Six months after pledging to lift a 16-year-old arms embargo on China, the EU has found itself unable to do so largely because of Beijing's vociferous threats to retake Taiwan by force, analysts say.
European leaders, spearheaded by France and Germany, agreed last December to draft an accord on removing the ban by the end of this month, practically promising China that it would go.
But with barely a week left, the chances of lifting the embargo in place since the brutal crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests have virtually vanished.
"Americans were pushing the EU to maintain the embargo, but the Chinese pulled the EU in the wrong direction through their anti-secession legislation on Taiwan," said Paul Harris, an expert on Chinese politics at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.
The "Anti-Secession" Law passed in March paves the way for China to take Taiwan by force should the island ever formally declare independence.
Passage of the law sent cross-strait tensions rising and alarm bells ringing across the world.
Washington voiced strong opposition to lifting the ban, saying that it would be unpardonable should European weapons end up killing American soldiers if the US intervened in any potential hostilities in the Taiwan Strait.
"The Chinese had an opportunity there and they missed it, they misread the international circumstances, specifically the circumstances in Europe," Harris said.
Beijing should have waited a few months more to pass the legislation and they should never have embarked on the saber-rattling rhetoric that accompanied it, Harris said.
Now with Britain, the US' strongest ally, taking over the EU revolving presidency next month there was little chance that the embargo would be lifted in the near future, he said.
In Washington last week a senior official said the ban would not be lifted "anytime soon" and would only be removed after Brussels and Washington reached a common understanding on how to view China's rise as a political and military force.
"The Anti-Secession Law was a wake-up call for a number of political decision makers in Europe," said Nicholas Becquelin, the Hong Kong-based director for Human Rights in China.
"It is all very well to think that China will be a benign power, but at the end of the day you have to consider that something will go wrong," he said.
The passage of the law also reflected the importance to Beijing of the Taiwan issue, especially in comparison to lifting the arms embargo, he said.
"The arms embargo is largely symbolic and for China it is essentially a diplomatic effort aimed at absolution for the Tiananmen massacre and an effort to improve their diplomatic image," Becquelin said.
Beijing still maintains that the crackdown was done in the name of stability and in recent weeks has reiterated that the country would never have been able to enjoy 16 years of robust economic growth had the military not quelled the protests.
Becquelin said that even though the continued implementation of the embargo was decided on military and security concerns, the debate also worked to focus the world's attention again on the Tiananmen incident.
"We welcome the fact that the arms embargo imposed after June 4, 1989, has not been lifted and continues to be in force," he said. "But it is a pyrrhic victory in a sense because the reason that it remains in force is purely military and security related. The human rights reasons were totally rejected."
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read: