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In pole position: Sales staff stand near the Seagull electric vehicle from BYD at a showroom in Beijing. The car, launched last year, sells for around US$12,000 in China and rivals US-made EVs that cost three times as much. — AP
HONG KONG: Ten years ago almost to the day, while checking out a handful of luxury sedans from one of China’s largest automakers SAIC Motor Corp, President Xi Jinping gave a pivotal speech that would set China on the course to dominate the electric vehicle (EV) industry.
The path to becoming a strong automaking nation lies in developing new-energy vehicles, Xi said, according to a 2014 Xinhua report.
Claiming a head start, or “high ground,” in this sector is key to the competition globally, Xi said.
In 2014, China sold around 75,000 EVs and hybrids, and exported about 533,000 cars.
The domestic market was dominated by international manufacturers such as Volkswagen AG and General Motors Co, which were allowed to enter by forming joint ventures with local players in the 1980s and 1990s.
This helped China transform from a bike-riding nation to a car-driving one.
Homegrown carmakers and brands that didn’t work with foreign partners were seen as inferior and lagging behind in engine and other automotive technology.
To get ahead and tackle environmental challenges, Beijing bet on fuel efficient and alternative energy vehicles.
The state had published a guideline in 2012 that established ways to develop the industry by setting sales goals, providing subsidies and allocating resources for building charging infrastructure, among other things.
Xi’s speech two years later signalled China’s determination to use this as a way leapfrog traditional Western and Asian auto powerhouses, in particular Japan, home to Toyota Motor Corp.
With the stage set, China needed a catalyst to spur consumer interest in EVs, which in the early 2010s were mostly cheap cars with short ranges.
That ended up being Tesla Inc, which became the first foreign automaker to set up a wholly owned operation in China.
With that special permission, Tesla completed its Shanghai factory in 2019. Its entry into the market motivated local players to come up with better EVs with longer ranges.
Fast forward to 2024, and China has become the world’s largest auto market and sells more electrified vehicles than any other country, with 9.5 million cars delivered last year.
It also controls the majority of the battery supply chain. Homegrown champion BYD Co dethroned Volkswagen to become the best-selling brand in China and in the last quarter of 2023, surpassed Tesla as the world’s largest producer of EVs.
China also overtook Japan as the largest auto exporter, sending 4.14 million units abroad with 1.55 million of them being EVs or plug-in hybrids.
The achievements proved that Beijing’s industrial policy and investments paid off. But they’re also adding to tensions with the West.
China’s success in EVs, which could disrupt traditional auto supply chains that employ millions of people, has become a key source of discomfort in Washington and Brussels.
As a price war at home and slowing growth drives Chinese automakers to search for buyers for its affordable and tech-laden EVs elsewhere, they’re running into trade barriers, especially in the European Union (EU) and the United States, which are meanwhile trying to develop their own EV supply chains.
Both have accused China of exporting its excess capacity.
The United States has quadrupled import tariffs on Chinese cars to more than 100%, while the EU is investigating Chinese EVs to see if there has been an unfair advantage from government subsidies.
Brazil recently removed a tax break on imported EVs and even Russia, arguably Beijing’s strongest ally and the largest destination for Chinese auto exports since the war with Ukraine, has asked Chinese carmakers to consider localising production.
Beijing has threatened to hit back, with the China Chamber of Commerce to the EU on May 22 saying that the import tariffs on cars with large engines may be raised to 25% from 15%.
There’s a June 5 deadline for the EU to inform Chinese EV exporters of preliminary findings and whether tariffs will be imposed.
SAIC, the state-owned manufacturer whose facility Xi visited 10 years ago, happens to be one of the three Chinese automakers, along with BYD and Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co, selected for further scrutiny by the EU in its anti-subsidy investigation.
SAIC owns the British-origin MG brand, which is one of the top selling EVs in Europe.
At an event marking the 10th anniversary of Xi’s speech last Friday, SAIC officials including chief engineer Zu Sijie said they’ve remembered the president’s instructions well, and the company has consistently innovated around technologies like smart driving and connected cars.
Li Zheng, the co-founder of SAIC Qingtao New Energy Technology Co, a battery startup backed by SAIC, took the opportunity to promise executives won’t be complacent as EV competition rises, noting that progress in solid-state batteries, which have a higher energy density and reduced fire risk, will be one way for China to maintain its edge.
