Europe and China are sliding into an overt trade confrontation, and this time the flashpoint is not cheap toys or textiles but the core of Europe’s industrial base.

A record Chinese surplus with the EU approaching $300 billion in 2025, combined with a four-to-one container imbalance and an increasingly undervalued renminbi, has pushed leaders like Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen to declare that relations with Beijing have reached an “inflection point” and that what is now at stake is nothing less than the survival of European industry.

China is about to put the world’s first commercial land-based small modular reactor into operation, and it is doing so on its own terms technologically, industrially, and geopolitically.

The Linglong One, also known as the ACP100, is a 125 MWe integrated pressurised water SMR developed by China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC). It was the first SMR design to pass an International Atomic Energy Agency safety review back in 2016, and its first-of-a-kind unit is being built at the Changjiang nuclear power site on Hainan island.

China is putting a formal gatekeeper in front of its steel exports, and that is less about paperwork in 2026 than about giving Beijing a strategic lever over a sector that has become both an economic shock absorber at home and a political lightning rod abroad.

From 1 January 2026, exporters of around 300 categories of steel products will have to obtain export licences tied to specific contracts and backed by manufacturers’ quality inspection certificates, the Ministry of Commerce has announced. The measure plugs steel into a broader export-licensing regime that already covers 43 sensitive goods, including wheat, corn, coal and crude oil, and signals that steel is now being treated alongside energy and food as a commodity of strategic concern.

The European Union is quietly defusing one of the more explosive flashpoints in transatlantic energy policy: how to apply its tough new methane rules to imported oil and gas without choking off supplies from the United States.

From this year, the EU’s methane regulation obliges importers of oil and gas to monitor and report the methane emissions associated with what they bring into Europe. Over time, that escalates: from 2027, new gas supply contracts will have to comply with standards equivalent to the EU’s own methane rules, or they will not be acceptable.

The European Union’s decision to drastically narrow the scope of its flagship sustainability disclosure regime marks a clear inflection point: it lightens the regulatory load on large companies, but at the cost of weakening one of the world’s most ambitious transparency frameworks just as investors and policymakers are trying to steer trillions toward genuine low-carbon and responsible business models.

What has changed is substantial. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), initially conceived to force tens of thousands of large companies to publish detailed, standardised data on their environmental, social and governance performance, will now apply only to a much thinner slice of the corporate universe. Only firms with more than 1,000 employees and at least €450 million in turnover will be required to report, and financial institutions are excluded for now.

Mexico’s new tariff regime has just turned one of India’s most successful auto export plays into a serious liability, and it has done so in a way that serves three agendas at once: domestic protection, fiscal tightening, and strategic alignment with Washington.

Under the law approved this week, Mexico will raise import duties on hundreds of products from countries without free-trade agreements including India, China, South Korea, Thailand and Indonesia, to between 5% and 50% from January 2026. For passenger vehicles, the duty jumps from 20% to 50%. Most affected goods (textiles, apparel, plastics, steel, auto parts, footwear and other consumer and industrial items) will face tariffs of up to 35%, but cars are in the top-tier penalty band.

Big Tech is effectively anointing India as the third global pillar of the AI and cloud infrastructure map after the US and China, not just as a market, but as a core build-and-run hub. Within the space of a day, Microsoft and Amazon have committed more than $50 billion in fresh capex for India’s cloud and AI stack, while Google is already rolling out a separate $15 billion AI hub in Visakhapatnam and Intel has moved from talking about India to actually putting manufacturing there via its tie-up with Tata Electronics.

For a country whose global tech brand was historically “back-office and coding talent,” this is a step change: India is being positioned as a site for hyperscale AI compute, semiconductor assembly and application-layer innovation, all at once.

Southeast Asia is turning what many feared would be a second “China shock” into a strategic opening. Instead of being crushed between U.S. tariffs on China and a flood of Chinese exports looking for new markets, the ASEAN region is quietly stepping into the space China is losing in the U.S. and using the moment to reposition itself at the center of a more fragmented global trading system.

Exports from ASEAN to the United States jumped by about 23% year-on-year in September, with Thailand and Vietnam leading the charge. In parallel, China’s share of U.S. imports has continued to erode under the weight of punitive tariffs. The arithmetic behind the shift is straightforward: the effective U.S. tariff rate on Chinese goods has climbed to roughly 31%, while for many ASEAN economies it is nearer 11%.