Summary
This slender, compact work sets out to assess the differences and convergences between the China policies of the United States and the European Union (EU). This large-sized volume (A4 paper) brings together papers given at a conference organised by the publishing institution in February 2008 and reflects the state of American and Europeans relations with China on the eve of the Beijing Olympics, the election of Barack Obama, and the world financial crisis. In this sense, this collection of short articles is to be understood in a particular historical frame. As the subtitle suggests, the book is designed more to influence the policies of the governments concerned than to provide one more contribution to the already abundant literature on China-US and China-EU relations.
That said, the chapters here presented, written by some of the leading experts on both sides of the Atlantic on China’s foreign policy and security, are still relevant and full of insight concerning the uncertain period that we are now entering. They cast light on some of the well-known structural differences between the American and European approaches to China. Given its strategic role in the Asia-Pacific region, Washington cannot but see Beijing through a prism in which the contentious issues of Taiwan, the military modernisation of the People’s Liberation Army, and the rise of China in the region counterbalance commercial and political issues such as human rights and good governance, indeed often pushing them into the background, and the temptation to contain the People’s Republic remains a factor in North America.
Conversely, the EU sees China first and foremost as an economic and diplomatic partner whose internal development is to be encouraged, as is its integration into the international community. In other words, for a long time the EU demonstrated an inability to formulate a China policy that would take account of security questions. This was clearly demonstrated in 2003 by the willingness of France and Germany to lift the embargo on arms sales to China that had been adopted post-Tiananmen. The reasons put forward by Gerhard Schröder and Jacques Chirac at the time were the relative improvement in the country’s human rights record, but in the process they forgot to take note of the change in the balance of forces in the Taiwan Strait and China’s rapid military modernisation.