What Does the EU Want, A Well Behaving China or a China That Runs Ropes Around It?

Phar Kim Beng
Founder/Chair
Strategic Pan Indo-Pacific Arena
Strategicpipa.org
Twitter: @indo_pan
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Strategicpipa
What Does the EU Want, A Well Behaving China or a China That Runs Ropes Around It?
By Phar Kim Beng
Founder CEO
Strategic Pan Indo-Pacific Arena
Trade agreements are shaped by market access; the larger the better. Their benefits are obvious and clear. Back in 1953, 23 countries gathered together to form the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs.
Prior to that the Treaty of Rome helped France and Germany to reconcile their “existential” differences, which had often triggered both sides to go in war in the Franco-Prussian conflict, World War I and World War II. In all these agreements, the West flourished from them, together with it Japan.
By 1960, of the development economic theories that were abound, including one by Eugene Rostow, who argued that all economies must have the proper infrastructure and systems of banking before they can “take off” together, one of the most powerful theories yet was the Akamatsu thesis: Japan would take off first, invariably, by exporting their goods to the US, even service members of the US caught in the Vietnam War, and the the rest of Asia would follow in a reverse “flying geese formation”.
The benefits seen in East Asia lead the World Bank to refer to the region as a “miracle” as hardly one percent of a region could prosper together.
Economists like Jhagdish Bhagwatti at Columbia University, an advisor to the late Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations (UN), further urged more countries to jump on board to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
Trade for the better word was an instrument to defuse human conflicts, to get all nation-states entwined in some form of what Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane at Harvard University once called “complex interdependence”. Trade functions as the operational source code of mutually assured transactions (MAT).
But look deeper, the current conflict between China and Australia, perhaps Korea and Japan a few years ago, have all been marked by the initial ebullience of trade, especially given the size of the Chinese economy. But at every turn of the way, when China needs to underscore some diplomatic points, to prevent its own regime from going all wobbly, Beijing has never shied away from “weaponizing” trade. This ranges from asking its citizens not to visit or study in the countries all the way to slapping egregious tariffs up to 90 per cent on their barley and wine; as was the conundrum now faced by Australia.
The EU is at its weakest moment ever, what with wave after wave of pandemic that can be endemic, with mutation of the Sars Cov II in the background. Countries like Hungary, Austria, Poland and Denmark have also been attracted by the ideology of the far right.
The EU should have tried to set its house in order before signing any investment agreement with China, an entity known to have the temerity to walk away from any iron clad agreement, as had been witnessed in Hong Kong. Even the minority rights of Tibetans and Uyghur Muslims are trampled over.
The Council of Europe and the European Commission had prior to the agreement with China described it as a “systemic rival”. If one already has the premonition of defining the other in unsavory terms, it boggles the mind why the EU would want to conclude an investment agreement with China before President Elect Joseph Biden had formed his team, and consolidated the Transatlantic Relationship? As for the promise of China to behave according to the norms of the International Labor Organization, with the provision to sign the covenant of the international civil and political rights in March 2021, it further undermines the coherence of the EU to let the much dreaded National Security Law remain in place. When in a hole, stop digging. The EU just dug a deeper one for itself. As ever so often, rational calculation of cost and benefits has obscured the nature of the opposing regime.