“New-energy vehicles have become a strategic industry, fiercely contested by countries around world,” Li said. “They’re a key supporting force to our country’s revitalisation of green sectors.”
A lot can happen in 10 years, but with SAIC having invested about 150 billion yuan (US$21bil) into research and development over the past decade alone, even despite trade wars, 2034 looks bright. — Bloomberg
Liz Truss delivers a speech at an event to announce the winner of the Conservative Party leadership contest in central London on September 5,2022. Photo: AFP
Liz Truss is the new British Prime Minister. She beat her Conservative rival Rishi Sunak by tacking strongly to the right. No doubt the fact that she is white, and Sunak is brown, was also a major factor for the 170,000 overwhelmingly white Conservative Party members who voted. If Truss is to be taken at her word, she will be the most right-wing prime minister since Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
Each of the last four Conservative prime ministers has been more right-wing than their predecessor: in chronological order, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss. Truss wants to cut taxes, doesn't like the state, is hostile to redistribution, believes in trickle-down economics (that feathering the nests of the rich will ultimately help the poor), and is an anti-China hawk.
In being true to her beliefs, however, she faces a gargantuan problem. She is confronted with the worst economic crisis of any British prime minister since 1945. It is impossible to find any good news on the economic front. As a result of the war in Ukraine, the price of natural gas, which is the main source of domestic heating, is five times what it was a year ago and is predicted to carry on rising steeply. Without state intervention to hold down energy prices, around half the population will this winter be impoverished.
Inflation, which for most of this century has been at around 2 percent, is already at 11 percent, and is predicted to rise to 20 percent. Interest rates, which have similarly been very low, are rising rapidly, meaning much higher mortgage payments for homeowners. The Bank of England forecasts that the country will go into recession towards the end of this year, and some believe that it will continue until 2024.
With inflation now in double figures, workers are finding they are facing wage increases that are less than half the increase in prices: as a result, they are confronted with the prospect of sharply declining real wages over the next several years. There is growing industrial unrest which is likely to become increasingly widespread over the next year.
This is not just a short-term problem. Real wages are now just below the level they were in 2007, on the eve of the Western financial crisis. In other words, the British economy has been stagnating for the last 15 years and in the process has been falling behind its near neighbours Germany and France. One major think-tank is predicting that over the next two years Britain will experience the largest fall in average real incomes for over one hundred years.
It is inconceivable that Truss can tackle this nightmare scenario by cutting taxes, rolling back the state, and turning a blind eye to the poorest sections of the community. This will require state intervention and redistribution on the scale of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, otherwise the Conservative Party will surely lose the next general election in 2024. Truss faces a major dilemma: take the right-wing ideological route and court electoral disaster or follow a pragmatic road and swallow her ideological principles.
Even before the coming economic tsunami, there was a mood of frustration and dislocation, a feeling that the country no longer worked properly. Far from ushering in a new era of prosperity and efficiency, Brexit has become synonymous with labour shortages in many parts of the economy. This has been accentuated by the impact of COVID-19 which continues to disrupt the economy, most obviously in the form of chronic labour shortages in many sectors. Britain's most-loved institution, the National Health Service, is now on life-support, a result of being starved of money for many years and an increasingly chronic shortage of staff.
It is important to emphasise that Britain is now in a much inferior position than it was in 1979 when Thatcher first came to power. This is a weakness it shares more generally with the West and especially Western Europe. The Soviet bloc aside, the West for the most part dominated the world during the 1980s. Its influence and hinterland, however, are now much reduced because of the rise of China together with that of the developing world. A topical example will suffice to illustrate the point. Is the present spike in oil and gas prices, which are costing Western Europe dearly, a permanent or temporary phenomenon? It looks very likely that it will be the former, that Western Europe will be permanently disadvantaged, because Russia has found new markets, notably India and China, for its oil. Western Europe enjoys less economic power in the world and its room for manoeuvre has contracted. This is what being part of the declining part of the world means.
Finally, what will Truss mean for Britain's relations with China? There is no reason for optimism. Truss thinks of herself as a cold war warrior. She has strongly hinted that China will be designated a "threat" to national security and treated in the same way as Russia. The golden age in the relationship between Britain and China came to an end around five years ago and there is precious little chance of it returning for a long time to come.
The author was until recently a senior fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University. He is a visiting professor at the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University and a senior fellow at the China Institute, Fudan University. Follow him on twitter @martjacques. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn
Liz Truss will move in 10 Downing Street as she beat Rishi Sunak in the election on Monday to become the new leader of the
Conservative Party and the new UK Prime Minister. Analysts believed that this would ...
