Elites Are Sobering Up About Free Trade

Robin Harding’s argument is blunt and mostly right. China is not behaving like a normal trading partner that expects reciprocity over time. It is behaving like a civilization state executing a long plan for autonomy and dominance. Trade, in Beijing’s model, is not mutual dependence. It is a transitional tool until dependence is no longer needed.
The key insight here is the asymmetry. Europe still thinks in terms of exchange. China now thinks in terms of replacement. If you can make aircraft, chips, software, green tech, and luxury goods yourself, why rely on outsiders at all? Add US export controls and the incentive for full self sufficiency hardens into doctrine.
Harding also nails the psychological shift among elites. For thirty years, free trade was treated as a law of nature. Now it is being reclassified as a strategic risk. That is not ideology. That is belated realism.
Where the piece is strongest is its honest admission that Europe has boxed itself in. If China will not buy and will only sell, Europe’s current social model becomes mathematically untenable. High welfare, heavy regulation, and slow innovation collide with a hyper efficient export machine willing to run permanent surpluses.
The fork in the road is ugly but real.
Option one is reform: harder work, sharper competitiveness, less comfort, more dynamism. Politically toxic but economically sane.
Option two is protectionism: blunt, destabilising, and likely inevitable in some form. Once voters see factories closing with no reciprocal access to Chinese demand, abstract devotion to free trade collapses fast.
The uncomfortable truth is this. The old globalisation consensus was built on the fantasy that every rising power would converge on Western norms. China never signed up to that dream. It signed up to win.
Europe now has to decide whether it wants to be a museum, a welfare state without an industry, or a serious competitor again. There is no painless version of that decision.
Elites are sobering up. Good. The hangover will last a long time.