With Concessions and Deals, China’s Leader Tries
to Box Out Biden
Xi Jinping has been making trade agreements in Asia
and now Europe, hoping to head off the incoming president’s efforts to rally a
united front against China.
Steven Lee
Myers
By Steven
Lee Myers
Jan. 3,
2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
A trade
pact with 14 other Asian nations. A pledge to join other countries in reducing
carbon emissions to fight global warming. Now, an investment agreement with the
European Union.
China’s
leader, Xi Jinping, has in recent weeks made deals and pledges that he hopes
will position his country as an indispensable global leader, even after its
handling of the coronavirus and increased belligerence at home and abroad have
damaged its international standing.
In doing
so, he has underlined how difficult it will be for President-elect Joseph R.
Biden Jr. to forge a united front with allies against China’s authoritarian
policies and trade practices, a central focus of the new administration’s plan
to compete with Beijing and check its rising power. The image of Mr. Xi joining
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, President Emmanuel Macron of France and
other European leaders in a conference call on Wednesday to seal the deal with
the European Union also amounted to a stinging rebuke of the Trump
administration’s efforts to isolate China’s Communist Party state.
The deals
show the leverage Mr. Xi has because of the strength of the Chinese economy,
which is now the fastest-growing among major nations as the world continues to
struggle with the pandemic.
Noah
Barkin, a China expert in Berlin with the Rhodium Group, called the investment
agreement in particular “a geopolitical coup for China.” Chinese companies
already enjoyed greater access to European markets — a core complaint in Europe
— so they won only modest openings in manufacturing and the growing market for
renewable energies. The real achievement for China is diplomatic.
China had
to make only modest concessions to overcome increasingly vocal concerns about
China’s harshest policies, including the crackdown on Hong Kong and the mass
detentions and forced labor of Uighurs in Xinjiang, the western Chinese region.
China
agreed, at least on paper, to loosen many of the restrictions imposed on
European companies working in China, open up China to European banks and
observe international standards on forced labor. The question is whether the
pledges can be enforced.
To China’s
critics, Mr. Xi’s moves have been tactical — even cynical. Yet they have also
proved successful to a degree that seemed impossible only a few months ago,
when several European countries became more outspoken in opposing China.
“It would
be wrong to see these Chinese concessions as a significant shift in policy,” Mr.
Barkin said. “Over the past year, we have seen the party tighten its grip over
the economy, double down on state-owned enterprises and launch a new push for
self-reliance. That is the direction of policy that Xi has mapped out and it
would be naïve to believe that this deal will change that.”
Instead,
China has demonstrated once again that it pays little or no diplomatic cost for
abuses that violate European values. The Europeans finalized the investment
agreement, for example, a day after the European Union publicly criticized the
harsh prison sentence handed down to a Chinese lawyer who reported on the
initial coronavirus outbreak in the city of Wuhan.
Australia
faced a similar trade-off in November when it signed up for the Asian trade
pact, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, even as China waged a
campaign of economic coercion against the country.
China’s
vast economic and diplomatic influence, especially at this time of global
crisis, means that countries feel they have little choice but to engage with
it, regardless of their unease over the character of Mr. Xi’s hard-line rule.
The Asian trade pact, for example, while limited in scope, covers more of
humanity — 2.2 billion people — than any previous one.
“The values
we all cherish in our Sunday sermons must be adhered to if we are not to fall
victim to a new systemic rival,” said Reinhard Bütikofer, a German member of
the European Parliament who has spoken out against the European investment
agreement with China.
“I think
the understanding is increasing,” he added, “but how to respond is not yet
clear.”
China’s
overtures will not end the anger over its repressive policies, including its
documented use of forced labor. They could mollify China’s critics, though, by
using the lure of commercial profit in a country whose economy has rebounded
from the pandemic more robustly than others’ have.
That would
also undercut Mr. Biden, who already must overcome four years of frustration in
Europe over President Trump’s go-it-alone approach as he confronts China’s
actions at home and abroad.