#Taiwan island is a province of #China. What does the #US
mean by “defense” ? : China will firmly strike back against acts
undermining China's sovereignty and security: Chinese FM commented after
US claimed the arms sale to Taiwan was for defensive purposes.
Life-long trauma: CIA mind control program victims speak out
;
Julie Tanny's father Charles Tanny Photo: Courtesy of Julie Tanny
Editor's Note: `
Among the victims of the CIA's MK Ultra project is the family of Julie Tanny (Tanny), whose father was coercively brainwashed as part of the Montreal Experiments in Canada back in the 1950s. The experiments were funded by the Canadian government and covertly in part by the CIA. She is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed against five defendants - the US government, the Canadian government, the McGill University health center, the Royal Victoria Hospital, and McGill University, as her family was irreparably destroyed by the program. She shared her story with the Global Times (GT) in a recent interview. ` GT: You father underwent brainwashing treatment for three months in 1957 by Dr. Ewen Cameron. Why did he go? ` Tanny: My father had what's called trigeminal neuralgia, which is a pain in the side of the face that goes into the jaw. Apparently, it's excruciating because I actually know somebody who has it and just recovered from it. `
They believed at the time that it was psychosomatic. So they sent him to a psychiatrist. My father was very against it, but he did whatever he had to do to get rid of the pain because he just couldn't function. `
The doctor that he went to see was working with Dr. Cameron on this program in the hospital, which we didn't know. He put my father into the programs. We don't know what they wanted to do with him, but we do know that his treatment was different in that my father was not a psychiatric patient. That's what made him different from all the other ones. ` GT: What "treatment" did he undergo? ` Tanny: What they did was as soon as he was admitted to the hospital, they immediately put him on insulin. My father was not a diabetic. I know that the insulin put him in a coma. It was part of the sleep treatment where they put him to sleep, and after it he was interviewed by the psychiatrist, then they would take clips of some of the things he said and run them on a tape, 24-7 under his pillow. It would be going around nonstop in his head, brainwashing him basically. But what they would do was they would give him shock treatments, but not the regular shock treatments they give today. These are called Page-Russells. It was a machine invented by a Mr. Page and Mr. Russell. It was about 75 times the strength of a regular shock treatment. It was designed to wipe out the brain. And the tape was to replace it with different thoughts. `
I don't really know what they were trying to do, but I know in my father's case, they said they had written notes like "this is as far as we can take him" or "we have to put him back in because he still has ties to his former life." It's hard to know, but whatever they were trying to do, it wasn't good. ` GT: How did you know these details? Did your father share what they did to him with you or did you acquire the information through other means? ` Tanny: No. What happened was I was about 5 years old at the time, so I definitely remember what he was like before and what he was like after - it was two different people. My father was very engaged and very hands-on with us. All his free time was spent with his children. And after he came home, he didn't even know who we were. When we were at my mother's for dinner in 1978, when it came on the news that Mrs. Orlikow, who was the wife of a member of parliament in Winnipeg, was suing the CIA and we were all sitting around watching the news and my mother turned to my brother and said, go to the hospital and get dad's records tomorrow. ` And I was like, what are you talking about? Because no one ever told us what happened to my father or why he changed so much. The problem with that was my father had a massive stroke in 1977 and was left unable to communicate. He couldn't speak, he couldn't write, he couldn't read. `
And once I had found out about really what happened to him in 1978, it was too late to have that conversation with him. So it was never talked about. Never. Even after we found out. ` GT: How severely did this affect you and your family? `
Tanny: I think that we started off as a very happy family with the father who was always busy, building a skating rink in the backyard and taking us to the ice rink in the park across the street, and taking us to the amusement park every now and then. `
And all that, everything ended when he came back from the hospital. He came back very angry - physically violent. I asked my brother, what was it like to grow up in our house? And he said empty. ` GT: What prompted your fight for justice? ` Tanny:A lot of things happened to push us to do this. First of all, when my father had his stroke, the doctors couldn't find a reason; he didn't have a blood clot or high blood pressure. What happened to him was he had an artery that collapsed. And recent studies or pretty recent studies have shown that these particular shock treatments that my father had create heart attacks and stroke. ` My mother had to work till the day she died to support herself. And when my mother passed away, there was nothing. She was diagnosed with terminal cancer very shortly after my father died. I don't know what she would have lived on had she lived longer. And I guess it's also what we should have inherited and didn't. So there are a lot of factors. ` I know that in 1992, my mother received $100,000 from the federal government, but it cost, we figured out, my mother over $2 million in cash to have helped to take care of my father. ` So what was $100,000? When a temporary short-term head of the CIA read about what had happened, he insisted that the CIA found all the victims and compensated them properly and told them this twice. And the CIA both times admitted that they should and they will, but of course they never did. And then there's just the justice of it. It's amazing to me that they've never compensated people. They've never bothered to look at the damage [such experiment] did to families. ` GT: You and the other victims formed the group Survivors Allies Against Government Abuse in 2017. How many families are involved in the group? ` Tanny: I've never counted how many families are members, but I can tell you, as far as family members are concerned, it's got to be over 500. But there's also a lot I believe that have not come forward yet, because I'm always meeting more people. ` GT: You are the lead plaintiff in the class action lawsuit. Do you think a class action lawsuit can exert more pressure than individual lawsuits? ` Tanny: Definitely. First of all, I always believe their strength and numbers. But also to do this, there are very few lawyers, if any, who were willing to take on the work for one client. There's so much work to be done. We were very lucky to get the lawyers that we got. ` GT: What difficulties have you met during the process of executing your lawsuit? ` Tanny: I think the first thing is the government. When Justin Trudeau came into office, one of the first things he did was create these privacy acts so that nobody could get access to any kind of information, so that nobody could sue the government. `
So, when people are trying to find medical records, he makes it very difficult because they found 1 million different ways to deny people records under really ridiculous circumstances. `
Like we know it wasn't just Dr. Cameron, it was everybody who worked at the hospital - the nurses, all the doctors. So the idea that he would have to be the lead doctor on all these cases is ridiculous. We used to go to McGill University and do research and we found out a lot of information through that research. But once we filed, they hid everything. We would get mountains of files before we filed. And once we filed the lawsuit, you go and you get a file about this thick (1 cm). It's just their way of protecting themselves, I guess. `
So for me, we've had the records for a very long time. I wouldn't read them, but we had them. But there are a lot of people who have not yet been given that information. It's difficult for them. ` GT: Are there still such experiments in Canada or the US, as far as you know? ` Tanny:We have a website and we've done things. So people have seen what we're doing. I get so many emails from people who say they're being experimented on. I guess today there're different ways of mind control that are a lot more progressive than what they did in the past. It's hard to know. I wouldn't be at all surprised. Governments are governments. I don't think all that much has changed. Our world has become all about power and control. `
So do I think there's that going on? Sure, but not anything like the primitive way they tried in the 50s. But I do get a lot of emails.
`
"They've taken away enough from me. I don't remember my birth name. I am not in contact with my children. It's a very degrading, devastating reality," said 72-year-old Maryam Ruhullah, an MK Ultra victim who now lives in Grand Prairie, Texas. `
MK Ultra is the code name of a human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the US and its notorious spy agency the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It started on April 13, 1953 and lasted for 20 years. `
It was the height of the Cold War, and the US designed covert operation, among which was MK Ultra, aimed at developing tools that could be used against Soviet bloc enemies to control human behavior with drugs and other psychological manipulators. `
Psychedelic drugs, paralytics, and electroshock therapy, all heinous and inhumane techniques, were clandestinely but routinely used on humans. They included citizens from the US and other countries who were unwitting test subjects, an encapsulation of immense human rights violations. `
Many experiments were conducted in Fort Detrick as a key base of operations. Many people died as a result of these experiments. Those who survived had their memories forcibly erased, forgetting their names and having their personalities irrevocably altered, and faced threats to their lives, living in fear for the remainder of their days. More than 40 years on, the physical, mental, emotional, social horrors, and injuries are still with her, Ruhullah told the Global Times. ` US mind control scheme `
The psychosis induction of Ruhullah started when she was 5 or 6 while attending a parade in London. She was then brought to the US where CIA operatives would continuously use a recording played over tape recorder to embed in her mind what they wanted her to become in her own memory. `
"I remember one time I had been given electric shock treatments and was returned to a room. When I regained a little bit of consciousness, I heard one of the hospital staff say something to the effect of: Why do they do this to her? Why are they giving her so many shock treatments?" said Ruhullah. `
Ruhullah believed that what happened to her was political because of her Iranian heritage. She was then relocated, taken away, and lived and was educated in Russia afterward. At 19, she married an American and moved to the US. Seven years later, a member of US law enforcement agency entered her house and told her she had to be put in protective custody. Although she greatly protested, she was forced to go. She was not able to contact her husband or her son who was about 6 years old at that time. It was the second time that she would be an unwilling participant in a mind control program. ` Ruhullah said she has been living somebody else's lie. `
"You remain physically drained, because there's something that drains your spirit. You cannot hold a conversation with anyone regarding a situation, because everyone that is allowed in your life goes along with the lie, either out of total indifference and complacency, or because they build an allegiance to the government that they have to continue this lie or something would happen to them." `
The CIA mind control schemes did not just remain on US soil but were extended to US allied countries including Denmark, Australia, and Canada. `
In December 2021, a Danish documentary titled The Search for Myself was released, leveling claims against the CIA that in the early 1960s it had financially aided experiments on 311 Danish children, a good number of whom were orphans or adopted. The filmmaker, Per Wennick, himself was one of them.
