If Trump Wants to Take On China, He Needs Allies

And he should start with Europe.
By Julianne Smith

BERLIN — With the prospect of a trade deal between China and the United States all but dead, the Trump administration is no doubt weighing its next steps in its quest to rein in Beijing’s rise. President Trump should try something he hasn’t yet: call Europe.
Just five years ago, such a suggestion would have raised eyebrows. 

Europe’s relationship with China has traditionally been one of close economic cooperation, especially for an export-led country like Germany. 

To the extent that Europeans saw political and security challenges in working with China, they kept faith that growing economic ties with the West would temper the country’s worst instincts.
Over the last few years, though, Germany, along with several other European countries, have experienced a strategic awakening. 

German policymakers, along with industry leaders, have become much more vocal about China’s predatory trade practices, in particular forced technology transfers. 

They have begun to refer to China as a “systemic competitor.” 

So has the European Union.
This should make the countries of Europe, historically among America’s closest allies, well placed to work with Washington to confront China over trade, its destabilizing policies in Asia, and the authoritarian political model it is promoting around the world. 

Instead, Europe and the United States are consumed by cyclical arguments over — to name just a few issues — military spending, trans-Atlantic trade imbalances and the Iran nuclear deal. 

That’s exactly where the Chinese want the two sides of the Atlantic to be: distracted and divided.

On the subject of China, Europeans feel like they have been relegated to observer status. 

Trump administration officials have made few efforts either to brief allies on their China policy or to propose anything like a unified trans-Atlantic strategy. 

When the Trump administration has engaged Europe on China, such discussions tend to focus on tightening investment screening and preventing the Chinese telecommunications provider Huawei from constructing 5G networks. 

Those two important issues merit trans-Atlantic consultations. 

But the Trump administration’s approach — which includes threatening to limit intelligence sharing with any ally that proceeds to build its next generation of mobile infrastructure with Huawei — is a losing strategy. 

Europeans are tired of taking orders from Mr. Trump’s America, which makes them more inclined to ignore American directives on issues like Huawei.
The president should start over. 

The United States and Europe need to come to the table as actual partners and begin a much broader dialogue about China’s political, economic and technological ambitions. 

At the very minimum, the two sides of the Atlantic should be sharing insights on everything from Chinese influence operations to human rights abuses to investments in artificial intelligence and other disruptive technologies. 

More ambitiously, the United States and Europe should aim to fortify their trade relationship; coordinate American and European policies on China’s human rights abuses; and create alternatives to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
The best way for the United States and Europe to compete with China would be to resolve their own bilateral trade disputes. 

The more the two sides bicker and threaten each other with more tariffs, the more space they allow for China to continue ignoring international trading rules. 

When — or if — the two trans-Atlantic partners turn down the heat on their simmering trade war and focus on strengthening trade ties, they should reach out to Japan and other allies that could bolster the West’s economic strength and influence.
Better coordination should be the next item on the trans-Atlantic to do list. 

In March, when Xi Jinping visited Paris, President Emmanuel Macron invited the chancellor of Germany and the president of the European Commission to join him. 

Mr. Macron’s intended message was clear: Instead of picking off individual European Union members, China would have to deal with a united Europe. 

The United States and Europe could send a similar message. 

The two partners could begin coordinating their messaging on issues like China’s continuing persecution of the Uighurs, or the two Canadian citizens that China is detaining.
One specific area of focus should be China’s Belt and Road Initiative — a vast network of infrastructure and connectivity projects, underwritten by China, across Asia, Africa and Europe. Some of those projects provide much needed investment. 

Many, however, lack transparency, leave the host country riddled with debt, and require political favors in return. 

Given the scale of China’s investment, it is tough for Europe and the United States to offer viable alternatives. 

They should still try.
They could also do more to help countries avoid the Belt and Road Initiative’s many pitfalls. 

Last year the United States Treasury sent a team of evaluators to Myanmar to help it navigate the challenges of a Belt and Road project. 

Europe should be doing the same thing. 

They could start that work not halfway around the world but in Portugal, Greece, Italy and Serbia, which have already signed on to Chinese projects and are looking at more.
It may be hard to imagine the Trump administration doing any of these things. 

This is an administration, after all, that has undermined, not strengthened, America’s network of alliances from the start. 

It prefers to see the world, as two administration officials put it in a 2017 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, as “not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors, and businesses engage and compete for advantage.”
Mr. Trump is right to claim that America finds itself in an era of great power competition with China. Where his administration has repeatedly missed the mark, though, is in its determination to deride the very “global community” that could help America in its challenge. 

If Trump were serious about competing with China, he would be doing more to get as many allies on his side as possible.
Working with Europe will not be easy. 

The two will never be in perfect lock step on China, especially when it comes to security issues. Europe doesn’t have anything resembling America’s forces in Asia nor does it share America’s security commitments. 

Even inside Europe, there will continue to be different approaches to China. 

Nonetheless, the smartest thing for Europe and the United States to do would be to find areas where they can come together. 

Right now, they are not positioning themselves for even modest levels of success. 

They aren’t competing, and China wants to keep it that way.

Trophy Infrastructure, Troublesome Debt: China Makes Inroads in Europe

Beijing is constructing parallel financial and commercial networks across Central and Eastern Europe to challenge the global order
By James T. Areddy

BELGRADE, Serbia—Europe is distracted by internal discord over immigration and its tense relationship with Russia and the U.S. 

Seeking to fill the void, China is taking advantage of a historic opportunity to wedge itself into the heart of the West.
Deal by deal, applying experience honed in Asia and Africa, China is constructing parallel financial and commercial networks in Central and Eastern Europe to challenge the global order. 

It has taken footholds in more than a dozen nations on the periphery of the European Union. 

Some, such as Hungary, are smaller, more marginalized members. 

Others, including Serbia, are on the runway for admission.
Chinese workers set a highway through Montenegro’s impassable mountains on pillars as tall as a 50-floor skyscraper—part of an emerging corridor of highways, ports and rail lines that outlines a new Chinese trade route between Greece’s Aegean coast and Latvia on the frigid Baltic.
Chinese technology governs a new international money-transfer system in Serbia. 

Chinese banks gobbled up a newfangled issue of yuan-denominated bonds from Hungary. 

Outposts like Košice, Slovakia, are now stops for freight trains from China.
Beijing’s offers of trophy infrastructure and financial lifelines to troubled economies give those countries proposals they aren’t hearing from Washington and Moscow, which both generally view the region through prisms of national security. 

Nor are they hearing such proposals from Brussels, preoccupied with fraying EU cohesion.

Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at a 2014 ceremony to open the China-Serbia Friendship Bridge over the Danube in Belgrade. 

For European politicians, the Chinese alternative promises quick results and less fuss over contracts and transparency than typically found in the West. 

The catch is that China’s package deals are government orchestrated and require borrowing from its banks to pay its contractors. 

A few countries, including Montenegro, are taking on large amounts of debt in the process.
Most of the Chinese financial support in Europe is loan-based, helping turn nations into clients of Beijing’s banks. 

And with each achievement, the Chinese companies building infrastructure and selling software or services gain more credibility in the West. 

Stretching its engineering capacity and technological innovation westward helps China expand and modernize its economy, as well as bolster alliances.
Beijing cheered when Greece blocked an EU effort last year to condemn a Chinese crackdown on political activists. 

Politicians in Brussels suggested that Athens had grown too dependent on China because a Chinese government-run company runs Greece’s main port. 

Greece called the proposed measure “unconstructive and selective criticism.”
The push is part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative to develop trade, financial and communication networks around the world—a strategy that came out of the global financial collapse a decade ago, to lessen China’s dependence on a U.S.-led economic order it blamed for the crisis. 

