SPEAKING
FREELY High price to pay for overturning
China arms ban By Richard A Bitzinger
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
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The
European Union recently dodged a bullet by refusing to
take up the issue of overturning its 15-year-old ban on
selling arms to China. Supporters of lifting the
embargo, led by France and Germany, are unlikely to
abandon their quest, however, and the ban is likely to
come up again for review, perhaps as early as this
summer. If it is lifted, the EU risks further damaging a
trans-Atlantic alliance already strained over Iraq and
other issues, with very little likelihood that its
defense industry would see much, if any, benefit.
Advocates of ending the arms embargo -
implemented, along with the United States', after the
1989 Tiananmen Square massacre - base their case on two
arguments. The first is that China has "changed" - that
Beijing has significantly reformed its system of
government and its economy, and moderated its aggressive
tendencies in the Asia-Pacific - and should be rewarded
for this. France in particular has called the arms
embargo "outdated" and says it no longer corresponds to
the "political reality of the contemporary world".
Yet as recently as last December, the EU
Parliament condemned China's human-rights record, while
the president of the EU Commission stated in April that
Beijing still needs to do more to show that it is making
progress in this regard. At the same time, China
continues to pursue double-digit increases in defense
spending and to build up its military forces,
particularly along the Taiwan Strait.
Supporters
of overturning the ban usually add that the EU Code of
Conduct on arms sales, which aims to promote "high
common standards" for arms exports, will still apply,
and will therefore prevent abuses when it comes to
exporting arms to China. But the Code of Conduct - which
is not legally binding in any case - explicitly
restricts arms sales to countries that might use these
weapons for internal repression, for external
aggression, or where human rights are being seriously
violated. If such descriptors do not apply to China,
then where might they?
The second argument -
that China is a huge, largely untapped market for
Europe's beleaguered arms producers - is more cynical.
But at least it's more honest. Beijing, which has
greatly increased defense spending over the past decade,
has been on a major shopping spree for foreign weapons.
According to the Congressional Research Service, China
has signed new arms-import agreements worth in excess of
US$11 billion since 1999; in 2002 alone, it purchased
$3.6 billion worth of foreign weapon systems.
Most of these sales have gone to Russia, which
does not observe the arms embargo on China. Obviously,
Europe would love to get in on the gravy train. To
Europe's arms manufacturers and its governments, China -
and indeed, the whole of the Asia-Pacific region - is
just another market. In fact, it is an increasingly
critical market for a regional defense industry that
increasingly views itself as besieged by its US
counterpart.
But ending the arms embargo is
unlikely to result in Beijing buying German submarines
or French-made fighter jets. European defense firms
cannot hope to compete with Russia's sweetheart pricing
or technology-transfer arrangement, plus there is the
fact that Russian weapons are simply a better fit when
it comes to the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA),
based as it is on Soviet designs and technology. More
likely, European arms producers would mainly provide
Beijing with competing bids in order to extract better
deals from Moscow.
Of course, Europe might be
able to sell components or subsystems that could greatly
contribute to the modernization of the PLA, particularly
in such areas as command and control, communications, or
sensors. But in that case, the EU does not need to end
the arms embargo to allow the export of these items to
China. The United Kingdom and France have, despite the
arms ban, long permitted the transfer to China of
non-lethal equipment such as helicopters, airborne
early-warning radar, and jet engines.
So what
does the EU stand to gain from ending the arms embargo?
Actually, it is Europe's large commercial enterprises
that stand a far better chance of benefiting than its
defense sectors. Lifting the arms ban would amount to
the political rehabilitation of China, in return for
which Beijing could reward Europe by buying more
passenger jets from Airbus, satellites from Astrium, or
telecommunications systems from Ericsson or Siemens.
China might also turn to Europe for nuclear power plants
or high-speed rail systems. It is also worth pointing
out that China is already a risk-sharing partner in
Europe's Galileo satellite navigation project.
Of course, this EU-China coziness will come at
the potentially high price of adding further stress to
an already tense US-European relationship. Even if
Europe fails to make any large arms sales to China, the
damage done by explicitly overturning the embargo and
visibly fracturing the once-unanimous Western stance on
this policy issue will be enormous. And it will hand
Beijing a significant victory: in effect, a de facto
recognition of its post-Tiananmen human-rights policy.
So long as Europe views weapons sales to China
in strictly an economic sense, it will clash with
Washington, which has to deal with the regional military
and strategic repercussions of these sales. Europe's
defense industry is unlikely to gain much from lifting
the arms ban, and certainly the trans-Atlantic
relationship will suffer greatly. Only Beijing will be
the big winner.
Richard A Bitzinger is
associate research professor at the Asia-Pacific Center
for Security Studies in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click hereif you
are interested in contributing.