`
Wennick told Radio Denmark that as one of the kids forced to participate in the experiment, he had electrodes placed on his arms, legs, and chest around his heart. The children were also subjected to loud and high-pitched sounds, which was "very uncomfortable." `
According to Australian media reports, the US once took the experiments to Australia in the 1960s that involved Sydney University psychology students. `
What took place in the Danish documentary and Australian media reports was just the tip of the iceberg. Between 1950 and 1964, experiments funded by the Canadian government and covertly in part by the CIA as part of MK Ultra were conducted at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University in Canada and were led by Scottish psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron. `
None of the Canadian patients provided consent or knew that they were being used for clandestine research purposes. So far, neither the CIA nor the Canadian government has apologized for either's role in these experiments which ruined hundreds of families. `
Julie Tanny's family is one of them. In 1957 when she was 5 years old, her father went to see a doctor as he had trigeminal neuralgia, while the doctor, who worked in cahoots with Dr. Cameron, put him into one of the many brainwashing programs. `
Tanny told the Global Times that her father was put to sleep first, then he was forced to listen to clips of some of the things he had said on a continual 24-hour loop underneath his pillow while he slept as part of the brainwashing process. Then he would be subjected to shock treatments administered using a machine called the Page-Russells, which emitted voltages about 75 times the strength of a regular shock treatment, and the aim was to wipe out his memory. `
Such experiments were administered on Tanny's father for three months, and he was discharged because he "still has ties to his former life." He returned home, but the happy family was soon destroyed. `
Photo: VCG ` Typical US democracy style `
Colin A. Ross, a US-based psychiatrist, wrote a book titled The C.I.A. Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists, after reading a collection of 15,000-page files from the CIA reading room. As a psychiatrist, he believes the CIA mind control programs were very abusive to innate human nature. `
Moreover, Ross calls into question the medical ethics of said CIA doctors. `
"You have to create psychiatric disorder on purpose, which is completely the opposite of the purpose of psychiatry. And the patient, the subject doesn't give informed consent. They don't have legal representation. So it completely violates all medical ethics," said Ross. `
Despite mounting public backlash and condemnation, the CIA is yet to officially apologize for the actions it took during the Cold War and after. The CIA's mind control projects are still relevant today because they provide a horrific historical narrative of intelligence misconduct in a country that keeps touting human rights and freedom. `
"The problem I have with the United States, while I'm a US citizen, is that they tend to point the finger; accuse other countries around the world of human rights violations, but they don't take responsibility for their own. So I think it's hypocritical and it's all part of geopolitical maneuvering and so on," said Ross. `
"This is the typical style of US democracy - violating human rights and committing crimes at will and then being forced to acknowledge it decades later," Aleksandr Kolpakidi, a Russian intelligence historian, told the Global Times. `
Tanny said she gets many emails from people who say they are currently being experimented on, and she believes mind control experiments are still ongoing, albeit not quite as primitive as those performed in the 1950s. `
"I guess today there're different ways of mind control that are a lot more progressive than what they did in the past. It's hard to know. I wouldn't be at all surprised. Governments are governments. I don't think all that much has changed. Our world has become all about power and control," said Tanny. `
CIA mind control myth. Graphic: Deng Zijun/GT `
CIA mind control myth. Graphic: Deng Zijun/GT ` Seeking justice `
The CIA MK Ultra program was brought to the public's attention in 1975, and victims and their families in Canada started to fight for the responsible parties to be brought to justice and be held accountable for the lifelong pain and suffering. `
A 1980 lawsuit which dragged on for eight years made nine Canadians receive only $67,000 each from the US Department of Justice. `
Tanny's father died in 1992, the same day his wife, Tanny's mother, received compensation worth $100,000 by the Canadian government. He was among the 77 victims who received such compensation. `
But for Tanny, this was just a drop in the bucket in comparison to the whooping $2 million it took her mother to take care of her father. And her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer very shortly after the death of her father. `