Major infrastructure is the initiative’s calling card.

China Calling
Serbia has welcomed billions of dollars' worth of deals from Chinese companies.

The $255 million China-Serbia Friendship Bridge marked the beginning of major Chinese construction engineering commissions in Europe.

Serbia in 2018 chose Zijin Mining Group Ltd. to invest in its largest copper mining and smelting complex, RTB Bor, in a $1.26 billion deal.

Serbia credits China's Hesteel Group with saving 5,000 jobs with its 2016 takeover of a steelmaker in the city of Smederevo.

Chinese engineers are at work on Serbia's $350 million portion of the Belgrade-Budapest high-speed rail line.

Serbia is emerging as China’s closest partner in middle Europe. 

China designed and built Belgrade’s first new bridge over the Danube River in seven decades, and helped modernize electrical and phone systems in the country. 

Most recently, Serbia got a financial-payments network from government-owned China UnionPay. The platform is Beijing’s answer to Visa and Mastercard, giving Serbians a way to use local credit cards overseas. 

It also gives China’s yuan a route into Europe.
UnionPay says its payment system in Serbia includes chips and other technology standards designed to guarantee “unblocked” international money transfers. 

That, in effect, could weaken a frequent U.S. tool sometimes used against Chinese companies—economic sanctions—by creating a parallel money-transfer system outside U.S. reach.
“For Serbia, it’s important that such a large international player has chosen to cooperate with it,” said Jorgovanka Tabaković, a prominent national politician and governor of the National Bank of Serbia.
As for its influence in Central and Eastern Europe, China points to its investment in the region, noting that it is a fraction of its pan-Europe exposure. 

Beijing committed nearly $8.9 billion in government-backed project loans and other development assistance to all of Europe last year, up from about $4 billion in 2016, according to a Wall Street Journal tally of deals cited in a compendium published by the Export-Import Bank of the United States.
That two-year tally is only 7% of China’s global total of $185 billion in loans and assistance for the period.
U.S. officials have cautioned developing nations that China’s outreach has strings attached. 

In an October speech in Washington, Vice President Mike Pence said of China’s infrastructure loans, “the terms of those loans are opaque at best, and the benefits invariably flow overwhelmingly to Beijing.” 

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis recently raised similar concerns, saying that “massive debt is piled on countries that fiscal analysis would say they are going to have difficulty, at best, repaying in the smaller countries.”
Outside of Europe, China’s $62 billion infrastructure plan in Pakistan is a factor in the country’s debt funk, which helped cost the ruling party a recent election and nudged the country closer to an international bailout. 

In August, Malaysia’s newly elected prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, ordered a freeze on $22 billion worth of Chinese railway and pipeline construction his predecessor had endorsed, citing inflated contract values and excessive borrowing.
Last year, Sri Lanka surrendered a port to Chinese control to defuse a debt bomb. 

Chinese public works and their big loans are grist for political activists in Angola, Zambia and Kenya.
In Europe, Montenegro faces financial challenges associated with a deal from Export-Import Bank of China and China Road and Bridge Corp. to build its first-ever highway. 

The government calls it the nation’s “greatest engineering construction challenge in its history,” due to the country’s mountainous terrain.
The highway promises to link Central Europe to a port on the Adriatic Sea facing Italy. 

Montenegro already owes around $1.1 billion for the current work, which covers a 25-mile midsection that is due to be completed before mid-2019. 

The cost exceeds the original plans by hundreds of millions of dollars due to unhedged currency swings.
Unless the nation, known for cheap beach holidays, can come up with another $1 billion for a next phase, the four-lane roadway will terminate in a valley of 100 farmers and a general store.

Greece’s Port of Piraeus, pictured on Sept. 15, is managed by Chinese shipping company China Ocean Shipping (Group) Co. 

No data capture the breadth of the economic integration across the region, including private flows from investors who scrambled in after Beijing’s official nod in favor of Europe. 

Some styled themselves as trade middlemen in the continent’s Chinatowns and others formed “friendship” associations to link with local business and academia.
Oil company CEFC China Energy Co. amassed a $1.7 billion empire of property, brewery, soccer, bank and hotel assets in the Czech Republic, but they fell into question earlier this year when the company’s chairman came under investigation by Chinese authorities.
A senior executive at CEFC in Prague said plans were “developing” for China International Trust and Investment Corp. to take over the group’s Europe operations, which would in effect replace a private business with the Chinese state’s oldest-line international investment vehicle.
Beijing has talked about its inroads as a restoration of ancient Silk Road trade routes, but German politician Sigmar Gabriel sees bigger ambitions. 

“It is not a sentimental nod to Marco Polo, but rather stands for an attempt to establish a comprehensive system to shape the world according to China’s interests,” he said when stepping down in February as foreign affairs minister.
Along Europe’s east-west divide, Serbs, Slovaks, Croats and Czechs remain haunted by the Cold War and Yugoslavia’s bloody 1990s breakup. 

Those experiences partly cloud their views of the U.S. and Russia. 

China carries no such historical baggage.
In a near Central European future, a container of Chinese-made mobile phones or automobiles unloading at China Ocean Shipping (Group) Co.’s port in Greece could travel north through Macedonia and Serbia on Chinese toll roads and bridges and slot onto the Chinese-engineered railway to Hungary. 

China-run warehouses have been proposed in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. 

The item might be purchased on the website of e-commerce company Alibaba Group HoldingLtd., which is expanding its cloud data services in Europe, as the internet traffic moves via the switches installed by Huawei Technologies Co. that dominate the region.
The fast-expanding ties between China and Serbia run from visa-free travel between the two countries to mining, manufacturing and weapons research.

Aleksandar Vučić, then Serbia’s prime minister and now president, meeting Xi Jinping and his wife, Peng Liyuan, last year in Beijing. 

A nation of seven million people with an economy similar in size to Vermont’s, Serbia projects political neutrality. 

Officials have called Beijing a “fourth pillar” of its foreign policy, along with Brussels, Washington and Moscow.
“We do not believe that we should choose between East and West,” Serbian Finance Minister Siniša Mali said in written responses to questions.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić describes Xi as a personal friend and has met him five times in two years. 

Their wives discussed bilateral relations in Beijing on Oct 29.
A poll last year by think tank Belgrade Centre for Security Policy found that Serbians see the U.S. as stronger militarily and politically than China but not far ahead of it economically. 

In the poll, the U.S. trails China in technology and in trust as an investor.
The nearly mile-long China-Serbia Friendship Bridge, opened four years ago, was the first major piece of infrastructure constructed in Europe by a Chinese team. 

That led to commissions for its builder, China Road and Bridge, in Croatia and Montenegro.
Even before the bridge’s dedication, according to the term sheet reviewed by the Journal, the clock was ticking on a 18-year requirement for Serbia’s Finance Ministry to wire millions of dollars each January and July to a New York bank account of the Beijing-based project lender, Export-Import Bank of China, until $217.4 million plus fees are repaid. 

The contract also stipulated that “goods, technologies and services… be purchased from China preferentially,” and that any disputes be settled in China.
Work is now under way by China Railway Signal & Communication Co. in Belgrade for a $3 billion rail upgrade to Hungary. 

Construction has been delayed on the Hungarian side because the EU challenged a no-bid award to a Chinese contractor. 

Serbia, unburdened by such rules, fast-tracked approval to the same Chinese contractors for its $350 million portion.
Down the block from Bank of China Ltd.’s new Belgrade office, an 11-floor, $60 million Chinese cultural and corporate center for a government-owned construction business is rising on the former site of China’s embassy. 

