A Singaporean think-tank has found that 66% of Singaporean opinion leaders would side with China over the United States if forced to choose - a striking figure for one of Washington's closest partners in the region.
Europeans should resist filing this under "Asian story." Singapore (and ASEAN more broadly) sit in Europe's predicament: the US is their most important security partner and China is their most important trade partner – and they would rather not choose at all.
As news emerges of escalation in the trade conflict between Europe and China, it may seem naive to point to the opportunity of them working more closely together. However, we should not be surprised if that is exactly what happens in the coming years. Europe and China share a fundamental goal in the transition to clean energy, and to complete it, they need each other.
The transition to clean energy is a shared goal for Europe and China, albeit for different reasons. In China, clean energy is central to the country's economic reform plan, in which the economy transitions away from investing in real estate and infrastructure and towards high-tech manufacturing, including clean energy technologies. In Europe, besides climate targets, successive global crises have made its energy system expensive and vulnerable to disruption, necessitating a transition towards clean, local energy sources.
What is sometimes underappreciated is that, because of this shared goal, clean energy has already become a key driver of economic growth for both (see chart). In China, clean energy industries account for 25% of GDP growth; in Europe, more than 30%. In the US, the figure is just over 5%.
Most importantly, to complete the transition to clean energy, Europe and China need each other. Europe cannot achieve energy security without affordable Chinese technologies, and China cannot sustain its export model without reaching agreement with advanced economies like Europe on the rules for market access.
The key question is how exactly Europe and China will be able to cooperate amid conflict – driven mainly by Europe's concerns about overreliance on Chinese products – especially at a time when tensions are still escalating. The answer lies in the current energy crisis. Europe will increasingly discover that the greatest value from clean energy lies not in manufacturing these technologies (solar panels, wind turbines, heat pumps) but in deploying and integrating them with the local energy system, as this is what unlocks the potential of the broader economy. The Netherlands is a case in point: its congested electricity grid is already preventing new business formation even outside industrial production.
The main bottleneck for cooperation between Europe and China is therefore not economic competition but strategic security: Europe does not want to become overly reliant on a single country for its energy needs again. This will drive European policy towards a logic of diversification – as seen this week in the area of chemicals – rather than punishment (like the US approach of import tariffs on Chinese goods). This European approach could, like the Western quota policies on Japanese imports in the 1980s, provide the basis for diplomatic agreement.
Last month, Stanford University published research that contradicts the dominant narrative on US-China artificial intelligence (AI) competition. According to millions of human voters, the performance gap between the top US and top Chinese AI models has effectively closed (see chart).
Most importantly, Chinese firms are generating frontier AI capability at a fraction of the costs of US firms. According to Stanford, a 23-to-1 spending gap between US and Chinese private firms is producing a 2.7% performance gap. This has direct implications for US-based AI companies whose valuations rest on the assumption of a structural advantage. It also suggests the DeepSeek shock of January 2025 – when the launch of a single Chinese model briefly erased a trillion dollars from US tech stocks – was not an anomaly, but the first sign of a convergence that had been underway for several years and has continued since.
A key question in the coming years will be how Western investors can profit from China's AI capabilities. On April 27, the Chinese government cancelled Meta's $2 billion acquisition of Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup founded by Chinese engineers. Beijing is signaling that frontier AI capability is now treated as strategic territory in the same category as rare earths and semiconductors – and is therefore closing the offshore "Singapore-washing" route that Chinese tech firms have used for years to reach Western investors.
