As China makes final preparations for its leadership change this week, the silence from Europe is deafening. Not only have all European governments refrained from making any comment, but even the European media has also failed to cover events in Beijing adequately. Ask a European politician for his or her views on political changes in China and the best response you are likely to get is a shrug.
That's not because Europeans are naturally shy about expressing their views on internal developments in other countries. The one thing the European Union (EU) does well is churning out diplomatic communiques on any conceivable topic.
Nor is it because Europeans fail to understand the importance of the developments in Beijing. Like their counterparts elsewhere, European intelligence agencies do monitor developments in China fairly closely. Rather, the silence is due to a poverty of strategic thought: the Europeans are stuck with an ossified, old approach to China that they seem unable to discard. And Europe's neglect of China may be reciprocated by the new generation of Chinese leaders.
The Europeans should be top practitioners of the art of interpreting both the intricacies and significance of personnel changes and the mysteries of political manoeuvring inside a communist party. After all, that's precisely how Europe monitored developments inside the Soviet Union for almost half a century. But the USSR was always considered a strategic challenge first and an economic opportunity second, while in the case of China, the reverse is true: Europe sees its relationship as primarily about trade, so the politics is deemed far less important.
In fairness, the Europeans have tried to impart to their relationship with China a deeper political meaning. A "strategic dialogue" now takes place regularly; in July this year, both China and the EU agreed to expand it to more sensitive military topics such as maritime security and crisis management. Furthermore, outgoing Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has made a point of visiting the "old continent" as frequently as possible.
But these are just diplomatic niceties that have not led to engagement beyond commerce. One reason for this is that trade interests do dwarf everything else. A decade ago, two-way trade stood at US$100 billion; today, the total is $567 billion. Both sides are therefore locked in a relationship of mutual dependency that goes on regardless of who is in power. Just ask German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been more critical of China's human rights record but has presided over a far bigger increase in trade than Gerhard Schroeder, her predecessor as Germany's leader, who considered himself Beijing's best European friend.
But a more important reason a new engagement between China and Europe has proved elusive is that the strategic needs of either side remain incompatible. From the Chinese perspective, Europe's real advantage is as a counterbalance to the US. But that requires a European continent which is both united and inclined to stand up - even occasionally - to the Americans, and neither seems likely in the foreseeable future.
The Europeans, in turn, dream of a strategic relationship that makes China a net contributor to a global security arrangement that is still European-dominated and Eurocentric. China has no interest in accepting any of that. So, concentrating on just managing trade rather than developing a more intricate and personal relationship between leaders remains the default position on both sides.
Besides, the EU as a whole is simply incapable of implementing a coherent strategic approach even if it knew what it wanted. One of the first moves undertaken by Catherine Ashton when she was appointed Europe's foreign policy supremo in late 2009 was to undertake a study of the continent's relations with China. The outcome was a policy paper so full of banalities that it read as a university undergraduate's essay; it sank without trace and, mercifully, Ashton never repeated the effort.
The result is that the EU's dialogue with China remains overshadowed by three largely irrelevant issues: an arms embargo imposed by Europe in 1989, which everyone agrees should be lifted but nobody knows how to do so or when; a "human rights dialogue" that generates constant irritations despite the fact that both Europe and China routinely ignore it; and a vague promise to grant China market economy trading status in return for Chinese concessions that nobody can specify.
This boring, repetitive script resembles that of cheap Bollywood movies in which the plots seldom change, and only the same dusty old studio props get rearranged.
The Europeans believe that if China's current Vice-Premier Li Keqiang does assume the premiership, as is widely anticipated, relations between the two sides will at least continue on an even keel: Li has already handled European matters for a number of years, and the hope is that he will push for the conclusion of a new China-EU investment agreement.
Yet beyond this, most Europeans don't expect much from tomorrow's China. A recent public opinion survey conducted by the Bertelsmann Foundation, one of Germany's top scholarly organisations, indicates that an astonishing 82 per cent of ordinary Germans assume that it will still be up to Europe - and not China - to ensure world peace and the protection of the environment.
Furthermore, two-thirds of the German respondents also believe that China's rise will not result in a fairer distribution of wealth around the world. Or, put differently, the rise of China may be inevitable, but changes nothing.
This fatalistic view, equating China with a steamroller that cannot be stopped but whose effects would supposedly be to flatten today's world without creating something useful in its stead, is also shared by Europe's political class.
Most European governments hope that China will buy their bonds or lend them money, but most also fret about the possibility that Chinese companies would end up buying European industrial enterprises, supposedly on the cheap.
Meanwhile, the European Commission - the EU's executive - is preparing its own "gift" to the new Chinese leadership in the shape of a probe into alleged dumping of solar panels made by China. Since the Chinese export more than $25 billion worth of such panels to Europe yearly, this could turn out to be the largest trade dispute between the EU and China in history.
And, if this was not enough, there is a growing view in Europe that China may now be interested in splitting the EU from inside. The French in particular worry about the booming trade between China and Germany; this apparently has the potential to get the Germans "more tempted to look towards the wider world rather than Europe", as Gerard Errera, one of France's top diplomats warned recently. "France is running out of time to retrain Germany," Errera added, ominously.
What the Europeans don't seem to understand is that their inability to forge a broader relationship with China does have long-term consequences and that Europe will have to deal with a different China when the new leadership takes office.
For, according to polling conducted by the BBC, ordinary Chinese are reciprocating by not taking Europe too seriously either. Four years ago, two-thirds of the Chinese respondents considered Europe as a positive influence on the global stage; today, the figure is only 46 per cent. More painfully still, only 8 per cent of Chinese people rank the China-EU relationship as the most influential for China; even Japan scores more than twice that figure.
In short, neglect is a contagious disease.
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Article source: http://www.thethailandlinks.com/2012/11/13/europe-needs-a-new-outlook-on-china-and-vice-versa/
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