The mission was destroyed in 1999 when American planes dropped five laser-guided bombs on it during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s campaign to stop the Balkan conflict.
After taking three bows at a plaque to embassy “martyrs,” Beijing tourist Yang Xiaoyu said he was just 2 years old when the bombs fell. 

“I feel like our country was quite weak then,” Yang said. 

“When we came here today and recalled what had happened then, we feel that our motherland is indeed getting stronger.”

World Leaders Opt For China’s Money Over The Rights Of 1 Million Jailed Muslims

From Saudi Arabia to Iran, the desire for Chinese cash unites the Muslim community and leaves the Uighurs’ prospects looking bleak.
By Akbar Shahid Ahmed

WASHINGTON ― Now that United Nations experts have endorsed widespread reports that China is holding a million members of its Muslim minority Uighur community in internment camps, the Chinese government’s denials of a crackdown look flimsier than ever.
Activists and reporters who have documented the repression appear vindicated and awareness about the crisis seems to be growing ― but there’s no certainty of resulting international pressure from governments like the United States that experts see as essential to forcing change.
“There’s very few countries in the world that have been vocal about the Uighur situation, even historically,” said Sean Roberts, a George Washington University professor and former U.S. Agency for International Development official.
“The United States might have more leverage over China than any other country that might seek to sanction China but China also has a lot of leverage over the [U.S.] economically … I really think that in the end this can only be addressed by the [U.N.], which requires a lot of states coming together.”
The dilemma for world leaders is that so much of the global economy now relies on China ― Chinese manufacturing, Chinese consumers and Chinese investment.
Since the Chinese government is so enmeshed in the country’s economy, to criticize even policies far removed from business like human rights violations is to risk becoming a target of political retribution through economic means.
Beijing has exploited that fear to avoid even acknowledging its crimes. 
It has even successfully forced other governments to aid its repression by handing over Uighurs living within their borders.
For years, particularly since a new top Chinese official took over the predominantly Uighur colony of East Turkestan in 2016 and began instituting harsh new surveillance and measures like forcing families to host Communist Party officials in their homes, Beijing has felt it can treat the estimated 10 million Uighurs and other members of Muslim-minority communities as it pleases despite international law.
“There has not been comparable foreign government pressure” to the criticism from rights groups and analysts, said Maya Wang, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.
“The Chinese government continues to act with impunity... The camps’ very existence and construction shows the government thinks it can continue to do so.”
Small but influential countries with business ties with China have helped shield it from criticism.
Greece last summer blocked a disparaging European Union statement on China’s human rights record, and it aligned with Hungary against a separate EU statement on Chinese regional expansionism in 2016.
The argument from Chinese partners like Greece is that such issues are better discussed in private. But advocates argue general silence around the targeting of Uighurs is the very reason their communities now exist in what U.N. expert Gay McDougall called a “no-rights zone.”
“If one million Tibetans were arbitrarily detained in camps, there would be much stronger condemnation from the international community, which is a testament to the work of Tibetan advocacy groups around the world and people speaking strongly about rights issues there,” Peter Irwin of the World Uyghur Congress told HuffPost in an email.
“This is perhaps why the Chinese government hasn’t gone to this extreme in Tibet.”
“The reason that we’ve seen things escalate to this extent … is at least in part because of the lack of response from the international community over the last three decades when [Uighurs] were targeted by discriminatory policies,” he added.
The Chinese policy in East Turkestan is now perhaps “more acute” than even the brutal upheavals during the country’s Cultural Revolution because it is planned in such detail and so specifically targeted on an ethnic and religious minority group, Roberts said.
The U.S. has been one of the few governments to at least pay lip service to *the need for change, through its support of a well-respected Uighur news service run by state-funded broadcaster Radio Free Asia and a consistent line for years from officials and lawmakers.
For Zubayra Shamseden, a East Turkestan native now working with the Uighur Human Rights Project in Washington, D.C., even that counts: “If there was no U.S. government or no U.N. to stand up, imagine what’s going to happen to Uighurs,” she said.
Uighur groups estimate that more than a million members of the community now live outside China. They are primarily in Central Asia, but 10,000 are scattered around Europe, while about 5,000 are in the U.S., around 3,000 in Australia and up to 50,000 in Turkey, a country with which they share historical and cultural ties.
As a result, the crisis affects citizens in foreign countries as well.
With arrests of Uighurs in China having surpassed the 1 million mark, essentially every family has a member or a friend who has been detained, subjected to lectures about loyalty to the Communist Party and torture, Shamseden said.
“What’s happening inside the country is obstructing normal living” for Uighurs trying to live as productive citizens in countries abroad, she continued.
In nations ranging from Egypt and Malaysia, they now also live in fear of being forced back to China.
The lack of concern for Uighurs is especially striking coming from governments in Muslim-majority countries, given their rallying around the cause of the Palestinians and to some degree that of the persecuted Rohingya minority in Myanmar.
The most powerful of those governments, like Iran and Pakistan, are hoping to benefit from China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative, a transnational development plan seeking to tie Europe and Asia closer together.
“I’m not very religious, but at least I know the principles of our religion: If your brothers and sisters are suffering, you are too,” Shamseden said.
“I don’t know why the Muslim world won’t really follow what that religion told me.”
The spike in attention to the Uighur cause thanks to the U.N. session that ended Monday could create momentum, particularly because it comes a few months ahead of another big international review of China’s approach to human rights scheduled for November.
With the Trump administration eager to confront China on all fronts as it ramps up its trade war, Washington could see a benefit to highlighting the issue even more, for instance by using evidence of mass detention to place sanctions on powerful Chinese officials, Roberts said.
But the Trump administration has made that task potentially more difficult through its withdrawal from the U.N. Human Rights Council, which forfeited its official role in the November review.
That makes it more important for governments like those in Europe to speak out, said Sarah Brooks, a program manager at the International Service for Human Rights.
Still, she and other experts believe the unprecedented U.N. finding could make China so wary of further criticism and damaging revelations that the government will become a little more receptive to external calls for change.
“You can’t necessarily stop a government from oppressing its own people,” Roberts said.
“It’s a question of whether the tide could be turned to at least put enough pressure on China to … at the very least shut down those camps.”

European Horses

China Seeks Influence in Europe, One Business Deal at a Time

By David Barboza, Marc Santora and Alexandra Stevenson

The Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, center right, welcoming Milos Zeman, center left, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 2015. Ye Jianming, far left, headed CEFC China Energy, which spent more than $1 billion on deals in the Czech Republic.

PRAGUE — When Xi Jinping became the first top Chinese leader to visit the Czech Republic, he was accompanied by a mysterious Chinese tycoon with big political ambitions, money to burn and strong ties to the Czech president.
Ye Jianming was the sole businessman among the group of Chinese and Czech government officials who gathered two years ago outside the presidential summer residence where Xi and Milos Zeman, his Czech counterpart, planted ginkgo trees. 

For Ye, it was recognition of his role as a major power broker in Prague, having bought landmark properties, a local brewery and a much beloved soccer team.
The meeting — and the Ye's presence — cemented China’s newfound influence on politics and business in Zeman’s Czech Republic and signaled its broader ambitions in Europe.
In just two years Ye’s company, CEFC China Energy, had spent more than $1 billion on deals in the Czech Republic. 

He hired former Czech officials, including a onetime defense minister. 

Ye was even named a special economic adviser to Zeman.
Zeman, in turn, became a big backer of Beijing, tamping down domestic opposition to Chinese influence and taking up Chinese causes. 

He publicly supported China’s claims over Taiwan, the democratic island that Beijing claims as its territory. 

When Xi visited, police tried to keep protesters out of sight; some later accused the police of using violence to suppress them. 

