Partners In Arms?:
Chinese President Hu welcomes French counterpart Chirac to Beijing
Posted Sunday, October 10, 2004; 12.57 BST
For France, especially, the potential of a strategic relationship between Europe and China is too delicious to pass up. Certainly, the opportunity to sell couture and nuclear-power technology to the Chinese was the prime motivation for Chirac's state visit. But it also offers the chance to breathe life into Chirac's Gaullist dream of a multipolar world in which the cultural, economic and political power of the U.S. is reined in by others. Chirac reminds listeners that he himself first met Deng Xiaoping, the architect of modern China, as early as 1975. (Deng, Chirac told the People's Daily in August, saw French-Chinese relations as the "cornerstone of China's foreign policy.") When Hu visited France last January, he got the whole bulldozer treatment from Chirac: the Eiffel Tower lit up in red, a parade up the Champs Elysées and every other sign of affection the French President could muster. One, in particular, pleased the Chinese. At a press conference with Hu, Chirac stated his opposition to the E.U. embargo on selling arms to China, imposed after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. "The embargo," said Chirac, in terms he has used in the months since, "no longer corresponds at all with the realities of the contemporary world."
For the U.S., desperate not to tip the balance of Asia's military power China's way, a decision by the E.U. to lift the embargo would be evidence that multipolarity was more than just a mouthful — that it had real implications. "Both China and Europe," writes Shambaugh, "seek ways to constrain American power." But a closer look at the arms embargo shows the limits to a strategic relationship between the E.U. and China. A top official at the European Council says flatly that there is "very little prospect" of the embargo being lifted this year. The reason is simple: France and Europe are not coterminous; however much Paris (and Berlin) might want to sell arms to China, other European capitals do not. The British don't want to upset the Americans, while the Scandinavians, whose concerns for human rights in China have a political weight uncharacteristic of the rest of Europe, are adamantly opposed. A top official from Europe's biggest arms company says that "it would be big news to me" if the embargo was lifted. Schröder and Chirac, he says, seem to bring the subject up only "when there's a Chinese official within earshot."
If Europe's divisions are one reason why its Asian love affair may turn out to be somewhat less orgasmic than some hope, the continuing strength of the U.S. in the region is another. Beijing may want to talk to people other than Americans; but that is not the same thing as saying that the Chinese leadership doesn't realize that it has to talk to Americans first. The U.S. is just too present in Asia, too much a guarantor of the balance of power, to be ignored. It is the U.S. Seventh Fleet (the E.U. doesn't have a First one) that is based in Japan, the U.S. whose troops are a trip wire against catastrophe on the Korean peninsula, the U.S. to whom China has to talk if it wants to moderate those in Taiwan who dream of independence. And it is the U.S. — certainly not any European nation — that has a strategic relationship with Japan, still the world's second-largest economy.
Nor are U.S. companies slouches when it comes to Asian trade. Asians may love Louis Vuitton bags — but they love American pizzazz, too. In Hanoi, Chirac said that a world shaped solely by U.S. cultural values would be an "ecological catastrophe." Alas, that's just one more reason why he should have stopped by Macao. In the city of the old Jesuit priests, the waterfront is now dominated not by churches but by a huge new U.S.-owned casino, brimming with Chinese. For the millions of Chinese just now learning to enjoy prosperity, a clone of Las Vegas on the shores of the South China Sea still seems to trump an Eiffel Tower bathed in red. Europe may be wildly in love with China, but China — as it always has — is playing hard to get.
With reporting by Matthew Forney/Beijing, James Graff/Paris and Kay Johnson/Hanoi
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that there is "very little prospect" of the embargo being lifted this year. The reason is simple: France and Europe are not coterminous; however much Paris (and Berlin) might want to sell arms to China, other European capitals do not. The British don't want to upset the Americans, while the Scandinavians, whose concerns for human rights in China have a political weight uncharacteristic of the rest of Europe, are adamantly opposed. A top official from Europe's biggest arms company says that "it would be big news to me" if the embargo was lifted. Schröder and Chirac, he says, seem to bring the subject up only "when there's a Chinese official within earshot." 
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