present in somewhere or another in a lot of uh connectivity around uh the European continent uh Tik Tok the video scrolling sharing creating app that was uh has recently been ordered to either ban or sell by the US now it's banned on officials phones in the EU as it is as well in the United States but I don't think we're hugely close to an outright ban in Europe so you can see here already a couple of examples that show The World Isn't just um what says it is the Europe you know wanting to to differentiate itself completely from the US but it also isn't just Europe following the coattails of the US and in addition to chips chips and more chips Peter another big topic for xiin Ping is going to be electric cars yeah that's hugely important for him um China's the world leader in electric cars it's the world leader in Green Tech as a whole you can still say that with technology the US is what's driving a lot of the Innovation but if you look at this the entire sector of Green Tech China is ahead Brussels feeling threatened by this um has announced investigations into Chinese State subsidies which are large for for instance electric cars uh solar power panels wind turbines rail projects um these are projects that have been carried out in the EU but perhaps with a lot of financial help from Beijing now China doesn't want the big tariffs that Brussels is threatening so it's um in one case some are seeing this as a retaliation threatened France with retaliatory um taxes on cognac although they'll deny that this is in retaliation as with all of these trade War sort of things but I think we can expect a showdown on Monday when Emanuel macron has invited the European commission president Ur of V to trilateral talks with him and uh Xi Jinping notably Olaf Schultz won't be present and then maybe just maybe he'll um offer up a sampling of this uh this KAC to see to show Shi Jinping what he might be missing out on I don't know maybe they'll with chips yeah they might do that would be I guess more Belgian than but yeah perhaps Alison all right Peter thank you it's going to be an interesting visit to follow and thanks to you we'll now be knowing we'll look out for uh talks on chips and also electric vehicles thank

Channel: FRANCE 24 English

Views: 18,706

Keywords: China, Europe, France, Tech, Xi Jinping

Id: Px3E3zfzAkg

Length: 4min 43sec (283 seconds)

Published: Fri May 03 2024