The Diplomat: China Doesn’t Understand Europe, and It Shows

 While his tour was designed to improve China’s post-pandemic image in Europe, some of Wang’s statements only made things worse for China. In Norway, while answering a question about the Nobel Peace Prize and Hong Kong, Wang said that China won’t allow the politicization of the Nobel Prize by interfering in China’s internal affairs — a response that many in the West read as a Chinese threat against awarding the Nobel Prize to Hong Kong protesters. Later, while in Germany, Wang criticized the Czech Senate President Milos Vystrcil’s visit to Taiwan and warned that it would incur a “heavy price” — another threat against a European country for doing something considered normal in a democratic state.[...]

China’s run of European mistakes started in 2012, when it decided to set up the 16+1 mechanism with the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, among them both EU members and non-members. Back then, China’s decision was watched with suspicion in Brussels and with every step China has taken in the CEE region the European Union’s fear of division has increased. While the EU seems to have gotten over the 2018 Visegrad (V4) moment, when China inaugurated a V4+China format for meetings with Hungary, Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia, and Wang even praised the V4 as the EU’s “most dynamic force,” things changed a lot in 2019. Two crucial moments were Italy’s decision to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Greece’s addition to the 16+1. [...]

Moments like these have shown that China doesn’t understand the EU at all. While world powers no longer create agreements like the Treaty of Tordesillas, the idea of spheres of influence still exists in their minds. Sixteen formerly communist CEE countries teaming up with a communist great power set off alarm bells in Brussels. The EU doesn’t want any new “Berlin Walls” and it definitely doesn’t want to swap out Russian influence with Chinese in the CEE region, creating a new Iron Curtain. The European Union’s fear of division was mainly generated by China, which failed to understand how sensitive and important this subject is for Brussels. [...]

Sometimes, China doesn’t even seem to understand the basics of the European Union. The EU is a supranational entity, which receives its mandate from all 27 EU member-states, yet remains separate from the national institutions of each member state. The members of the European Parliament, although they come from each EU country, represent not their countries, but the EU. China’s failure to grasp the bloc’s basic structure became clear when it scolded the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs after an Estonian member of the European Parliament went to Taiwan.

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The Conversation: How China lost central and eastern Europe

Bulgaria is not the only country in the region to have qualms about China. In the Czech Republic, Prague city council ended its sister-city relationship with Beijing in October 2019 in favour of a partnership with Taipei. The president of the senate then announced plans to visit Taiwan in August in defiance of China.

In May, the Lithuanian foreign minister called for Taiwan to be reinstated to the World Health Organization. The same month, CEE officials were among signatories of a protest letter against China’s introduction of national security legislation in Hong Kong. [...]

First, China has not fulfilled the lavish promises it made to the region for large-scale investments. Chinese foreign direct investment in the EU peaked in 2016 at US$43 billion, then plummeted back to 2012 levels in 2019, with the expectation that 2020 would be even lower. [....]

Second, growing frustration with their marginalisation has led CEE countries to reflect on their political identity. In particular, the wave of recent protests in Hong Kong brought back memories of their own fight against Soviet control. Hongkongers’ use of tactics developed by eastern-European dissidents – such as the Lennon Wall and the Baltic Way – resonated in the region. [...]

Third, CEE countries have grown wary of the political risks associated with their bonhomie with China, amid growing criticism from the EU and US over the past few years. For some, this reassessment has been associated with the tech cold war between the US and China. Following pressure from Washington, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania and Estonia have indicated they will ban Chinese firm Huawei from the construction of their 5G networks.

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The Atlantic: Tillerson to Latin America: Beware of China

China’s trade with and investment in the region deepened at around the time of the great recession of 2008. Between 2015 and 2019, it plans to invest $250 billion in direct investment in the region and about $500 billion in trade. It’s well on its way: China is already the largest trading partner of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru.

As I’ve previously written, countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have a hard time securing international financing because of poor governance, corruption, and their economic policies. But China goes to them, builds desperately needed roads, railways, and ports, and uses these new facilities to transport raw material to feed its growing economy and population. China is an attractive investor not only because it has a policy of non-interference in the domestic affairs of its partner countries but because its projects are completed at a speed that developing nations are unused to. More importantly, perhaps, it offers to finance these projects on easy terms. But there’s always a catch, Tillerson said Thursday at the University of Texas, his alma mater. [...]

“China is experimenting with market-based solutions, and moving incrementally in its international economic efforts, much as it did during its domestic development,” he wrote. “Its approach to global economic affairs appears to be more pragmatic than ideological—and may be more likely to defend than upend the liberal economic order.”

