Why the EU and Japan are uniting in opposition to Chinese language competitors

Good morning. A scoop to begin: Chinese language President Xi Jinping rebuffed pleas by Russia’s Vladimir Putin to strike a brand new gasoline pipeline deal at a bilateral assembly final month, sources informed the FT, however did bow to a requirement to snub Ukraine’s upcoming peace convention.

Right now, our vitality correspondent uncovers a EU-Japanese plan to crew up in opposition to China, and our tech correspondent reveals Brussels’ demand for US social media networks to get critical about Russian election disinformation.

Higher collectively

Brussels and Tokyo plan to align their clear vitality insurance policies to stop low cost Chinese language suppliers from additional undercutting their producers, writes Alice Hancock.

Context: The EU, burnt by the expertise of the near-total lack of its photo voltaic manufacturing trade to Chinese language rivals within the 2010s, is placing up a harder combat to stop different sectors comparable to wind and hydrogen going through the identical destiny.

EU vitality commissioner Kadri Simson visits Tokyo at present and tomorrow for conferences with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and financial system minister Ken Saito. In accordance with a draft communiqué seen by the FT, they are going to agree “to co-operate on supply and demand-side policies in clean energy sectors”.

“We are creating a working group to compare our Net-Zero Industry Act with [Japan’s] own legislation on promoting clean technologies, and making sure we have clean tech supply chains not dominated by one country,” a senior EU official mentioned.

The purpose is to make it simpler for European and Japanese corporations to collaborate — by aligning requirements, for instance — and thus scale back reliance on cheaper Chinese language rivals. The journey comes amid a flurry of EU probes into Chinese language corporations, which Brussels suspects of benefiting from unfair state subsidies.

Simson will journey with at the least 16 senior executives from corporations together with Daimler, Trafigura, TotalEnergies and Air Liquide, a number of of whom have been matched with Japanese corporations.

One key concern is the hydrogen trade. Europe is at present house to two-thirds of the world’s main producers of electrolysers required to supply hydrogen from water. EU officers concern that if they don’t act quickly, that place might be misplaced.

The Japanese, in the meantime, are eager to advertise their very own hydrogen trade, which Tokyo sees as key to decarbonise its vitality manufacturing and vehicle sector. Coal-fired energy vegetation make up round a 3rd of the nation’s energy provide.

Tomorrow, Brussels can even announce a pilot instrument to assist potential hydrogen consumers discover provides within the embryonic market.

The EU has set itself a goal of manufacturing 10mn tonnes every year of renewable hydrogen by 2030, and importing the identical quantity — although most trade executives see this as unrealistic.

Chart du jour: Linked up

Radical advances in neurotechnology are serving to disabled folks stroll and will present the hyperlink between human and synthetic intelligence. However the brand new advances additionally increase profound moral questions.

Excessive alert

Days earlier than the European parliament elections, Brussels has warned massive tech platforms that they’re underestimating Russia’s efforts to undermine the vote, writes Javier Espinoza.

Context: EU officers are nervous about Russia’s capacity to meddle on this week’s elections via aggressive disinformation campaigns. The EU has set new safeguards forward of the vote. In April, Brussels launched a probe into Meta over its dealing with of Russian disinformation.

However throughout a visit to the US final week, European Fee vice-president Věra Jourová mentioned Meta and different massive on-line platforms weren’t doing sufficient.

“I do recognise efforts by most online platforms to improve the protection of the election information space. But California is far from Russia and I am concerned that the scale of the threat is underestimated here,” Jourová mentioned.

“The Kremlin is working hard to game the systems of online platforms,” she added.

Whereas in California, Jourová met the chief executives of Google, YouTube, X, TikTok and Meta to evaluate how prepared they’re to sort out on-line threats to elections.

She beneficial the platforms spend money on capacities to raised perceive the totally different nationwide dangers within the EU, together with beefing up content material moderation capacities in all EU languages and co-operating extra with reality checkers, specialists and specialised nationwide businesses. She additionally urged they arrange hotlines with nationwide governments.

Jourová notably singled out social media platform X as not doing sufficient, pointing to latest experiences of workers shortages. “I expect more efforts to regain trust of the expert community dealing with countering Russian hybrid threats,” Jourová mentioned.

After Jourová’s go to, X mentioned in a submit: “X is steadfast in safeguarding the integrity of elections — and it’s equally critical that a full range of industry sectors are also engaged in this vital work.”

What to look at at present

1. Montenegro’s Prime Minister Milojko Spajić meets EU Council president Charles Michel in Brussels.

2. EU enlargement commissioner Olivér Várhelyi attends a high-level political discussion board in Sarajevo.

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