Twenty-twenty was the year in which the peak of Xi Jinping’s geopolitical illegality and domestic abuse occurred. However, the year ended with a free gift from the European Union to Beijing in the form of a unilateral, opaque and misleading investment agreement. The Europeans betrayed their American ally, not to mention their own values.
During seven years of work, but suspended by the pandemic, the agreement was concluded by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen. They insist the agreement simultaneously upholds “our interests” and “promotes our core values,” as Von de Leyen said.
But the draft confirms what anyone familiar with China’s behavior over the past decade should know by now: that is, that Brussels sacrificed European values to promote economic interests, marginal way.
Yes, the agreement will open up new service industries for European investors, hamper technology transfers and add some transparency to state-owned enterprises and other forms of market matching. The EU has hailed these modest concessions from China’s state capitalist apparatus as major victories, but most were already underway – and could have been achieved without betraying human rights if Europeans had included the United States. as a third partner.
As it stands, the deal will surely disappoint on its own terms, leaving European newcomers to the Chinese economy complaining of an uneven gaming environment in the industries that this deal opens up to investment, such as electric vehicles, consumer finance and private hospitals. While Chinese giants are allowed to raise capital and litigate at home, European companies will remain largely hostage in a rigged game, in which the thumb of the Chinese state is put on the scales.
And for what? The EU is basically prepared to expose its routine preaching on human rights as cheap talk in exchange for more serious margins for vehicle manufacturers, consumer goods manufacturers and other largely German multinationals. Meanwhile, the deal recently counteracted the mass slavery of the communist regime of its Muslim minorities. At best, it will kill the ongoing efforts of China’s human rights defenders and hawks in the European Parliament to deliver the continent’s supply chains of Uyghur forced labor. At worst, it will incorporate some new European companies into the same blood-stained value chains.
The official text calls on China to comply with a number of provisions of the International Labor Organization that it has already ratified without providing any enforcement mechanism to control behavior on the ground. China is both the founding signatory of the ILO and the world capital of modern slavery. Therefore, getting Europeans to ratify Beijing on additional ILO provisions can only be pointless.
The deal comes just as the Trump administration, wedged in China, walks out the door. President-elect Joe Biden and his clandestine foreign policy, although historically unresponsive in Beijing, have indicated that they prefer a joint transatlantic approach to China. But Europeans could not wait to see what the new regime could mean in Washington.
Proponents of the agreement say the EU should not be responsible for not partnering with an ally. China’s own policy has not been stable among administrations. They also argue that getting caught up in the rivalry between China and the United States is not a long-term interest in Europe. But European duplicity is, or should be, obvious to the Biden team, despite the typical demand of Democrats for European goodwill.
In the post-COVID world, market manipulations and domestic abuses in China are unlikely to decrease and may even worsen. In this context, the EU’s race to reduce an agreement says something, something disastrous, about America’s European “strategic autonomy”, the buzzword first floated by French President Emmanuel Macron and now flying for Brussels.
Yes, the deal won’t take effect another year, but two weeks is all the time Biden has to figure out how to react, not an enviable position for the free world leader. Biden could take a page from his predecessor. President Trump’s China’s skeptical instincts and his distrust of Europeans seem vindicated: Xi is as bad as he insisted, and Angela Merkel’s Eurocracy has been exposed as a stain of exhaustion.
The democratic West needs a single backbone. Hopefully Biden has it.
Jorge González-Gallarza is an associate researcher at the Civic Foundation.
Twitter: @JorgeGGallarza