The family of a prominent Holocaust survivor said Zeman withdrew a proposed medal for the man after his nephew met with the Dalai Lama, an exiled spiritual leader whom China considers a rebel.

China's fifth column: Xi's myrmidons demonstrated during his visit in Prague in 2016.

For China, the Czech courtship was an unqualified victory: It had won a sure friend in Europe, an American military ally and a country once seen as a bulwark for liberal democracy in a strategically important region. 

As Zeman declared, the Czech Republic hoped to become “an unsinkable aircraft carrier of Chinese investment expansion” in Europe.
Then, Ye was detained in China this year, exposing the Czech Republic to the perils of this new relationship and forcing the president to defend his quick embrace of the Chinese deal maker. 

While the reason for Ye’s detention was never made public, critics of the Czech president saw Ye’s disappearance as proof that the country shouldn’t have tied its future and its fortune to the Chinese.
An emboldened, globally ambitious China is using money, business deals and other incentives to extend its power abroad. 

The pitch can hold great appeal in a world shaken by Washington’s growing disengagement and Europe’s struggles.
But tighter ties to China mean greater susceptibility to an opaque political system where decisions are made behind the scenes. 

Investments can be driven by politics rather than economics, resulting in costly white elephants.
In the Czech Republic, Ye’s sudden disappearance took the country’s leaders by surprise. 

They couldn’t discern why that would happen to someone who seemed to have the government’s blessing. 

They had not pressed him on where he was getting his money to make big flashy deals in the Czech Republic and elsewhere. 

Officials also had difficulty answering questions about criminal allegations in the United States that a senior business associate of CEFC had tried to bribe his way into new business opportunities in Africa.
Zeman dispatched a team of officials to determine what the tycoon’s problems meant for the Czech Republic. 

He soon found out.
Prague was about to become even more enmeshed with the Chinese government. 

A state-owned company stepped in to take control of Ye’s empire, fueling suspicions that the company was politically important to the Chinese leadership.

Xi and Zeman during a welcome ceremony outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 2014. Zeman’s visit was the first by a Czech leader in nearly a decade.

Eastern Appeal
Early in his political career, Zeman, a blunt-spoken populist, warned against toadying up to Russia and China. 

Those seeking deeper ties with Beijing, he told a local newspaper in 1996, are “ready to go under plastic surgery to slant their eyes.”
But the realities in Europe were changing by the time he won the Czech presidency in 2013.
The global financial crisis had tested Europe’s unity. 

Refugees from Syria had begun to arrive, fueling nativist sentiment and pitting local politicians against the bloc’s leaders. 

Western Europe no longer seemed to be the only option.
At the time, Beijing was beginning to pour money and political capital into Eastern and Central Europe as part of a broad bid to increase its heft in Europe. 

China’s leaders see the region as potentially fertile ground. 

While Britain, France and Germany welcomed greater investments from Beijing, they still bucked China’s stances on issues like human rights and its claim to control almost all of the South China Sea. Eastern and Central Europe didn’t have the same qualms.
Looking for further inroads, China started what came to be called the 16+1 initiative, an effort to expand cooperation with more than a dozen Eastern and Central European nations. 

It became a forum for China to show off what it could offer the region, like access to technology for a high-speed rail system. 

Xi later included Eastern and Central Europe in his Belt and Road Initiative, an ambitious plan to develop economic and diplomatic ties through infrastructure projects around the world.
China’s influence in Europe is already apparent. 

Greece last year blocked a European Union statement in the United Nations criticizing China’s human rights record. 

Greece and Hungary worked to water down a 2016 European Union statement regarding the South China Sea.
For Zeman, the courtship basically had to start from scratch.
The former Czechoslovakia recognized the Communist-led China in 1949, but a rift between Moscow and Beijing kept them apart. 

The post-Soviet Czech Republic, remembering the brutal 1968 Soviet crackdown on reform efforts in Prague and subsequent Communist domination, found common cause with Beijing’s critics.
Vaclav Havel, the anti-Communist activist and the country’s first leader after the fall of the Berlin Wall, invited the Dalai Lama to a state visit in 1990, angering Beijing. 

He had stern words for China. 

“Intimidation, propaganda campaigns, and repression,” he wrote, “are no substitute for reasoned dialogue.”

The Piraeus Container Terminal, operated by the Chinese state-owned shipping company Cosco in Athens. Greece, which has received significant Chinese investment, blocked a European Union statement in the United Nations criticizing China’s human rights record.

Zeman, a well-known smoker and drinker who once publicly denied that he showed up at his inauguration drunk, broke with that history. 

He rejected Havel-era support for the Dalai Lama and its close ties to the government of Taiwan.
He visited China in 2014, the first visit by a Czech leader in nearly a decade. 

A year later, he was the only European Union leader to attend a military parade celebrating the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. 

That helped him secure Xi’s 2016 visit to Prague.
“This is a restart,” Zeman told Chinese official media before Xi’s visit, adding that the previous government had been “very submissive” to the United States and the European Union.
“Now, we are again an independent country,” he said, “and we formulate our foreign policy, which is based on our own national interests, and we do not interfere with the internal affairs of any other country.”
His focus on China won wide praise from the Czech political apparatus.
“If anybody thinks that under current circumstances it is possible to create safe and prosperous world without cooperation with China, then he has missed the train long ago,” said Katerina Konecna, vice chairman of the Czech Republic’s Communist Party.
Zeman’s office said its efforts to court China were no different from the efforts of others.
“Those that have expressed such criticism offend our Western allies who collaborate extraordinarily tightly with the People’s Republic of China,” said Jiri Ovcacek, a spokesman for Zeman. 

Zeman’s office didn’t respond to further requests for comment.

CEFC’s European headquarters in Prague. The company bought a stake in one of Prague’s biggest office complexes. It invested in the Czech national airline, two hotels and a pair of Renaissance-era buildings. It also bought a brewery that traces its roots back more than 700 years.

A Shadowy Suitor
Zeman’s 2014 visit proved fateful for the Czech Republic. 

Among the business deals reached was a cooperation pact between a Czech financial firm and an up-and-coming energy company called CEFC.
It was led by Ye Jianming, who was born in a small village in the southern Chinese province of Fujian. 

He grabbed hold of assets once controlled by a notorious smuggler and in a few years parlayed them into a sprawling business empire with 30,000 employees. 

Ye traveled the world on his twin-engine Airbus 319 private jet, meeting heads of state, Russian oligarchs and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi.
CEFC was modeled on Xi’s vision of a stronger China — and it went where Xi wanted China to go. It struck deals in the United Arab Emirates and Kazakhstan. 

It courted top leaders in places like Albania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Sudan and Uganda. 

Last year, it agreed to buy a $9 billion stake in Rosneft, the Russian oil giant, which put it firmly in the middle of the complicated but important relationship between Beijing and Moscow.
Its fast rise fueled rumors in China that Ye had ties to Xi, who once worked in Fujian, or other Chinese leaders. 

CEFC did little to discourage them. 

Ye was part of a group tied to the Chinese military, according to documents and experts. 

On its website, CEFC cited the military and Communist Party experience of its top executives.
The Czech Republic made a tempting target for CEFC’s international push. 

The country was a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was disillusioned with the West and ready to do business.
CEFC bought a stake in Florentinum, one of Prague’s biggest office complexes. 

It invested in the Czech national airline, two hotels and a pair of Renaissance-era buildings. 

It bought a brewery that traces its roots back more than 700 years.
Zeman’s staff trumpeted the deals as proof that courting China made economic sense.
“People believed the rhetoric,” said Olga Lomova, the head of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation International Sinological Center of Charles University in Prague. 

“We have the Chinese. We will be happy again.”
CEFC also hired figures close to Zeman, leading to accusations from critics of a revolving door between the Chinese company and the president. 

