CHINA'S EUROPE TOUR OVERSHADOWED BY US RELATIONS
François Godement
EU Observer, January 29, 2009
EUOBSERVER / COMMENT - We are on the eve of a five-country tour (including Brussels) of Europe by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. The event looks like a hastily put together trip after China's last minute no show at the annual EU-China summit on 1 December in Lyons. Wen's trip offers plenty to gossip about for foreign policy pundits, since it glaringly skirts around France, whose president had been earlier pilloried by Chinese officials for meeting with the Dalai-Lama in his capacity as EU chair.
But we have a world crisis on, so there is not a peep in the media about Wen's peripatetic dealings with the EU and five European countries, including Germany, the UK and Switzerland. Instead, public attention has focused on the new US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's confirmation hearing in the Senate, and specifically on one sentence in the 102 page-long document he submitted for that hearing: "President Obama - backed by the conclusions of a broad range of economists - believes that China is manipulating its currency."
Time will show whether this snippet of a sentence is really a harbinger for Sino-American relations. It is in fact mitigated by another sentence: "The question is how and when to broach the subject in order to do more good than harm." Indeed. But that's not the issue for Europeans. The point is that, as the global financial crisis charges on, the world's economic axis is still perceived to lie between Washington and Beijing, not between the US and Europe, and even less between China and Europe.
Imbalances, not just numbers, are what matters. There is wide-spread agreement that the huge capital imbalance between China and the US was the first contribution to the bubbles that burst last year. Economists may differ on where to put the blame - the insatiable US preference for spending over saving, or the equally boundless Chinese policy of saving over spending. Whatever the cause, it is the resolution of this imbalance which is the priority to solving the crisis. Eurozone countries as a whole haven't had such a role in this crisis, and so they don't matter as much in the solution. The China-US "Strategic Economic Dialogue" is paramount. And this is true even if our own trade and economic interests will be deeply influenced by the form of the solution to come.
François Godement
EU Observer, January 29, 2009
EUOBSERVER / COMMENT - We are on the eve of a five-country tour (including Brussels) of Europe by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. The event looks like a hastily put together trip after China's last minute no show at the annual EU-China summit on 1 December in Lyons. Wen's trip offers plenty to gossip about for foreign policy pundits, since it glaringly skirts around France, whose president had been earlier pilloried by Chinese officials for meeting with the Dalai-Lama in his capacity as EU chair.
But we have a world crisis on, so there is not a peep in the media about Wen's peripatetic dealings with the EU and five European countries, including Germany, the UK and Switzerland. Instead, public attention has focused on the new US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's confirmation hearing in the Senate, and specifically on one sentence in the 102 page-long document he submitted for that hearing: "President Obama - backed by the conclusions of a broad range of economists - believes that China is manipulating its currency."
Time will show whether this snippet of a sentence is really a harbinger for Sino-American relations. It is in fact mitigated by another sentence: "The question is how and when to broach the subject in order to do more good than harm." Indeed. But that's not the issue for Europeans. The point is that, as the global financial crisis charges on, the world's economic axis is still perceived to lie between Washington and Beijing, not between the US and Europe, and even less between China and Europe.
Imbalances, not just numbers, are what matters. There is wide-spread agreement that the huge capital imbalance between China and the US was the first contribution to the bubbles that burst last year. Economists may differ on where to put the blame - the insatiable US preference for spending over saving, or the equally boundless Chinese policy of saving over spending. Whatever the cause, it is the resolution of this imbalance which is the priority to solving the crisis. Eurozone countries as a whole haven't had such a role in this crisis, and so they don't matter as much in the solution. The China-US "Strategic Economic Dialogue" is paramount. And this is true even if our own trade and economic interests will be deeply influenced by the form of the solution to come.
(...) [artículo aquí]
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