Brewed in China 2035: How can Europe compete in the next industrial race?
Guests
Sofie Carsten Nielsen, Executive Vice President for International Relations at the Confederation of Danish Industry, former Director of the European Biosolutions Coalition, and former Danish Minister for Higher Education and Science.
Dirk van der Kley, Head of the Genes and Geopolitics Program and Senior Technology Research Fellow at the Australian National University’s National Security College, and author of the Substack ‘Bio Brawl’, the leading publication on China’s biomanufacturing advances, who will be joining us from Canberra.
Chaired by
Janka Oertel, Distinguished Policy Fellow, European Council on Foreign Relations
China is already the undisputed champion of traditional manufacturing. But China’s leadership wants more: it aspires to lead in the next generation of production by 2035 – and biomanufacturing has emerged as a priority for China’s economic security, resilience and strategic autonomy.
Europe has seen this movie before. As with solar panels or electric vehicles, and increasingly wind power, Beijing is deploying a familiar playbook of state-backed investment and rapid capacity building to gain global market share in biomanufacturing. Europe remains strong on research and development, but the ground is shifting fast and the technological frontier has moved eastward. It is time for Europeans to stop dwelling on cars and chemicals and wrap their heads around the next industrial revolution and its repercussions for global power distributions. The bloc’s prosperity and security depend on its ability to reduce strategic dependencies across energy, defence, critical raw materials and food. As also argued by Janka Oertel and Nina Schmelzer in a recent ECFR policy brief on the matter, biomanufacturing can replace vulnerable supply chains and change how critical goods are produced. That is why European leadership in the sector matters.
Online event. Registration required. Register here