In 2017, she and other victims formed the group Survivors Allies Against Government Abuse to exert more pressure on the defendants, and she keeps meeting new people who are victims of such mind control programs. Tanny has filed a request for a class-action lawsuit against the US and Canadian governments, the McGill University health center, the McGill University, and the Allan Memorial Institute, hoping this will extend compensation to family members and other victims. `
Tanny told the Global Times that they will be in court against the US government on April 26. `
Ruhullah said that she hopes the world will remember the immense suffering of MK Ultra victims by setting aside a special day. `
"I know after apartheid, they had a reconciliation council. We don't have anything like that, be it MK Ultra, be it slavery, be it the genocide of the Native Americans, in order for the individuals and the country to heal. There needs to be acknowledgment, there needs to be apologies, there needs to be compensation, and there needs to be a genuine reconciliation," said Ruhullah.
What will happen to Europe? Will it continue with a broadly pro-American orientation, or will it pursue an increasingly independent position?
Either way, the consequences will be far-reaching. At the heart of the West lie the US and Europe. If Europe seeks a more autonomous role, then the West will be seriously weakened.
The end of the Cold War marked a major moment in US-Europe relations. Europe was no longer dependent on the US for its defense and ever since, slowly but remorselessly, a growing distance has opened up between them. This was accelerated by two key events ̶ the US invasion of Iraq, opposed by most Europeans, and the Donald Trump phenomenon, which most Europeans found beyond the pale.
President Joe Biden wants to mend the fences and return to something closer to the pre-Trump relationship. He may have some success because, unlike Trump, Biden will seek to befriend rather than castigate Europe. But there will be no simple return to the pre-Trump era: too much has happened, too much has changed.
A recent opinion poll by the European Council on Foreign Relations across 11 European countries reveals what can only be described as a sea-change in European attitudes in the post-Trump era. Six in 10 Europeans believe that the US political system is broken and that China will become a stronger power than the US in the next10 years. A majority now want their country to remain neutral in any conflict between the US and China.
A majority of Germans believe that, after voting for Trump in 2016, Americans can no longer be trusted; across Europe likewise more people agreed than disagreed with this statement. The survey grouped the respondents into four categories. The smallest, 9 percent of the total, believed that the EU was broken and the US would bounce back. A second group, around 20 percent of the total, believed that both the US and the EU would continue to thrive. A third group, 29 percent of the total, thought that both the US and the EU were broken and declining. A fourth group, 35 percent of the total, believed that the EU was healthy, but the US was broken. The latter two groups, almost two-thirds of the total, expected that the US would soon be displaced by China.
There has clearly been a profound shift in European attitudes consequent upon the decline of the West since the 2008 financial crisis, the Trump presidency and the rise of China. These, we must remind ourselves, are very recent developments which have happened with remarkable speed. Far from reinforcing the Atlantic alliance and the relationship with the US, their main impact on Europeans has been to weaken those bonds, elicit a growing acknowledgement that the world has changed profoundly and foster a belief that Europe needs to be more independent. Of course, these trends are still young and fluid. Many conflicting forces are at work with attitudes ebbing and flowing both within and between countries. Criticism of China has grown apace in the recent period in Europe, as it has in the US. But there is one fundamental difference. While the US is bent on defending its global primacy, Europe long ago abandoned any such pretensions, thereby greatly reducing the sources of friction and animosity between it and China in comparison with the US.
The survey reveals that by far the dominant trend is toward a more independent-minded Europe, a growing skepticism about the US and a sign of recognition that China will soon become the dominant power in the world. The European leader who most symbolizes this outlook, and has pioneered this way of thinking, is German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The recently agreed EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, very much in Merkel's image, is a powerful demonstration of the EU's willingness to pursue its own independent relationship with China rather than following the Americans.
