EUROPEAN DIARY:Plaudits for Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo reflected the EU's desire to avoid offending China, writes ARTHUR BEESLEY
JOSÉ MANUEL Barroso, chief of the EU Commission, was quick from the traps when the Nobel Peace Prize went to Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese democracy campaigner. The award was a strong message of support to all who struggle for freedom and human rights, he said.
Liu, a writer, is serving an 11-year prison sentence for subversion. Absent from Barroso’s statement was any plea for Liu’s release from the tiny cell he shares with five ordinary criminals in a provincial jail.
When EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton sent her congratulations it was the same. The baroness simply said she hoped Liu “will be able to receive his prize in person”.
It was as if she was speaking into a wide end of her megaphone. Liu is not due for release until December 2020.
It was rather craven stuff, and seemingly reflects a desire to avoid giving offence to people in Beijing who wield increasing influence in the European economy and in global affairs generally.
It was pragmatic, not at all pretty, and a clear reflection that China’s policy of downgrading human rights issues in global diplomatic debate is bearing fruit.
When it comes to China, Europe’s interests lie elsewhere. For the measure of that look only to exchanges in Brussels last week when Chinese premier Wen Jiabao attended an Asia-Europe summit and a separate EU-China summit.
Both events were dominated by public disagreement over China’s policy of keeping the yuan, or renminbi, artificially low, something that puts its advanced trading partners at a comparative disadvantage.
Critics argue that the weakness of the Chinese currency damages employment and competitiveness in Europe and the US because goods produced there are cheaper to sell.
Hence demands from a succession of western leaders for a loosening of the policy cap that limits the yuan’s gains in global markets. This is far from a theoretical debate. EU leaders are anxious that the rising value of the euro will stifle the nascent recovery of the European economy.
But Wen has no intention of backing down. On his arrival in Brussels he spoke only of keeping “the exchange rates of major reserve currencies relatively stable”, but the message was one that was heard loud and clear. After two days of lectures from his interlocutors, he delivered a riposte in blunter terms. “Do not work to pressurise us on the renminbi rate,” he said.
While China will proceed with reforms, the yuan will not rise rapidly. “Many of our exporting companies would have to close down, migrant workers would have to return to their villages. If China saw social and economic turbulence, then it would be a disaster for the world.”
Unsaid here is the fact that such turbulence could be a disaster to China’s ruling Communist Party, whose policy of economic expansion comes hand-in-hand with the ruthless suppression of political dissent.
The creation of a quasi-market economy has lifted hundreds of millions from poverty, created dependence in the western world on its cheap labour and given China a pivotal position in global affairs.
The figures are clear. Trade between the EU and China, €4 billion in 1978, reached €296 billion last year. The EU is now China’s most important trading partner and China is second only to the US in terms of the EU’s own trade.
Although there are limits to China’s potential for growth, the odds are in many ways stacked in its favour because of its low cost base and the abundant availability of cheap labour.
Thus China is emboldened, increasingly impervious to the clamour for human rights and democracy within its borders and apt to describe same as attempts to impose western values on it.
By way of an easy example, China’s foreign ministry decried the award of the Nobel prize to Liu as an “obscenity” that ran contrary to the aims of the prize.
“Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial authorities for violating Chinese law.”
Liu’s crimes are worth recalling. In a two-hour trial last December, he was convicted for writing nine essays critical of the government and for helping to craft a reformist manifesto called Charter ’08. He had exceeded his (limited) right to free expression.
There was more than a touch of that mentality in Brussels last week when the Chinese authorities abruptly cancelled a scheduled press conference at the end of the EU-China summit. Wen had been due to take questions alongside Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council.
There was a nasty underside to this. Four journalists from independent Chinese media were initially refused access to the European Council headquarters after Chinese representatives claimed they posed a security risk.
While the four were ultimately admitted, Wen kept away from journalists. Neither Barroso nor Van Rompuy went to the press room and the commission is still insisting that the press event did not go head because the summit ran over time.
Feeble is not the word.