We now know how
the bureaucrats in the European Commission will mark the death of
China's reformist leader Zhao Ziyang, who was purged in 1989 when
he opposed the Communist Party's decision to crush the democracy
movement at Tiananmen in 1989: They will apologize to China's new
leaders for making such a fuss about it. The European Commission is
planning to end the arms embargo it placed on China as a symbol of
its revulsion at the bloodshed of June 1989 and open an entirely
new "strategic partnership" with Asia's communist superpower. But
Europe's citizens are not as cynical as the "Eurocracy," and deft
diplomacy by incoming Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice could
still save the Atlantic Alliance and keep pressure on Beijing to
improve its human rights practices.
To be successful,
the Bush Administration must sidestep the European Commission and
lobby the European Union's 25 individual member states,
concentrating on the newer members who still remember the sting of
communist tyranny. U.S. diplomats should point out the symbolic
disgrace of lifting the arms embargo as Beijing continues to arrest
dissidents and clergy. And the Administration should explain the
host of reasons why lifting the embargo is a bad idea for Europe,
not just the United States. In addition, Congress should resurrect
legislation that would reduce U.S.-European defense cooperation in
technologies that E.U. members share with China.
Washington's
Resignation
As the 85-year-old
Zhao Ziyang lay on his deathbed in a Beijing hospital last week
with secret police stationed outside his door, the European Union's
new Commissioner for External Affairs, Benita Ferraro-Waldner,
visited Washington to break the news that the European Commission
intends to end its Tiananmen-era arms embargo on China. The E.U.'s
embargo, she said, would certainly be lifted by the beginning of
the summer. She mentioned nothing about the Beijing regime's
continuing and systematic violations of civil, political, and
religious rights. Human rights don't seem to matter much in
Brussels these days.
The State
Department's reaction was a shrug of the shoulders. "I don't have
anything further," a Department spokesman said in response to
questioning, adding obliquely that Secretary of State Colin
Powell's comments last December were the definitive U.S. policy on
the matter. Powell said then only that the Europeans "are aware of
our view that the embargo should remain . . . I understand it is a
difficult issue for the European Union to wrestle with, and I know
they're working on it."
The Pentagon
reacted with a bit more alarm, but their concern was "the strategic
balance in the Taiwan Strait," a worry that Ms. Ferraro-Waldner
reassured her American friends the E.U. would accommodate, somehow.
Clearly, the message that Ms. Ferraro-Waldner will take back to
Brussels is that the Americans are now resigned to the evaporation
of the embargo.
Yet on January 14,
only a day after Ms. Ferraro-Waldner's meetings in Washington, the
European Parliament in Strasbourg passed a resolution condemning
China's violations of human rights in Tibet and its threats to
Taiwan and calling on members to "maintain the European Union
embargo on trade in arms with the People's Republic of China and
not weaken national restrictions on such arms sales."
Economic Clout and
Political Influence
Convincing the
E.U. to relax its embargo is only the latest example of China's
growing deftness at turning its economic clout into serious
political influence. China's diplomats have found the key to
persuading the Eurocrats in Brussels to compromise the traditional
democratic values of the European Parliament in Strasbourg: money.
More importantly, the Chinese are in the process of disrupting the
Atlantic Alliance. They are forcing the Europeans to choose between
Beijing and Washington, and the Europeans are tilting to
Beijing.
The arms embargo
was never really about arms. The Chinese get all they need,
cheaper, from Russia. In a sense, all the embargo does is give
Moscow greater price leverage with Beijing. The real issue at stake
is China's "national dignity." Europe levied the embargo on the
Chinese communists in response to Tiananmen, and the Chinese regime
believes that after fifteen years the Europeans should forget about
it. Now, with the deposed former Communist Party secretary Zhao
Ziyang-the last hero of Tiananmen-dead, the new leadership in
Beijing wants the Chinese people to forget, too.
A lot has happened
in the years since the bloody 1989 crackdown on the democracy
movement. China has become the E.U.'s second-largest export market,
after the United States, and the world's third-largest trading
nation, after the U.S. and Germany. With promises of vast trade
largesse, Beijing has been wooing the E.U.'s two core members,
France and Germany, to abandon the 1989 embargo as "outmoded" and
enter into a new "comprehensive strategic partnership" with China.
The Chinese have convinced eager French and German leaders that
E.U. protests of Beijing's dismal human rights record are the sole
remaining obstacle to this "partnership." And besides, as Chinese
Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui pledged to European journalists
in December, the arms embargo is just a "symbolic" policy and
dropping it will not have any real effect because the embargo will
be replaced by tighter controls on E.U. arms exports.
