As the South China Morning Post reported on Friday, European Union leaders appear close to reaching an in-principle trade agreement with Beijing even though, that is, the agreement won’t require Beijing to agree to end its use of forced labor. Thus, led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron, the EU is about to prove again the very shallow nature of its holier-than-thou human rights rhetoric.
But there’s at least a glimmer of hope.
While EU leaders lick their chops at the prospect of new Chinese investments, the European Parliament is taking a different tack. It has just passed a resolution condemning China’s repression of its Uighur Muslim citizens and demanding the EU block imports of goods produced with forced labor. The call to action is well deserved. More than 2 million Uighurs have been imprisoned in reeducation camps, sterilized, and then churned out as slave-like labor. While the resolution doesn’t bind EU leaders, it offers a much needed moral counterpart to Macron and Merkel. The French EU parliamentarian Raphael Glucksmann offered a particularly passionate condemnation of what he described as the “deportation and eradication of the Uighur people.”
Borrowing from Emile Zola’s “J’accuse!” letter on the late 19th-century Dreyfus affair (involving the French government’s anti-Semitic persecution of an army officer), Glucksmann accused “the international community of complicity by its silence and passivity.” Listing those who enable Xi Jinping’s “crime against humanity,” Glucksmann rightly included multinational brands such as Nike and governments such as that of Pakistan. Pakistan bears special note here in that its frequent protestations of insults to Islam do not easily comport with its unashamed regurgitation of Chinese communist talking points.
Other parliamentarians offered similar condemnations of the EU’s betrayal of its supposedly sacred values. The German EU parliamentarian Reinhard Butikofer observed on Twitter that “from a geopolitical perspective, the message of this turn of events is unmistakable: A few market access concessions weigh more than both the need to stand tall against the appalling forced labor practices in China, and the opportunity of aligning with the incoming Biden team.”
Indeed.
What we see here is a truth that far too many American foreign policy commentators ignore. While they rightly point out the value of alliances such as NATO, they ignore two related truths. First, that while the EU might claim the opposite, it is far from a reliable U.S. human rights partner if Chinese gold or Russian energy pipelines are on the table. Second, that China is utterly unrepentant in its use of economic and climate change-related leverage as a means of advancing its broader imperial interests.
Credit to Glucksmann, Butikofer, and company. Shame on Macron, Merkel, and company. And a lesson for Joe Biden and company: Europe isn’t going to join American resistance of China easily.