Jaroslav Tvrdik, the country’s former minister of defense, was hired to run CEFC’s Czech operations while serving as an adviser on China to the government. 

Czech officials defended keeping Tvrdik as an adviser, saying the position was unpaid.
Miroslav Sklenar, Zeman’s protocol chief, left that position in 2015 for a role at CEFC. 

He returned to the presidential palace at the end of 2016.
Early on, CEFC worried that its growing involvement would upset the public. 

Its solution: Buy the local soccer team.

Slavia Prague had been on the brink of bankruptcy when CEFC purchased a majority stake in 2015. The team’s uniforms were changed to say “CEFC China” in Roman letters and in Chinese characters.

Slavia Prague had been on the brink of bankruptcy when CEFC purchased a majority stake in 2015. The team began to spend heavily under its new owner, retaining its star forward, Milan Škoda, and signing a Dutch player, Gino van Kessel. 

Last year, the club won its first league championship since 2009. 

Slavia Prague played in uniforms that said “CEFC China” in Roman letters and in Chinese characters.
CEFC’s deals made little business sense to observers. 

“So many of the acquisitions were made in a rush, and were nonsense,” said Ms. Lomova, of Charles University. 

“They were not investments that were able to pay for themselves.”
And CEFC acknowledged that its motivations went beyond business. 

“Our company cares about what we can do to bridge the cultural gap,” Jiang Chunyu, a senior executive at CEFC said at a forum in China in December.
Protestors carrying Tibetan flags shouted slogans against Xi during his visit in Prague in 2016.

Promises Undone
Xi’s historic 2016 visit to Prague showed the China-Czech relationship to be the closest in the history of the two countries. 

It also showed that cracks were forming.
Thousands of protesters tried to greet the Chinese leader as he met with Zeman in Prague Castle. Members of both the Czech and European parliaments joined. 

One lawmaker, who owns a home on the hill beneath the castle, set up a projector to cast the words “Truth and Love” on the castle wall — an invocation of a famous quote of Havel’s, who said that truth and love would vanquish lies and hatred. 

Flags lining Xi’s route from the airport were defaced.
Czech authorities, with the help of CEFC, tried to obscure the tensions. 

Police officers blocked demonstrators from getting too close to the castle, setting off complaints from protesters about police violence.
“Why are the police protecting the Chinese and limiting the ability of the Czech people to express themselves?” said Ondrej Kolar, the mayor of a Prague district.
Wherever Xi traveled, busloads of local Chinese supporters appeared, too.
Filip Lexa, a 33-year-old teacher and doctoral student studying Chinese literature, said he showed up with a flag representing the Uighur minority of western China, where the authorities there have cracked down on the local population. 

He said he was harassed by a group of Chinese men bused into the event.
“When I took the flag out, everyone attacked me,” he said, adding that he escaped serious injury. “They pulled me into the middle of this group and started kicking me and hitting me with the flag poles they were carrying. One even broke a pole on my back.”
CEFC played a major role in trying to make sure the Chinese dictator’s visit went smoothly, said Mr. Kolar, the mayor who was involved in preparations for the event because his district is home to a number of embassies.
“It wasn’t organized by the state, but by a private company,” he said. 

“CEFC organized the whole event.”
CEFC arranged for the display of Chinese flags along the route through Mr. Kolar’s neighborhood — flags with red and yellow color reminiscent of the Soviet Union. 

When some were defaced, CEFC workers replaced them.
“It felt like the ’70s or ’80s again,” Mr. Kolar said. 

“Then it was revealed that it was CEFC who paid for those flags.”
Many Czechs had other reasons to sour on the relationship with China. 

Investment figures have proved disappointing — Taiwan’s investment in 2017 was nearly three times that of China’s, according to data from Sinopsis, a research group focused on China. 

Zeman attributed the shortfall to new Chinese limits on money flowing abroad.
The revocation of an award to a famous Czech Holocaust survivor also set off outrage. 

George Brady, an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor, was set to be honored at a Czech state dinner in 2016 and receive a medal for his work. 

His sister, Hana Brady, died in the gas chambers in Auschwitz, and he had turned her story into a popular children’s book called “Hana’s Suitcase.”
But his nephew was the Czech Republic’s culture minister — and he was set to meet with the Dalai Lama. 

Before the ceremony, the nephew, Daniel Herman, received a call from Zeman’s office.
“I was told that if I went ahead with a meeting with the Dalai Lama, there would be no medal,” Mr. Herman said in an interview. 

He went ahead with the meeting. 

“And there was no ceremony,” he said.
Czech officials acknowledged that Zeman asked Mr. Herman not to meet with the Dalai Lama. 

They said the withdrawal of the medal was unrelated, although they did not specify a reason.

Zeman, right, and Xi on the terrace of the Strahov Monastery overlooking Prague. Xi’s historic 2016 visit showed the China-Czech relationship to be the closest in the history of the two countries.

But China’s biggest challenge to its Czech strategy began elsewhere.
In November, American authorities arrested Patrick Ho, a top executive of CEFC’s nonprofit arm, and charged him with offering bribes to officials in Uganda and Chad in exchange for oil rights.
Czech officials and one person with direct knowledge of Ye’s case say he was detained by the Chinese authorities after Ho’s arrest. 

A short time later, the company was hit with a number of problems. 

Its bid for a stake in Rosneft collapsed. 

And Chinese rating firms warned that CEFC had taken on considerable debt.
In April, Zeman met with officials from Citic Group, a state-controlled Chinese company that had agreed to buy just under half of CEFC’s Europe venture. 

While Ye’s ties to China’s leadership had been just rumored, Citic is a company firmly under Beijing’s control. 

Citic didn’t respond to requests for comment.
If a direct role for Beijing in Czech businesses bothered Zeman, he has shown little public sign. 

He is set to make another visit to the Chinese capital this autumn.

A security guard at the entrance of an unmarked building in Shanghai listed as an address for CEFC.

Europe needs to step up vigilance on China’s influence

Beijing’s authoritarian brand presents a direct challenge to liberal traditions 
By Thorsten Benner and Kristin Shi-Kupfer

Complacency with Chinese tyranny: French President Emmanuel Macron with Xi Jinping in Beijing in January

Mike Pompeo, the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, said last month that Beijing’s efforts to exert influence in liberal democracies are just as concerning as those of Moscow, citing China’s “much bigger footprint”.
Indeed, China’s rapidly increasing political influencing efforts and the self-confident promotion of its authoritarian ideals present a fundamental challenge to western democracies. 
 Drawing on its economic strength and a Communist Party of China apparatus that is geared towards strategically building stocks of influence across the globe, Beijing’s efforts are bound to be much more consequential in the medium to long term than those of the Kremlin. 
Nowhere is the gap between the scale of China’s efforts and public awareness of the problem larger than in Europe.
EU member states urgently need to devise a strategy to counter China’s authoritarian advance. 
 As we detail in a new report, Beijing pursues three related goals.

• First, it seeks to weaken western unity within Europe and across the Atlantic. One aim of this is to prevent Europe from challenging China’s human rights record and its hegemonic ambitions in the South and East China seas. 
•  Second, it aims to build European support on specific issues such as market economy status and a free pass for Chinese investments. 
•  Third, Beijing pushes hard to create a more positive global perception of China’s political and economic system as a viable alternative to liberal democracies. 

