Intressant rapport om relationerna mellan Kina och EU

I april släppte European Council on Foreign Relations en rapport, A Power Audit of EU-China Relations, som avhandlar EU:s och Kinas relationer till varandra.

Författarna är inte nådiga mot hur EU skött sina kort visavi Kina, och visar att den största förloraren är EU-medlemsstaterna själva som bl.a. lämnat öppet mål för Kina att dra nytta av EU:s öppna marknader utan att ge europeiska företag samma villkor i Kina. Samtidigt har Kina blivit mycket skickligt på att spela ut olika EU-länder mot varandra när det gäller politiska frågor.

The EU’s China strategy is based on an anachronistic belief that China, under the influence of European engagement, will liberalise its economy, improve the rule of law and democratise its politics. The underlying idea is that engagement with China is positive in itself and should not be conditional on any specific Chinese behaviour. […] Yet, as this report shows, China’s foreign and domestic policy has evolved in a way that has paid little heed to European values, and today Beijing regularly contravenes or even undermines them. The EU’s heroic ambition to act as a catalyst for change in China completely ignores the country’s economic and political strength and disregards its determination to resist foreign influence.
[…]
The results speak for themselves. The EU allows China to throw many more obstacles in the way of European companies that want to enter the Chinese market than Chinese companies face in the EU – one reason why the EU’s trade deficit with China has swollen to a staggering €169 billion, even as the EU has replaced the US as China’s largest trading partner. Efforts to get Beijing to live up to its responsibility as a key stakeholder in the global economy by agreeing to more international coordination have been largely unsuccessful.

En bra sammanfattning av rapporten finns på bloggen Kinabevakning.