What are the consequences after the sanctions between Europe and China?
What will change with the sanctions war between Europe and China. Roberto Santoro's speech
The European Union, the United States and Great Britain try to raise the bar against China, imposing sanctions against members of the Communist Party and the paramilitary structures of the Dragon, accused of having planned the repression of the Uighurs, the minority of Chinese Xinjiang. The response is not long in coming, with a flurry of countermeasures taken against MEPs, institutional bodies and European research centers which, according to Beijing, would have damaged Chinese "sovereignty and interests".
The president of the European Parliament Sassoli called the sanctions in Beijing "unacceptable", adding that they will have "consequences", while Mister Pesc, the high representative for EU foreign policy, Borrell, applauds the "perfectly coordinated" action of the countries Westerners, awaiting the next NATO summit which will also be attended by US Secretary of State Blinken. So far the news yesterday, with the decision taken by the West to once again put the issue of human rights denied in China first.
For years, human rights organizations have been denouncing the Chinese internment project against Uyghurs, persecuted, arrested, with families separated from their children, women forced into forced sterilization, re-education camps. But are sanctions enough to say, as we have been reading for some time in many newspapers and on social media, that there are "hawks" in American and Western foreign policy towards China?
It does not seem so. It is enough to recall the half-hour sermon that Chinese diplomacy reserved for US Secretary of State Blinken on the bilateral between the two superpowers that took place in Anchorage , Alaska, last week, to understand that the restrictive measures will certainly not be enough. imposed by Europe to lower the crest of the regime. In Anchorage, Beijing diplomats had the courage to compare the repression against the Uighurs to the Black Lives Matter issue, saying that the US has "many human rights problems". Too bad that BLM is a movement that in America is depopulated in universities and regularly organizes large street demonstrations.
Yet after the half hour of Chinese reprimand ("America shows no signs of removing the toxicity of the Trump administration …"), the response of US diplomats instead of being, for example, boycott the next Olympics in China, yes it is limited to one observation: Washington and Beijing, on many issues, are "fundamentally in disagreement". With these hawks the West will not go far. If you really want to show a more adult attitude than the West has shown towards Beijing in recent years, you need to be aware that the 21st century “Cold War” will not be won only on human rights.
The model of political and economic relations between the West and China must be called into question. Beijing has become a global power in recent decades because Western countries have never hindered the communist model based on party subsidies to the Chinese state industry, exceptional measures have never been taken against systematic fraud on intellectual property and industrial espionage, which in the US has led to many FBI investigations. We have intertwined the Western economies with the Chinese one, but the take-off of China, which has now acquired a dominant position in the production of many advanced technologies and essential supplies, in the West has only paid for the destruction of millions of jobs. The pressure on human rights, therefore, is not enough.
China is not the Soviet Union, which while suppressing dissent had an economy that was falling apart. The power of the Chinese derives from the economic power, from the exploitation of Western knowledge, knowledge, technological innovation that Beijing has managed to guarantee by establishing itself as a privileged economic interlocutor of Europe and America. Western countries should stop depending on the Wuhan regime to get masks, PPE, pharmaceuticals, stop being dependent on Beijing in "rare earths" – the metals of new technologies – and stop exporting so many technologies such as AI and 5G to the China. We should also seriously ask ourselves the question of what happens in Western universities and research centers funded by Beijing, as US Senator Tom Cotton denounced.
The sanctions for the repression against the Uighurs are a signal, but if the West continues to have an attitude of generous and naive openness towards Beijing on the economy, research and technologies, we will remain lambs mistaken for lions. We need to start separating the two economic models that we have integrated, wrongly. This will allow, on the one hand, to protect markets, the industrial system and the world of work in the West. On the other hand, it will push the communist regime to crumble, piece by piece.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/quali-conseguenze-dopo-le-sanzioni-tra-europa-e-cina/ on Tue, 23 Mar 2021 09:08:48 +0000.