HONG KONG - A
senior official from the European Union recently
indicated that the 25-nation bloc was seriously
considering lifting the embargo on arms sales to China,
which was banned from buying advanced weaponry from the
EU since the bloody crackdown on Tiananmen pro-democracy
movement in June 1989. That ban was upheld on November
17 by the European Parliament in Brussels, and China's
human-rights record was cited; the EU said it would also
put legal teeth into its arms-sales code of conduct.
Coincidental or not, the news currently making the
rounds in in Beijing's political circles is that China
will soon release some political prisoners and commute
the sentences of others, in an effort to win points with
the EU for the eventual lifting of the arms embargo.
A leading dissident and pro-democracy
campaigner, Liu Jingsheng, was released from prison over
the weekend. He has been released from prison after more
than a decade behind bars.
The United States
exerted overwhelming pressure to maintain the ban until
Beijing improves its human-rights record; France and
Germany have been especially keen to see the embargo
lifted, opening the way to arms sales to China. Beijing
will hold discussions with the EU in The Hague about the
arms ban and human rights on December 8.
China
experts say that Beijing's expected moves are indeed
intended to trade some political dissidents for the
lifting of the EU embargo, since the Middle Kingdom is
eager to beef up its military strength to prepare for
possible military conflict between the two sides of the
Taiwan Strait.
Human-rights organizations,
including Amnesty International, have disclosed that
more than 200 dissidents from the Tiananmen
pro-democracy demonstrations, part of the democratic
Student Movement in June 1989, when the troops and tanks
were deployed, are still imprisoned.
Bernard
Bot, foreign minister of the Netherlands and currently
chairman of the EU, hinted on November 22 that the bloc
might be ready to remove the ban on arms sales and was
prepared to hold further talks with Beijing during the
EU-China summit on December 8. He cautioned, however,
that some obstacles remained to a smooth and swift
removal of the arms-sales ban.
According to Gu
Junli, an expert with the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences (CASS), it appears unlikely that the EU will
reach a unanimous decision to lift the ban before next
March. Gu suggests that EU member nations could have
forged a compromise proposal and possibly laid out a new
code of conduct on arms sales. That would mean the
general ban could be lifted but member states would
still have to adhere to a legal code of conduct
concerning arms sales and banning the sale of arms if
they are likely to be used to repress the buyer's
population or ethnic minorities or to violate human
rights. The current code is considered voluntary.
The biggest hindrance to ending the arms sale is
China's human-rights record, a sore point in China's
relationships with major Western powers and the EU. The
bloc imposed the embargo after Beijing quelled the 1989
pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square with the
massacre of hundreds, if not thousands, of peaceful,
unarmed demonstrators.
As the virtual backdrop
of the EU chairman's hints, news about China's expected
efforts to refurbish its human-rights records have
emerged in Beijing; insiders said China was expected
soon to release some political dissidents in addition to
commuting sentences. The EU statement and the unofficial
reports in China occurred at about the same time.
In fact, China's talks with the EU on the
embargo removal started early this year, and Beijing had
then started to take steps to satisfy the EU over its
human-rights record. On April 23, one of China's most
prominent labor-movement leaders, Chen Gang, was set
free, three years earlier than scheduled. Chen
originally had been sentenced to life imprisonment for
organizing a massive strike in 1989; the sentence was
later reduced to 18 years, and he was freed three years
early.
Chen will soon be joined by Wu Shishen, a
former editor with the Communist Party's mouthpiece, the
Xinhua News Agency, who has been serving a life
sentence, already having spent 12 years behind bars. Wu
was convicted of leaking former president Jiang Zemin's
full report for the 14th National Party Congress to a
Hong Kong journalist well before the congress opened. An
informed source, speaking on condition of anonymity,
told Asia Times Online that Wu is expected to regain his
freedom in mid-2005, also part of Beijing's plan of
trading some dissidents and political prisoners for an
end to the EU weapons ban.