To further these goals, China commands a comprehensive and flexible influencing toolset in Europe, ranging from the overt to the covert and strategically deployed across three arenas: political and economic elites, media and civil society & academia. 
 Beijing uses investments in infrastructure and public utilities to create political leverage in Europe’s periphery. 
In Greece, for example, it controls the port of Piraeus, leading the government in Athens to torpedo a joint EU resolution on human rights in China in the Human Rights Council. 
In the Czech Republic, it placed an adviser in the president’s office. 
Across Europe, it buys the services of former politicians such as Philipp Roesler, the former German vice-chancellor who was hired by HNA, the Chinese conglomerate, and David Cameron, the former UK prime minister, who has signed up to lead a joint UK-China investment fund. 
Many smaller eastern and southern EU members align with China in fits of “pre-emptive obedience”. 
They try to curry favour with China and lure investment by supporting China’s political positions. 
Some illiberal governments, such as that of Viktor Orban in Hungary, do so all too happily.
They see China’s authoritarian model as attractive and a convenient source of leverage against Brussels and western EU members pushing back against their illiberalism. 
Orban has already played the China card to put pressure his EU partners who are considering reducing structural funds in response to his authoritarianism and a post-Brexit recalibration of the EU budget. 
“Central Europe needs capital to build new roads and pipelines. If the EU is unable to provide enough capital, we will just collect it in China,” Orban said in Berlin this year.
To sweeten the deal for China, Orban is gladly working to prevent a strong EU stance on China’s territorial advances in the South China Sea. 
In parallel, Beijing has invested in shaping the narrative on China.
Across central and eastern Europe, China-supported Confucius Institutes, as well as China-linked think-tanks and university scholars dominate discussions, while an increasing number of journalists go through training programmes designed and funded by the Chinese Communist party. 
In Brussels and other capitals, China funds think-tanks and pays lobbyists to project a favourable image. 
It spreads Chinese official views and creates subtle dependencies by paying for inserts in European quality newspapers. 
It uses the lure of the Chinese market to encourage self-censorship in film, art, and academic publishing. 
Springer Nature, the German group that publishes Scientific American, has removed content in China that was deemed politically sensitive by the party. 
China even went as far as demanding that Germany ensure that its visiting football teams are not met by protests about Tibet during paid friendly games on German soil. 
In part, China uses covert methods, such targeting German lawmakers and government employees via fake social media profiles. 

But most influencing comes through the front door.
Beijing takes advantage of the EU’s one-sided openness. 
Europe’s gates are wide open whereas China seeks to tightly restrict access of foreign ideas, actors and capital. 
Beijing profits from willing enablers among European political and professional classes who are happy to promote Chinese values and interests. 
They do so mostly for financial or other advantages but at times also out of genuine political conviction or convenience.
Rather than only China trying to actively build up political capital, there is also much influence courting on the part of those political elites in EU member states.
China has already made significant progress toward a more fragmented and pliant Europe that better serves its authoritarian interests. 
If Europe intends to stop the momentum of Chinese influencing efforts, it needs to act swiftly and decisively.
In responding to China’s advance, European governments need to make sure that the liberal DNA of their countries’ political and economic systems stays intact.
 Some restrictions will be necessary, but Europe should not copy China’s illiberalism.
While staying as open as possible, Europe needs to address critical vulnerabilities to Chinese authoritarian influencing through a multi-pronged strategy that integrates different branches of government, businesses, media, civil society, culture/arts as well as academia. 
 To better leverage the collective weight of EU member states, larger member states, such as Germany and France, need to take serious steps towards putting their privileged bilateral relations with China in the service of common European interests.
Complaining about the 16+1 format China uses to interact with smaller EU members in central and eastern Europe while engaging in 1+1 formats with Beijing undermines a common EU response to challenges from China. 
In addition, European governments need to invest in high-calibre, independent China expertise. Raising awareness about and responding to China’s political influencing efforts in Europe can succeed only if there is sufficient impartial expertise on China in think-tanks, universities, NGOs and media across Europe. 
 Furthermore, the EU needs to continue providing alternatives to the promises of Chinese investments in European countries.
It also needs to enable EU members and third countries in the neighbourhood to properly evaluate, monitor and prepare large-scale infrastructure projects, including those financed by China.
 The EU and its members must be able to stop state-driven takeovers of companies that are of significant public interest.
In addition to high-tech sectors as well as key parts of public infrastructure, this notably includes the media, as an institution of critical importance to liberal democracies.
 Foreign funding of political parties from outside Europe, not least from China, should be banned across the EU. 
European intelligence services urgently need to enhance co-operation on Chinese activities to arrive at a common understanding of the threat and to deliver joint responses. 
 EU members should put additional awareness-building measures in place sensitise potential targets of Chinese intelligence activities. 
In particular, decision makers and scholars should be briefed more systematically about common patterns of contact-building and approaches by Chinese intelligence agencies or related actors.
 For the wider public to get a full picture of authoritarian influencing, liberal democracies need to leverage one of the key assets of open societies: the power of critical public debate.
Implementing transparency requirements concerning collaboration with Chinese actors for media agencies, universities and think-tanks, among others, would help raise awareness of the various influencing mechanisms Chinese state actors employ. 
 “Vigilance is wise; confidence a useful adjunct,” the Economist counselled recently in a piece on China’s influence in Europe.
With the necessary defensive mechanisms in place, confidence should come more easily.

Europe's First Chinese Colony

Chastised by E.U., a Resentful Greece Embraces China’s Cash and Interests
By JASON HOROWITZ and LIZ ALDERMAN

The port of Piraeus. China invested nearly half a billion euros in the port, transforming it into the busiest harbor in the Mediterranean. 

ATHENS — After years of struggling under austerity imposed by its European partners and a chilly shoulder from the United States, Greece has embraced the advances of China, its most ardent and geopolitically ambitious suitor.
While Europe was busy squeezing Greece, the Chinese swooped in with bucket-loads of investments that have begun to pay off, not only economically but also by apparently giving China a political foothold in Greece, and by extension, in Europe.
Last summer, Greece helped stop the European Union from issuing a unified statement against Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. 

This June, Athens prevented the bloc from condemning China’s human rights record. 

Days later it opposed tougher screening of Chinese investments in Europe.
Greece’s diplomatic stance hardly went unnoticed by its European partners or by the United States, all of which had previously worried that the country’s economic vulnerability might make it a ripe target for Russia, always eager to divide the bloc.
Instead, it is the Chinese who have become an increasingly powerful foreign player in Greece after years of assiduous courtship and checkbook diplomacy.

Among those initiatives, China plans to make the Greek port of Pireaus the “dragon head” of its vast “One Belt, One Road” project, a new Silk Road into Europe.
When Germany treated Greece as the eurozone’s delinquent, China designated a recovery-hungry Greece its “most reliable friend” in Europe.
“While the Europeans are acting towards Greece like medieval leeches, the Chinese keep bringing money,” said Costas Douzinas, the head of the Greek Parliament’s foreign affairs and defense committee, and a member of the governing Syriza party.

Municipal workers protested cuts to government spending in Athens in 2012. China quietly invested in Greece as the European Union imposed austerity measures. 

China has already used its economic muscle to stamp a major geopolitical footprint in Africa and South America as it scours the globe for natural resources to fuel its economy. 

If China was initially welcomed as a deep-pocketed investor — and an alternative to America — it has faced growing criticism that it is less an economic partner than a 21st-century incarnation of a colonialist power.
If not looking for natural resources in Europe, China has for years invested heavily across the bloc, its largest trading partner. 

Yet now concerns are rising that Beijing is using its economic clout for political leverage.
Douzinas said China had never explicitly asked Greece for support on the human rights vote or on other sensitive issues, though he and other Greek officials acknowledge that explicit requests are not necessary.
“If you’re down and someone slaps you and someone else gives you an alm,” Douzinas said, “when you can do something in return, who will you help, the one who helped you or the one who slapped you?”
The Trump administration, recognizing it has a geopolitical and economic challenger, recently intervened to help lift an American deal over a Chinese competitor — and the Greeks seemed happy to play one power off the other.
E.U. officials are concerned that China is buying silence on human rights issues and undermining the bloc’s ability to speak with one voice. 

China targets smaller countries in need of cash, among them Spain, Portugal and others that suffered in the financial crisis. 

Hungary, where China is pledging to spend billions on a railway, also blocked the E.U. statement on the South China Sea.
Many analysts have noted that Greece’s human rights veto came as Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras returned from a summit meeting in Beijing in May, where he signed billions of euros’ worth of new investment memorandums with Chinese companies.
Greek officials insisted that, despite all the Chinese investments, the country identified with the E.U. and did not do China’s bidding. 

Some European officials are not so sure.
“The Greek government needs to choose where its alliances lie and realize the E.U. is not only a market, but first and foremost a community of values,” said Marietje Schaake, a prominent member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands.
Over the summer, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany tightened rules to limit takeovers of German strategic assets, a move aimed at Chinese state-backed firms. 

As Ms. Merkel put it to a German newspaper after Greece’s vote blocking the condemnation of Chinese human rights violations, Europe “has to speak with China in one voice.”
She added that China’s economic might allow it to pressure weaker European nations. 

“Seen from Beijing,” she added, “Europe is an Asian peninsula.”

Greek voters elected the radical leftist party Syriza and its leader, Alexis Tsipras, in 2015.

China’s Greek Gateway to Europe
In January 2015, Greek voters shook Europe by electing the radical leftist Syriza party and its leader, Tsipras. 

He had campaigned to end the austerity measures of the E.U. and halt privatizations like the port of Pireaus. 

Boisterous protesters spilled into Athens, waving Syriza flags and denouncing the European power centers, Brussels and Berlin.
But it was Beijing that became quietly nervous. 

China’s years of laborious and expensive spadework in Greece suddenly seemed imperiled, especially its investments in Pireaus.
Immediately after Tsipras took office, the Chinese ambassador, Zou Xiaoli, became the first foreign official to pay him a visit. 

Xiaoli pressed Tsipras to honor the previous Greek government’s commitments to privatize Piraeus, according to several people with knowledge of the meeting.
Back in Beijing, Chinese officials expressed displeasure, and state-run media ran articles questioning Greece’s friendship with China. 

Less than a week later, the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, telephoned Tsipras to make sure there were no more misunderstandings.
In response, Tsipras and his deputies announced an “upgrading of relations between Greece and China.” 

Within weeks, three Chinese frigates arrived in Piraeus port. 

At a ceremony, Tsipras affirmed Greece’s intent to “serve as China’s gateway into Europe.”

Tsipras boarded a Chinese frigate during a ceremony at the port of Piraeus in 2015.

Even as Berlin and Brussels grow wary of Chinese investment, Greece may not care, after suffering under German-enforced austerity attached to the international bailouts that have kept the country afloat since the 2010 debt crisis.
In 2010, as creditors demanded the gutting of pensions and sharp tax increases, the Chinese offered to buy toxic Greek government bonds. 

In 2013, as Greece became increasingly subject to creditor budget restrictions, the Chinese spent freely on Greek assets.
In turn, Greece becomes a voice in the room at the E.U. for China on sensitive issues — although government officials insist Greece remains loyal to the bloc and NATO, and is only seeking to strike a balance in a shifting world.
As for scuttling the E.U. statement on China’s human rights violations — the first time in a decade the bloc was silenced — government officials said Greece viewed the E.U. approach as “unproductive.” 

After the vote, China’s foreign ministry applauded “the relevant E.U. country for sticking to the right position.”

A ship in the repair zone on a floating dock in the Port of Piraeus. 

Neocolonialism Without Gunboats
Along more than 20 miles of coastline outside Athens, a forest of cranes at the Piraeus port load and unload thousands of containers from China and around the world. 

An ultramodern floating dock is scheduled for arrival in November from China. 

A planned new Chinese-financed passenger hub is also in the works.
China has transformed Piraeus into the Mediterranean’s busiest port, investing nearly half a billion euros through the state-backed shipping conglomerate Cosco. 

It hopes to make Piraeus the entry point to Europe under its One Belt, One Road project.
Chinese goods would travel along a new network of railways and roads radiating up through central European nations, with the prized destination being Germany, where China invested $12 billion last year alone.
In the middle of the port, Chinese, Greek and E.U. flags flutter in front of the headquarters of Cosco, which now controls the entire waterfront through its 67 percent stake in the port.
“It’s a kind of neocolonialism without the gunboats,” said Douzinas with a chuckle.
Greek officials note that, unlike democratic nations that change politicians every few years, the Chinese have a long and steady strategic view.
“They know what they want,” said Stergios Pitsiorlas, the Greek deputy economics minister and one of the government’s point men dealing with China.
Cosco has brought around 1,000 jobs to the area, but it has outfitted cargo docks with cranes made in China, not in Greece, and expanded the docks with building materials from China. 

And as Greece struggles through record joblessness, the company has used subcontractors to hire around 1,500 workers mostly on short-term contracts at wages far below what unionized Greek dockworkers are paid.
“There are more workers, but they earn less income,” said Giorgos Gogos, the general secretary of the Piraeus dockworkers union.

Chinese tourists in front of the Greek Parliament last month.

Yet Greece needs any jobs, and leaders are counting on more Chinese investment. 

Fosun International Holdings, a Chinese conglomerate run by Guo Guangchang, often referred to as China’s Warren Buffett, is spending billions of euros with a consortium with Greek and Arab investors to convert an abandoned former airport on the seaside outside Athens into a posh playground three times the size of Monaco for moneyed tourists. 

The project, Hellenikon, is part of a bigger plan to bring over 1.5 million Chinese tourists to Greece during the next five years.
Tsipras has swept aside regulatory hurdles, clearing two large refugee camps installed in the former airport, and quashing attempts by members of his own party to delay construction because of concerns the project might pave over ancient archaeological sites.
“That also has been unstuck,” said Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, the Greek economy minister.

The Greek Great Game: China vs. America
After World War II, the benefactor showering millions on Greece was the United States, courtesy of the Marshall Plan. 

America’s role in Greece wasn’t always popular — especially its support for the country’s military dictatorship during the Cold War — but the United States was regarded as the gold standard for economic opportunity. 

Not so much anymore.
When former President Obama visited Greece last November on his final foreign trip, some Syriza officials, bitter that his administration had not intervened more forcefully during the financial crisis, mocked his speech as a funeral oration for his own legacy, worthy of Pericles.
Privately, Mr. Obama’s advisers said the trip also served to demonstrate, somewhat belatedly, American engagement in Greece in the face of Russian meddling in the region.

Former President Barack Obama with Mr. Tsipras in November 2016.

But it was China that was most deeply entrenched. 

Eliot Engel, the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, described a “free-for-all for rogue countries” in Greece.
“We see it with Russia and we see it with China,” he said as he attended a July 4 party at the United States ambassador’s residence in Athens, part of a congressional delegation that had come to drum up business for American companies. 

“That’s why it’s so important for America to be engaged in the world.”
Tsipras is trying to play both sides. 

Having traveled twice in a year to Beijing to meet the Chinese president and attend One Belt, One Road forums to draw investment, he has recently welcomed American businessmen and promoted Greece’s recovery to American lawmakers.
In May, when Fosun and two other Chinese companies bid to take over a major Greek insurer, the United States commerce secretary, Wilbur L. Ross, intervened to help push the deal into the hands of Calamos Investments, a Greek-American consortium whose chief executive is a backer of President Trump. 