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The Atlantic: Why China Isn't Doing More to Stop North Korea

China has, in fact, proposed a plan for solving the North Korea problem. As part of an approach that it calls “suspension for suspension,” the Chinese government has offered to broker a deal in which North Korea suspends its rapidly advancing nuclear and missile programs in exchange for the United States suspending its regular military exercises with South Korea, as a prelude to negotiations to eventually rid the North of nuclear weapons. [...]

Whereas U.S. officials want North Korea to renounce nuclear weapons—or at least take steps toward “denuclearization”—as a precondition for talks, Chinese officials consider denuclearization an end goal of negotiations, not a starting point. Whereas U.S. officials see North Korean militancy as the sole threat to security on the Korean peninsula, Chinese officials perceive North Korean and American provocations as twin threats—“two accelerating trains coming toward each other” and refusing “to give way,” in the words of China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi. Whereas U.S. officials identify China as the central actor in the peninsular drama, holding the fate of North Korea in its hands, Chinese officials place their country just off-stage, merely directing feuding parties toward peace. While U.S. officials experiment with ways to exert pressure on North Korea, Chinese officials seek out pressure-relief valves. U.S. officials worry that nuclear negotiations with North Korea, which have backfired in the past, are a trap; Chinese officials claim dialogue is the only way out of the crisis. (Chinese embassy officials declined to comment on the record for this story.) [...]

The main form of pressure under discussion is economic. Trump’s Treasury Department recently imposed sanctions on a Chinese bank for allegedly laundering money for North Korea, and the administration is mulling further “secondary sanctions” on Chinese companies that do business with the North Korean government. It has also floated a range of punitive trade policies, from a tariff on steel imports to retaliation against Chinese intellectual-property violations. U.S. officials have long avoided such actions out of concern that punishing China would make it less cooperative, not more, on North Korea. But Anthony Ruggiero, a sanctions expert and former Treasury Department official, argues that this analysis misses the way that targeted financial measures work. Beyond drying up funding for North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program, he has written, economic penalties could, for instance, “drive a wedge between Chinese banks that covet their access to the U.S. financial system and Chinese leaders who indulge North Korea. If the banks fear they will be the next target of U.S. sanctions, they will pressure political leaders to change course.” (There’s recent precedent for this: The U.S. sanctions campaign to contain the Iranian nuclear program coerced China into reducing its trade and financial ties with Iran.) [...]

Even if Trump were to go all in on pressuring China, it’s far from clear that doing so would achieve the desired result: the dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program. That’s in part because of an additional disconnect in how China and America assess and rank the threats posed by North Korea. As Jennifer Lind of Dartmouth College has pointed out, North Korea is presently a national-security priority for U.S. officials because Kim Jong Un is building missiles that could carry a nuclear device to the United States, but Chinese officials don’t share that sense of urgency. North Korea has possessed nuclear weapons and shorter-range missiles that can hit China for years now. And while China opposes North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program, its top security concern with regard to North Korea is something different: the collapse of Kim Jong Un’s government creating chaos in the North, which in turn could produce a refugee crisis, loose nukes, and an opportunity for the U.S. military presence in the region to expand right up to China’s borders. The Chinese government is therefore unlikely to crack down on North Korea to the extent the Trump administration wants, no matter how much pressure the United States applies, since that could lead to Kim’s downfall. Why would the Chinese fulfill America’s dreams only to usher in China’s nightmares?

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Business Insider: How the impeachment of South Korea's leader can heal its rift with China

Eight lawmakers from the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) landed in China this week to meet China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, and other top officials to convey their belief that the decision to deploy THAAD should be left to the next president.

Their visit, which came even as the South Korean defence minister, Han Min-koo, reiterated Seoul’s commitment to THAAD, has fuelled speculation that the deployment of the system is not yet a done deal. The DPK’s Moon Jae-in, who is the favourite in this year’s presidential election, has already suggested rethinking the deployment.

China is concerned that even thought a THAAD system on South Korean soil would not be able to intercept Chinese missiles, its X-band radar surveillance system would be able to monitor missile tests on its northern and eastern coasts. [...]

On December 22, the Constitutional Court of Korea began a six-month-long hearing to decide whether to accept or reject Park’s impeachment. A presidential election, previously scheduled for the end of 2017, could be brought forward if the court upholds the impeachment vote. Even disregarding that vote, Park’s prospects look dimmer by the day – already she has been abandoned by 29 of the lawmakers in her ruling Saenuri party, which had previously held 128 of the 300 seats in parliament.

Any successor to Park would be “very likely” to delay the deployment of Thaad, said Zhang.

The DPK’s Moon, who lost the last presidential election to Park by 3 percentage points, has already added uncertainty to the THAAD debate by saying the next administration should reconsider the deployment.

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