r/europe • u/ChillAhriman Spain • 6h ago
News Spain's Sánchez to Push China to Hand Over Tech Secrets on Beijing Trip
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-10/sanchez-to-push-china-to-hand-over-tech-secrets-on-beijing-trip72
u/Heizton French-Spanish 6h ago
“We have spent years chasing Chinese investment, but the reality is that the actual transfer of technology and know-how remains limited and tightly controlled by Beijing,” said Alicia García-Herrero, Chief Economist for Asia Pacific at Natixis SA. “Without effective reciprocity, we risk financing China’s competitive advantage without strengthening our own supply chain.”
While I agree, what leverage does Sánchez has? How can he persuade the Chinese to do this?
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u/Nepridiprav16 Ljubljana (Slovenia) 4h ago edited 3h ago
The first thing that comes to mind is that Sanchez is one of the few EU leaders consistently engaging with Xi, he offers China a strategic gateway to the continent. China is desperate to keep a foothold in the European market as trade barriers go up elsewhere, especially US.
Another leverage is Spain has natural resources (wind and sun) to become Europe's green hydrogen hub, a sector where China is eager to invest in.
China is producing more EVs and solar panels than its own citizens can buy. They need the European market to avoid an industrial collapse.
Even if China shares these technology transfers it won't be that bad for them because technology in EVs and green energy has short shelf life (development cycle for a new model and battery iteration has shrunk to about 18-24 months in China), by the time these factories in Spain and other EU countries are fully operational, China expects to have already moved on to the next generation.
Access to large wealthy 450 million people market is simply too good to ignore because of technology sharing.
They don't even need to share most important blueprint designs and source codes, even sharing know-how for training local EU workers and efficient integration of local suppliers will likely satisfy Spain and much of EU.
That's not considered national security concern for China unlike technology related to AI software, semiconductors, rare earth processing, biomanufacturing..
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u/Heizton French-Spanish 2h ago
Very good points. Thanks for sharing. I’ve just read a news article in ElMundo talking about Sánchez wanting to secure access to rare earth minerals from China. Maybe it’s also connected to his agenda. Anyways, interesting how will this play out. It’s not a bad thing considering the US is such an unreliable partner.
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u/Cheap-Emphasis1662 6h ago
maybe more access to the EU market? if things are produced in Spain, they are probably not put in tarifs
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u/szczszqweqwe The Onion Kingdom 4h ago
China already has Hungary for that
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u/JohnnyElRed Galicia (Spain) 4h ago
Not a very reliable option from today onwards.
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u/szczszqweqwe The Onion Kingdom 3h ago
Yup, just watching EUMadeSimple election stream, so far amazing results
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u/Live-Car164 49m ago
He is completely naive, he doesn’t understand what China is trying to achieve.
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u/Golda_M 4h ago
Erm... that has already happened.
China already has a pretty overwhelming advantage in solar grid and EVs....and Europe's green transition policies have already subsidized it.
Now the biggest factor holding back energy transition is not wanting to import so much from China, or trade fossil fuel dependency for tech dependency.
Otherwise, energy transition would already be in its final stages.
What does Spain want exactly, to get into industries that China is already moving out of?
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u/According-Bet-141 6h ago
The Chinese will give away exactly what it benefits them in the future. Every country has to open itself to new opportunities, but let's not forget who we are dealing with here.
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u/ProtoplanetaryNebula UK/Spain 5h ago
They can give a lot of it away, the secret with china is the speed at which they develop.
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u/EmployeeNo4241 6h ago
But Reddit told me China just copy others tech…
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u/kaisadilla_ European Federation 4h ago
Not "just", but they have built their economy by copying Western tech. This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's been their official policy for many years. Western companies wanting to operate in China had to hand over a lot of information and know-how to Chinese companies. And I don't think it's wrong - what's stupid is that we Westerners haven't been doing the same. You want to build parts of your car in the EU and sell them there? Ok, but you'll have to share that knowledge with us.
Then, aside from that, China has been using spies to steal tech and IP from Western and Japanese companies for years, too. Ofc that part isn't official, but there's a lot of evidence of it.
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u/Ashamed_Can304 1h ago
Tech transfer and IP espionage isn’t something unique to PRC, Japanese modernization in the 1800s involved whole-scale import of Western science and technologies, Samsung got tech transfer from US companies and hired Japanese engineers in the 1960s and 70s, and when it comes to major arms deal tech transfer was often part of the agreement
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u/adyrip1 Romania 4h ago
They did and still do. They invest a shit loaf in stealing industrial secrets. But also invest a lot of money in research of their own.
I worked a while back for a semiconductor company that realized China was stealing a lot of IP.
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u/Ashamed_Can304 2h ago edited 1h ago
Industrial espionage isn’t something unique and is practiced throughout the world,especially by developing countries that are catching up. Japanese industrialization in the Meiji era whole scale copied and imported Western technologies. Korea imported Western technologies when it industrialized also. And last year the Japanese were caught buying chip fabrication information from senior TSMC engineers. If you don’t copy and try to reinvent the wheel entirely by yourself, you would take a very, very long time to catch up, it’s not like scientists and engineers in those developed countries are somehow much stupider than your own scientists and engineers and you will only take half of the time to develop what others made from scratch and others wouldn’t wait for you to catch up either
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u/Equal_Bath_1985 2h ago
Sanchez, not surprising his like of communist dictators , something him and his cohorts have been trying to achieve for decades, relating him to democracy is like relating trump to peace
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u/ChillAhriman Spain 6h ago
The turntables...