“I think
now is a very good window for us,” said Wang Huiyao, president of the Center
for China and Globalization, a think tank in Beijing. He said China could serve
as a model and as a partner in cooperation, and suggested that Europe could
play a moderating role between China and the United States.
“Everyone
has seen China’s resilience, its vitality, tenacity and its stability,
especially through its fight against the epidemic,” he said.
Mr. Xi, of
course, has not acknowledged that any of China’s policies have eroded global
trust. Nor have officials signaled any reconsideration of its core policies.
The
country’s “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy, named after a pair of jingoistic action
movies, shows no sign of relenting. Australia still faces China’s wrath, as
does Canada over the detention of the chief financial officer of the Chinese
technology giant Huawei at the behest of the United States.
“I think
they have a selective approach to mending their image,” said Minxin Pei, a
professor at Claremont McKenna College in California.
Over the long
term, it remains to be seen how significantly China’s pacts and pledges will
improve its international image, which plummeted this year because of its
obfuscation over the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.
A survey by
the Pew Research Center in October found that in 14 economically advanced
countries, unfavorable attitudes toward China had reached their highest levels
in more than a decade. A median of 78 percent of those surveyed said they had
little or no confidence that Mr. Xi would do the right thing in world affairs.
(One upside for Mr. Xi: 89 percent felt the same way about Mr. Trump.)
China’s
economic recovery has nonetheless given Mr. Xi a diplomatic opening, and he has
seized it. Mr. Xi’s pledges to accelerate China’s reduction of carbon emissions,
which he began making in September, have won international plaudits, even if
the government has yet to detail how it will wean itself from coal and other
heavily polluting industries.
Around the
same time, Mr. Xi showed renewed interest in wrapping up discussions for the
European investment agreement, which had been dragging on for seven years. Only
months before, a deal seemed all but dead amid rising animosity toward China in
Europe. “Real differences exist, and we won’t paper over them,” Charles Michel,
the president of the European Council, said in September.
A
breakthrough came after the American presidential election. Mr. Trump showed
disdain for America’s traditional allies in Europe and Asia, but Mr. Biden has
pledged to galvanize a coalition to confront the economic, diplomatic and
military challenges that China poses.
China
clearly foresaw the potential threat.
Only two
weeks after the election, China joined the 14 other Asian nations in signing
the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. In early December, after phone
calls with Ms. Merkel and Mr. Macron, Mr. Xi pushed to finish the investment
agreement with the Europeans.
The
prospect raised alarm, both in Europe and in the United States. Mr. Biden’s
incoming national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, took to Twitter to hint
strongly that Europe should first wait for consultations with the new
administration — to no avail.
Critics
said the deal would bind Europe’s economy even more closely with China’s,
helping Beijing expand its economic might and deflect external pressure to open
up its party-state-driven economy.
They said
the agreement failed to do enough to address China’s abuses of human rights,
including labor rights. The promise that negotiators extracted from China on
that issue — to “make continued and sustained efforts” to ratify two
international conventions on forced labor — assumes China will act in good
faith. China, critics were quick to point out, has not kept all the promises it
made when it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
The
investment agreement must be ratified by the European Parliament before it can
take effect, and it faces signification opposition that could derail it. For
now, Chinese officials have celebrated a deal that Mr. Xi called “balanced,
high-standard and mutually beneficial.”
“The
Chinese leadership is concerned about a trans-Atlantic front, a multinational
front, against it, and it is willing to make, I think, tactical concessions to
bring the Europeans on board,” Mr. Barkin of the Rhodium Group said. “They’ve
been very smart about this.”
Claire Fu
contributed research.
Steven Lee
Myers is the Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times. He joined The Times
in 1989 and has previously worked as a correspondent in Moscow, Baghdad and
Washington. He is the author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir
Putin,” published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2015. @stevenleemyers • Facebook
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário