By Patrick Goodenough
Pacific Rim Bureau – Despite opposition from the Bush administration and human rights activists, the European Union looks set this week to signal its intention to lift a 15-year-old ban on arms sales to China.
Ending the embargo immediately would require a unanimous decision by EU members at a summit with China, which begins in the Netherlands on Wednesday.
While such an outcome is unlikely, EU sources have mentioned a willingness to give Beijing a “positive signal.” Analysts interpret this as indicating that the meeting may announce a decision to lift the embargo, but at an unspecified future date.
Such a move would allow China, which has stepped up pressure on the EU in recent days, to save face, while avoiding an open clash between the Europeans and the U.S.
It would also avoid an embarrassing rift between EU member-states that are reluctant to lift the ban, including Britain and Scandinavian countries, and those wanting to do so, especially Germany and France.
Eyeing lucrative arms contracts, Berlin and Paris are spearheading the drive to lift the ban, imposed after Chinese troops killed unknown hundreds of civilians during pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
China has the world’s second largest defense budget, after the U.S. Between 1989 and 2002, its official budget for arms procurement was hiked by more than a thousand percent, according to U.S. officials.
Beijing has pressed repeatedly for the ban to be rescinded, most recently at an Asia-Europe meeting in Vietnam last October.
Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui told reporters in Beijing last week that EU-China bilateral relations would “definitely be affected” if the embargo was not ended.
“If the EU keeps the embargo, we believe it is a kind of political discrimination, it is kind of an unequal relationship in the political field, so we hope for an end soon to the embargo and for cooperation on a more equal basis.”
Zhang denied that ending the ban would fuel an arms race with Taiwan or affect relations between mainland China and the island Beijing regards as a renegade province.
Concerns that sophisticated European weaponry could be used against Taiwan is the primary reason Washington wants the ban to remain in place.
China has not ruled out the use of force to prevent Taiwan from formalizing its de facto independence, and under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, the U.S. is committed to helping the island democracy defend itself.
Other reasons for U.S. opposition, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Randall Schriver told U.S. lawmakers early this year, include concerns that China may not be able to prevent sensitive technology which it buys from Europe from being transferred to third countries.
The U.S. also says it does not believe China’s human rights record — the original reason for the ban — has improved sufficiently.
“We don’t feel as though the human rights situation has improved to the point where it merits lifting the ban, and we have continuing problems,” Schriver told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressional panel that reviews the national security implications of trade and economic ties between the two countries.
Washington maintains its own embargo on sales to China of items that appear on the U.S. Munitions List. It has warned that it will suspend sales of sensitive U.S. military technology to European countries if the EU ban is lifted.
“We have an active dialogue with them [the Europeans] and we have stated very clearly our view that we don’t think it’s time to lift the embargo on … arms sales to China,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told a press briefing on Friday.
Support for the ban to remain is also strong in Europe, where lawmakers in both the European Parliament and the German Bundestag — in direct defiance of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder — have voted to retain it.
Schroeder, who is this week paying his sixth official visit to Beijing, wants the embargo lifted to enable German firms to compete for contracts in China. Germany has been China’s largest trade partner in Europe for the past three decades.
‘Lifting ban would remove incentive to improve rights’
Human Rights Watch urged the EU Monday to resist Chinese pressure and “not to let business interests trump its longstanding proclaimed commitment to human rights in China.”
“What needs to be remembered is the reason the embargo was created in the first place,” the organization’s Asia director, Brad Adams, said.
“China’s army turned its guns on its own people after receiving orders from the political leadership. There is no sign of the reforms necessary to make the EU comfortable that this won’t happen again. If the ban is lifted, the next attack could be with weapons supplied by EU states.”
No Chinese leader has been held publicly accountable for the decision to send in the army. No details have been released about how many people were killed or how many people arrested in connection with the crackdown are still in prison.
Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue Zhang told a press briefing last week that the weapons embargo should not be linked with the issue of human rights.
China had made “tremendous progress in human rights” in recent years, the official Xinhua news agency quoted her as saying.
Other non-governmental organizations also are urging the EU to retain the ban.
The Free Tibet campaign argued that China would use any decision on lifting the embargo as an important propaganda victory.
“It would also remove yet another incentive for China to improve substantively its human rights record and live up to its international human rights obligations,” said the group, which focuses on the Himalayan region occupied by China since 1950.
Two other NGOs, Human Rights in China and the International Federation for Human Rights, also called on the EU to retain the weapons sales embargo.
The two said in a joint statement that although the EU and China have been engaged in a human rights dialogue since 1997, “violations in China remain serious and extensive.”