Unlike the Soviets
in the 1980s, the Chinese have the economic clout to wrench the
European Union's elbow and force Europe to accept China's human
rights record as the norm for the "post Cold War" environment. In
December, The Wall Street Journal has reported, a Chinese
aviation official confirmed the linkage between China's contract to
buy $1.3 billion worth of Airbus's new A-380 jumbo jets and the
embargo's end with the comment, "It's understandable. Politics and
economics can never be separated." Shortly afterwards, a French
official confirmed that Chinese President Hu Jintao linked the
Airbus deal and the embargo in a Sunday morning phone call to
French President Jacques Chiraq. Mr. Chirac, it was reported,
nodded vigorously into the phone, averring that France wanted to
see the embargo ended "now."
Encouraging Bad
Behavior
Although
Washington has been fighting to delay the embargo's end for the
past year, U.S. officials say privately they have little hope that
it can be delayed much longer. And no wonder. Their main argument
is U.S. self-interest: the only possible use China would have for
European weapons is to fight U.S. forces aiding in the defense of
Taiwan. This logic is unpersuasive to Europeans like French
President Chirac who seem to see a grand strategic realignment of
democratic Europe and communist China against the unilateralism of
the democratic United States.
But consider this:
Last week, when Britain's foreign secretary Jack Straw sympathized
with Chinese complaints that they were being "lumped in" with such
other dictatorships as "Zimbabwe and Burma," Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch, Reporters without Borders, and a host of
lesser-known human and civil rights groups in the Atlantic
Community all issued shocked press releases. Mr. Straw's comments
baffled human rights activists across Europe who can document quite
exactly how the Chinese communist regime parallels the Burmese and
Zimbabwean despotisms.
E.U. leaders tried
to persuade their Chinese counterparts at the Brussels summit to
ease up on political and religious repression. They pointed to the
"importance of concrete steps in the field of human rights and
reaffirmed their commitment to further enhance co-operation and
exchanges in this field on the basis of equality and mutual
respect" and hinted that "concrete steps" were needed to help
justify easing the arms ban.
Frustrated Chinese
leaders quickly followed up with a series of "concrete steps." Two
days later, Beijing ordered the arrest of a well-known Protestant
"house-church" pastor in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou.
Four days later, police detained three well-known dissident
writers. After their release, the writers told American friends,
police were stationed outside their doors and followed them and
their families wherever they went, "walking just two or three steps
behind." On December 20, The New York Times reported that Li
Boguang, a prominent human rights activist who has aided farmers in
lawsuits against the government, had been arrested. The same day,
Chen Ming, editor of the underground samizdat magazine China
Reform, was taken away by police. On Christmas Eve, Chinese
police detained another veteran dissident writer, Yang Tianshui, in
what had clearly become a post-summit crackdown on independent
intellectuals. On January 6, police arrested 69-year old Roman
Catholic bishop Jia Zhiguo, who at least was grateful that he had
been able to spend Christmas with his flock. And these were only
the cases that were reported in the Western press.
Steps for the
Administration and Congress
If Bush
Administration diplomats truly want to derail the E.U.'s efforts to
lift the embargo, they should:
- Ignore the
European Commission in Brussels, where France and Germany dominate,
and focus on E.U. member states, particularly the new ones that
still feel the sting of communist tyranny. The embargo will remain
in place as long as even a handful of members deny that there is a
"consensus" to lift it.
- Focus on the
fact that the E.U. arms embargo was levied on Beijing for massive
human rights abuses in 1989 and that since then the human rights
situation in China has only gotten worse. Lifting the embargo will
do nothing except tell the Chinese people the Europe has forgotten
Tiananmen.
- Highlight
China's record of conventional arms transfers to the third world,
which have become a threat to Europe's armed forces. European
countries have participated in peacekeeping operations in several
of China's conventional weapons customers, such as Zaire, Sudan,
Rwanda, Ivory Coast, and Zimbabwe (and even Liberia, which had
diplomatic ties with Taiwan).
- Finally, insist
that dialogue on China be a part of all Atlantic Alliance strategic
consultations and explore modalities for multilateral coordination
of arms export policies.
Meanwhile,
Congress should:
- Pass language
similar to that proposed last year to prohibit the Defense
Department from buying products from foreign defense companies that
sell China items similar to those found on the U.S. Munitions List
for a period of five years.
John J. Tkacik,
Jr., is Research Fellow in China Policy in the Asian Studies Center
at The Heritage Foundation.