Warning! Don't feed the dragon!
Take an unscrupulous opportunist such as the German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, partner him with a vainglorious opportunist such as the French president Jacques Chirac and you have the makings of a very unsavoury souffle indeed. Puffed up by their near success in preventing the liberation of Iraq two years ago, they recently came up with another breakthrough — ending the EU embargo on selling arms to China. For one of them, this might lead to desperately needed contracts to prop up his dysfunctional economy; for the other, it's a chance to add the multi-polar card to the hand he hopes to play in the Great Game.
NATURALLY, neither of these two characters has a regional role in the theatre where the arms might be used and you can be sure that neither of them would put a single soldier on the ground to defend the Taiwanese, South Koreans, Japanese or Americans who might end at the sharp end of Euro weapons in Chinese hands. But that's the world we find ourselves in.
Somewhat embarrassingly for our intrepid duo, the scheme has turned sour during the past few days. First came Beijing's passage of a law allowing China to use force against Taiwan if it moved towards declaring independence; on Sunday, US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, warned the EU to keep its weapons out of Asia; on Tuesday EU leaders meeting in Brussels signalled that the Old-New Europe crevice might open again if the plan went ahead, and now 500 Chinese human rights activists have written to the EU to keep the ban. Worst of all, the farce is shining a blinding light on the crime that led to all this in the first place.
IT'S ALMOST 16 years now since Chinese soldiers slaughtered thousands of their fellow citizens valiantly protesting corruption and repression. Despite the collapse of the Soviet empire, civil war in the Balkans, dot-com billionaires and bankrupts and 9/11, the ghosts of Tiananmen are still with us. Their sacrifices live on because China's government hides the truth about June 1989. Meanwhile, China's turned into a global economic power and a regional military giant, but it still remains an irredentist Communist dictatorship that continues to abuse the human rights of its people.
Today, another principled voice, that of Timothy Garton Ash, was added to the argument against lifting the embargo. Writing in the Guardian under the headline "Chasing the dragon", he doesn't spare the charlatans:
Consider. Europeans claim moral superiority over Bush's America on the grounds that we always favour the peaceful resolution of conflicts and respect for human rights. Last week, China's National People's Congress passed a law which authorises the use of "non-peaceful means" to prevent moves towards Taiwanese independence. "Non-peaceful means" is an Orwellian euphemism for war.These are not mere words. There is a serious Chinese military build-up, directed at Taiwan, the world's first Chinese democracy. The veteran Singaporean leader, Lee Kuan Yew, recently told a visitor that he saw a 40% probability of war between China and Taiwan at some point over the next 10 years. And at this perilous moment, peace-loving Europe should be hurrying to sell arms to China?
The main motive for wanting to lift the arms embargo is not political but, as one senior European commissioner put it to me, "mercantilist". With sluggish growth and high unemployment, France and Germany are desperate to secure more export contracts from the world's largest emerging economy. On the eve of his own wooing journey to Beijing, Chancellor Schröder described this policy as an expression of "true patriotism". Translation: jobs for Germans take precedence over human rights for Chinese.
YES, it's been a pretty awful week for Schröder and Chirac, but it's been a very good one for those who demand that Beijing tells us what exactly happened 16 years ago in Tiananmen Square. Not until then and not until it stops threatening Taiwan should the EU consider lifting its arms embargo.