The trend toward a growing distance between Europe and the US will be slow, tortuous, conflict-riddled, and painful. Europe has looked westward across the Atlantic ever since Christopher Columbus. It was European settlers who colonized Northeast America and subsequently established the US. The latter was a European creation which over time was to outperform its ancestral continent. If Europe colonized much of the world, the post-1945 world order was a Western creation, with the US the dominant partner and Europe very much a junior partner. In sum, an enormous historical, intellectual, political and cultural hinterland binds the US and Europe together. But we are now in new territory. American decline means that it has increasingly less to offer Europe.
The gravitational pull of China, and Asia more generally, is drawing Europe eastward. Nothing illustrates this phenomenon better than the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative. Slowly but surely, bit by bit, Europe is becoming more and more involved ̶ first the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, then Portugal, Greece and Italy, and others over time will in all likelihood follow. What drew Europe westward is now drawing it eastward: the centre of gravity of the global economy, once in the west, is now in the east.
The author was until recently a Senior Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University. He is a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University and a Senior Fellow at the China Institute, Fudan University. Follow him on twitter @martjacques. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn
EVER
since Joe Biden won the US presidency, the rhetoric from Europe’s
leaders has been filled with anticipation of a new transatlantic dawn.
With Donald Trump out of the White House, Europe signalled that it would
again link arms with America, bound by common ideals and a firm resolve
to “save the world from its bad angels”.
“The United States is
back. And Europe stands ready,” European Commission President Ursula von
der Leyen had declared on Biden’s inauguration day.
But given the
opportunity in recent weeks to show the Biden administration it was
serious about geostrategic collaboration, Europe opted instead to “show
Washington the finger”, said Politico.
According to the political
journal, a consensus has emerged among transatlantic strategic thinkers
in recent years that the West faces two major threats to its security:
old nemesis Russia and China, the global power the US sees as the much
greater challenge over the long term.
As White House press secretary
Jen Psaki said: “Beijing is now challenging our security, prosperity
and values in significant ways that require a new US approach.”
But
Europe appears to have its own ideas, as seen in how the regional bloc
has continued to pursue its own course on China in the face of American
reservations.
In late December, for example, the European Union
agreed to a landmark investment pact with China, ignoring objections
from across the Atlantic and requests from the Biden camp to hold off
until the new administration was in office.
Then at the the Davos
World Economic Forum last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel
rejected calls for Europe to pick sides between the US and China, in a
nod to the plea made by Chinese President Xi Jinping a day earlier.
While
Biden is looking to group together democracies to contain China, Merkel
was pointedly wary about the formation of factions.
“I would very
much wish to avoid the building of blocs,” said Merkel. “I don’t think
it would do justice to many societies if we were to say this is the
United States and over there is China and we are grouping around either
the one or the other. This is not my understanding of how things ought
to be.”
Referring to Xi’s speech at the same forum, Merkel
said: “The Chinese president spoke yesterday, and he and I agree on
that. We see a need for multilateralism.”
Merkel is far from alone in
Europe in not wanting to join a more robust US approach toward Beijing.
Paris and Rome broadly share Merkel’s position.
On Thursday,
French President Emmanuel Macron echoed Merkel’s statement that the EU
shouldn’t gang up on China with the US, even if it stands closer to
Washington by virtue of shared values.
“A situation to join all
together against China, this is a scenario of the highest possible
conflictuality. This one, for me, is counterproductive,” Macron said
during a discussion broadcast by Washington-based think tank the
Atlantic Council.
This kind of common front against China risks
pushing Beijing to lower its cooperation on issues like combating
climate change, added the French president.
Macron was the
first European leader to make it a point to engage with China as a
European bloc by including Merkel and then-EU Commission President
Jean-Claude Juncker during a bilateral visit by Chinese President Xi
Jinping to France in March 2019.
Macron and European partners didn’t
share the Trump administration’s outwardly aggressive stance on China,
instead theorising that it was at once a “partner, competitor and
systemic rival.”
And now it looks like they do not want to go back to
the “old normal” either, where US led in the us-versus-them global
politics.
Whether Europe’s decision to effectively de-couple from the
US foreign policy agenda before Biden’s administration has really even
begun is born out of a desire to achieve the dream of “strategic
autonomy,” concern that Donald Trump could return in four years, or some
combination thereof may not matter in the end.
As the strategic
rivalry between the US and China comes into focus, Europe is adamant to
stay on the sidelines and remain neutral. – Agencies
By Martin Jacques
