It was noteworthy that while US President George W. Bush was visiting Europe, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, Prime Minister Tony Blair's presumed successor and the UK's longstanding finance minister, was several kilometers away in China.
The Blair camp had been spinning that Bush's visit was payback time for Blair's support of Bush before, during and after the invasion of Iraq.
Part of the payback seems to have been that Bush did not touch foot on British soil, for fear of alienating even more former Blair supporters who continue to be outraged by the way their prime minister took them to war on false pretences. Let's face it, Bush is not an ideal member of Blair's campaigning team for re-election on May 5.
But even the claim that Bush went to Continental Europe to please Blair is yet another example of the dubious quality of 10 Downing Street "spin."
For the fact of the matter is that Bush had many reasons for trying to make up with Old Europe, not least that, quite apart from the delicacies of Middle Eastern diplomacy, Bush is not at all happy about Europe's plans to resume sales of arms to China.
China's designs on Taiwan do not feature much in the British opinion polls, but they are an obsession for Washington. Quite apart from wishing to bring Europe on side with regard to his plans for the Middle East, Bush wanted to get his message across to Europe about preserving the Chinese arms embargo.
Alas, all the indications are that Europe has not got the message, and cannot wait to resume arms sales. Also, to judge from the hype surrounding Brown's lightning tour of China, the UK is not alone in Europe when it comes to the ancient practice of kowtowing to Beijing.
We seem to have moved a long way since the mid-1990s, when Chris Patten, as the last governor of Hong Kong, went out of his way to campaign against China's abuse of human rights.
The week before Brown went on his whistlestop tour of China, the French press reported (with no subsequent denials to my knowledge) that in the previous fortnight there had been 200 state-sponsored executions in China.
The leading Western journalist on Chinese affairs, Jonathan Mirsky, has often tried to draw the West's attention to the reality of the Chinese regime before, during, and after the bloodbath that is now known simply as Tiananmen Square.
It is the way of the world, however, that the prospect of trading opportunities overrides all else, and as the West cultivates China, an awful lot of blind eyes are going to be in evidence.
Thus, after years of hearing that the EU is the UK's most important trading partner, the British are told by their own finance minister that they must rise to the "China challenge."
Unfortunately, a foretaste of what is to come was provided by the way that Brown's visit, although billed among other things as a means of securing a ?1 billion (US$1.9 billion) rescue operation for the car manufacturer Rover's plant at Longbridge in central England in fact ended up with an offer from Chinese partners of a mere ?130 million as well as many holes in the idea of future "commitments."
The Chinese were not born yesterday. They have several thousand years of history behind them, and the odd Long March to boot. They did not follow the Soviet Union by allowing communism to collapse around them, and embrace the "free market culture" of the time. Sure, they have introduced a private sector -- now a third of the economy as opposed to an estimated 1 percent in the 1970s -- but they have been ultra-cautious in how they have done this.
They maintain a regime of controls on capital flows, and have piled up hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign exchange reserves, propping up the US currency in the process. This gives them enormous economic power, which they will not hesitate to use when necessary.
We have to live with China -- and how! -- but during the many diplomatic meals that will be consumed with Chinese politicians, officials and businessmen in the coming years, a long spoon will come in handy.
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
After “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the US joined Israel on Saturday last week in launching “Operation Epic Fury” to remove Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime leadership team. The two blitzes are widely believed to be a prelude to US President Donald Trump changing the geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, targeting China’s rise. In the National Security Strategic report released in December last year, the Trump administration made it clear that the US would focus on “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,” and “competing with China economically and militarily
RSS