EU and Chinese leaders are on Wednesday to steer clear of tough issues at a fence-mending summit focused on trade and the economic crisis after Beijing canceled their last meeting over the Dalai Lama.
The summit, to be held in Prague, was originally set for last December but China called it off in protest at a meeting between the Tibetan spiritual leader and French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Poland.
France held the rotating presidency of the 27-nation EU at that time until Paris handed the baton over to the Czech Republic at the start of the year.
Czech President Vaclav Klaus will host Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) at Prague Castle along with European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
“It’s certainly a fence-mending summit and the problem is that it is only a fence-mending summit,” said analyst John Fox with the European Council on Foreign Relations, lamenting that tough political issues and the environment are on the backburner.
“The best thing that can happen is that the summit goes ahead and that it won’t be prevented by the Chinese being angry at Czech politicians making statements on Taiwan, or Tibet or the Dalai Lama,” he said.
At talks in Brussels earlier this month, EU commissioners and a Chinese delegation headed by Vice Premier Wang Qishan (王岐山) agreed that trade and investment would lead the way to economic recovery.
Two-way trade has exploded in recent years making the EU the top destination for exports of Chinese goods while China is Europe’s biggest trade partner after the US.
Last year they traded 326 billion euros (US441 billion) in goods with Europe running a 169.4 billion euros deficit with China.
However, despite promises to broadly cooperate on trade, China and Europe have many differences on trade issues.
The Chinese government said on Friday it would urge the EU at the summit to relax limits on high-tech exports to China and review its anti-dumping policies.
Beijing is particularly eager to address the issue of gaining market economy status from the EU, which is a standard often used in anti-dumping cases.
In the latest of a slew of EU anti-dumping cases launched against China, the European nations agreed last month to extend anti-dumping duties on Chinese-made candles that enter force on Friday and will last for five years.
The Europeans are eager to get Beijing to commit to ambitious cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in view of a key international meeting on climate change in Copenhagen in December but China has proved reluctant.
When Lika Megreladze was a child, life in her native western Georgian region of Guria revolved around tea. Her mother worked for decades as a scientist at the Soviet Union’s Institute of Tea and Subtropical Crops in the village of Anaseuli, Georgia, perfecting cultivation methods for a Georgian tea industry that supplied the bulk of the vast communist state’s brews. “When I was a child, this was only my mum’s workplace. Only later I realized that it was something big,” she said. Now, the institute lies abandoned. Yellowed papers are strewn around its decaying corridors, and a statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin
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