DIPLOMATIC NEWS
Some rare crumbs of good news for Beijing this week.
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Norway expressed concern about NATO taking on too much (meaning China-related security).
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Italy gave conditional and limited approval for some Huawei tech in its 5G network.
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Spain suggested it could help move the stalled EU investment agreement forward.
After several weeks on the back foot, China launched a diplomatic mini blitz last week, with a flurry of phone calls, a trip to Croatia and Slovenia by Communist Party foreign policy chief Yang Jiechi, and visits to China by the foreign ministers of Hungary, Ireland, Poland, and Serbia.
Poland is the oddity here — why is a stalwart US ally in the region flirting with America’s greatest adversary? The main reason is pique in Warsaw about being snubbed by the Biden administration. Nonetheless, foreign minister Zbigniew Rau went overboard with his explicit praise for the crumbling 17+1.
Serbia is no surprise, signing a deal on law-enforcement and security cooperation (that’s surveillance) the Hungary meeting was notably warm, with foreign minister Péter Szijjártó giving a medal to his Chinese counterpart, and announcing that a Hungarian factory would make the Sinopharm vaccine.
But on the ground in Budapest, it’s another story. The opposition-run Hungarian capital is welcoming the controversial new Chinese university by changing some street names. New roads include “Uyghur Martyrs,” “Free Hong Kong,” the Dalai Lama and Xie Shiguang, a much-jailed bishop of the underground Catholic Church.
The big picture, though, is that EU-China relations are in the deep freeze, as Noah Barkin notes in his useful monthly round-up, with still no reply from Beijing to a summit invitation issued in December. The US and the EU are cooking up a plan in advance of next week’s G7 summit in Cornwall. Cooperation on infrastructure, trade and supply-chain resilience are the ingredients. But the Americans are increasingly fed up with European foot-dragging. Australia, Japan and India are more useful allies. |