Liu Jingsheng, 50,
was released over the weekend, two and a half years
ahead of schedule. One of founding fathers of China's
democratic movement, Liu joined Beijing's early
democratic campaigns in the late 1970s along with other
major democrats such as Wei Jingsheng. After the 1989
Tiananmen massacre, Liu was sentenced to 15 years for
establishing a democratic party and an independent labor
union free from the Communist Party's domination.
Independent trade unions are banned in China.
Political observers regard the releases of a few
political prisoners by Beijing, and reports of more to
come, as efforts to build up goodwill with the EU. They
are regarded as concessions from China's leadership,
headed by party chief and President Hu Jintao, who
apparently is willing to release some political
prisoners in an effort to refurbish Beijing's image in
the international arena and win support from major
Western powers in the seesaw game of arms-ban
bargaining.
Human-rights organizations are quick
to remind everyone that more than 200 dissidents
arrested at the time of the Tiananmen Massacre are still
behind bars.
According to some political
observers who take a panoramic, strategic view of what
may be the arms-ban bargain - weapons systems for
dissidents - Beijing is eager to speed up its weaponry
upgrade and prepare for a possible conflict in order to
reclaim Taiwan, its so-called renegade province. Since
independence-minded Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian
won re-election in March, the mainstream public
sentiment on the island might be inclined to assert
independence, or virtual independence, during his second
term, some analysts say. So far, Chen has promoted a
timetable, considered provocative by China, whereby a
new independence-leaning constitution is scheduled to be
formalized in 2006 and then take effect in 2008. That is
why the some mainland leaders believe China must
strengthen its military for deterrence in a short time.
Many military analysts anticipate the balance between
the armed forces flanking the Taiwan Strait to be tipped
in Beijing's favor by around 2006, but that does not
promise an overwhelming victory for the mainland.
China's national defense upgrade sustained an
unexpected setback in 1989 when the Tiananmen Massacre
led to the EU arms embargo. The decade of the 1980s
before the embargo was a heyday for weapons transactions
between the Occident and China, which tried catching up
with the well-equipped troops of Western countries
through the introduction of sophisticated weapons, such
as military electronics, the Crotale ("Rattlesnake")
low-altitude surface-to-air defense missile system
developed by the France-based Thomson-CSF, French-made
multi-purpose Dauphin helicopters, torpedoes and sonar
systems manufactured by Italy, and anti-aircraft flak
guns by Sweden, among other high-technology weapons.
As a result of the arms ban, however, the import
of Goalkeeper weapons systems from the Netherlands, Type
23 frigates from the United Kingdom, light-class
aircraft carriers from Spain, and even China's Peace
Pearl F-8-2 jet-fighter upgrade programs in cooperation
with the US were either aborted or postponed.
In
this situation, China turned to Russia and placed the
first order for Su-27 fighters in the early 1990s. Yet
by the time the mainland equipped its People's
Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) with the Su-27s that
were designed to counter the US F-15 fighters, Taiwan
had already acquired US F-16 fighters, upgraded on the
basis of the F-15.
The Su-27 fighters in the
1990s could only lock on to two targets simultaneously
on their radar screens and they adopted a hybrid
electronic/hydraulic flight-control system. By
comparison, the US F-16 fighters had fitted three
multi-functional displays on the cockpit in the 1980s,
and even Taiwan's Indigenous Defense Fighter (IDF) had
two.
Only after China had spent lavishly on
purchasing the license for its own Su-27 production in
the late 1990s did Russia help to upgrade the F-8-2
fighters designed by China on its own. At the Air Show
China 2004 held in Zhuhai, Russia was still touting its
improved variants of the Su-27, from which observers
concluded that the weaponry Russia sold to China was not
much more advanced than China's home-made arms.
Therefore, the removal of the EU arms embargo
will open the door to more weapons sellers in China. At
this time, the country is not yet capable of producing
some crucial parts for its advanced weapons, so they
must be imported. In the research-and-development phase,
the crucial parts can be purchased through covert
channels, but analysts say that the imitations made by
China itself simply are not up to par when it comes to
mass production.
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