The Exin Group, a Dutch partnership with Calamos, eventually won the bid.
“He sent us a letter asking us to look at Calamos,” said Papadimitriou, the economy minister. 

Any deal, Mr. Ross implied in the letter, “could be the beginning of more investments in Greece,” Mr. Papadimitriou recalled.
Some Greek government officials cited Fosun’s defeat as evidence that Athens wasn’t under China’s sway.

Liu Xiaobo, China’s Prescient Dissident

By Jiayang Fan

Even a diagnosis of late-stage liver cancer has not liberated Liu Xiaobo, China’s lone Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

China’s lone Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the political dissident Liu Xiaobo, is gravely ill.
In 2008, Liu, a prolific essayist and poet, was working on a manifesto advocating peaceful democratic reform, which became known as Charter 08, when the Chinese government tried him and found him guilty of “inciting subversion of state power.”
Since then, he has been serving an eleven-year sentence at a prison in the remote northeastern province of Liaoning, and his wife, Liu Xia, has been under house arrest in Beijing, despite the lack of any charges against her.
Liu’s diagnosis of late-stage liver cancer came at the end of last month.
The prognosis is grim.
In a video that a friend of the couple’s shared on social media, Liu’s wife says, through tears, that the doctors “can’t do surgery, can’t do radiation therapy, can’t do chemotherapy.”
Yet even this particularly wretched twist of fate has not liberated the man who has devoted his life to fighting for liberty.
Although Liu, who is now sixty-one, has been transferred to a hospital in Shenyang, on medical parole, he has yet to be granted release from his sentence.
Last Thursday, his lawyer said that the authorities are refusing to allow him to travel abroad for medical treatment.
In response to a statement from the United States Embassy calling for the couple to be given “genuine freedom,” the Chinese foreign ministry warned that “no country has a right to interfere and make irresponsible remarks on Chinese internal affairs.”
It added that “China is a country with rule of law, where everybody is equal in front of the law.”
This is a curious remark, given the increasingly repressive regime that Xi Jinping has fostered since taking office, in 2013. 
Civil society and the rule of law were part of what Liu campaigned for more than a decade ago, but, as unlikely as those concepts seemed then, they are less certain now.
After a period of enforced ideological conformity, the government has expanded its security apparatus, increased censorship, tightened its control of nongovernmental organizations, and toughened surveillance laws. 
Rights lawyers and activists have been arrested and jailed, and others have fled abroad.
Liu once had opportunities to do so himself.
A scholar of Chinese literature and philosophy, he taught at Beijing Normal University in the nineteen-eighties, where he became known for his frank reappraisals of China’s past and present, particularly of the brutalities imposed during the decades under Mao.
Liu’s passion and audacity could at times be provoking to both his peers and to the public, but they spoke to a deep investment in his country’s future and his determination to contribute to it.
His intellectual honesty rendered him vulnerable yet dauntless.
In the spring of 1989, Liu was in New York, where he was teaching at Barnard College, when the student protests calling for democracy and accountability began in Tiananmen Square.
He returned to Beijing and stayed in the square for several days, talking to the students about how democratic politics must be “politics without hatred and without enemies.”
When Premier Li Peng imposed martial law, Liu negotiated with the Army to allow demonstrators a safe exit from Tiananmen.
But, at the beginning of June, the Party ordered a crackdown, in which thousands of people were killed. (The state has never permitted an official tally.)
For Liu’s involvement in the events, the Chinese press labelled him a “mad dog” and a “Black Hand” for allegedly manipulating the will of the people, and he was sentenced to two years in prison for “counter-revolutionary propaganda.”
After his release, Liu was offered asylum in the Australian Embassy, but he refused it.
Similar offers came again and again, but a life in which Liu did not feel that he could make a direct impact held no appeal for him.
At a time when other intellectuals, registering the need for self-preservation, turned to writing books less likely to be banned on the mainland, Liu chose to prioritize his principles, in order to be an “authentic” person.
He was barred from publishing and giving public lectures in China, but on foreign Web sites he wrote more than a thousand articles promoting humanitarianism and democracy; he called the Internet “God’s gift to China.”
Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2010, while he was serving his sentence, in recognition of “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.”
In an essay titled “Changing the Regime by Changing Society”—which during his trial was cited as evidence of his counter-revolutionary ideals—Liu expressed hope that the Chinese people would awaken to their situation and that their new awareness would forge a sense of solidarity against the state.
But he also warned of a growing moral vacuum in the nation.
He wrote:
China has entered an Age of Cynicism in which people no longer believe in anything...
Even high officials and other Communist Party members no longer believe Party verbiage. 
Fidelity to cherished beliefs has been replaced by loyalty to anything that brings material benefit. Unrelenting inculcation of Chinese Communist Party ideology has produced generations of people whose memories are blank.
It’s impossible to say what access Liu has had to the outside world during his incarceration.
It would certainly pain him to see how little younger people in China care or even know about the events in Tiananmen (the subject is strictly censored in the media) and how the nation’s growing international prominence has obscured its domestic ills—though he predicted as much.
“The Chinese Communists are concentrating on economics, seeking to make themselves part of globalization, and are courting friends internationally precisely by discarding their erstwhile ideology,” he wrote in 2006.
“When the ‘rise’ of a large dictatorial state that commands rapidly increasing economic strength meets with no effective deterrence from outside, but only an attitude of appeasement from the international mainstream, the results will not only be another catastrophe for the Chinese people, but likely also a disaster for the spread of liberal democracy in the world.” 
It perhaps would not surprise him to hear that last week, austerity-stricken Greece, which is courting Chinese investment, blocked a European Union effort to issue a statement condemning China’s human-rights violations.
As the news of Liu’s illness spread surreptitiously throughout China, democracy activists started a petition far narrower in its ambitions than Charter 08.
It asks only for Liu to be freed and to be given whatever medical care might help him now.
He would surely be grateful to his supporters for that gesture, but more than his illness he would regret how correctly he diagnosed Beijing’s recurring authoritarian impulses and his countrymen’s growing indifference to them.
Liu has always been a man of ideas, but that prescience will be of no comfort to anyone.

European Union's Yellow Sheep

In Greece, China Finds an Ally Against Human Rights Criticism
By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE and SOMINI SENGUPTA

Uighur men praying at a grave in China’s Xinjiang Province. Greece blocked a European Union statement that would have condemned China’s violations of human rights, including those of Uighurs and Tibetans.

GENEVA — China has long won diplomatic allies in the world’s poor countries by helping them build expensive roads and ports. 

Now, it appears to have similarly won over a needy country in Europe.
At a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council this month in Geneva, the European Union sought to draw renewed attention to human rights abuses in China — only to be blocked by one of its member countries, Greece. 

A spokesman for the Greek Foreign Ministry in Athens called it “unproductive criticism.”
It was the first time that the European Union did not make a statement in the Human Rights Council regarding rights violations in specific countries, including China, which has a seat on the council. That silence was an embarrassing reversal for the 28-country bloc, which has prided itself on taking progressive positions on human rights on a council where some nations with poor human rights records habitually resist country-specific resolutions and examinations of their conduct.
Greece is increasingly courting Chinese trade and investment as it faces pressure from international creditors and a cold shoulder from its traditional rich allies in Europe. 

China’s largest shipping company, known as China COSCO Shipping, bought a majority stake last year in the Greek port of Piraeus. 

The Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, has visited China twice in two years. 

And China will be the “country of honor” at Greece’s annual international business fair in September in the port of Thessaloniki.

Greek ports are critical to China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative, a huge infrastructure project across Asia, Africa and Europe. 

Just last week, at a concert of the Shanghai Chinese Orchestra in Piraeus, the Chinese ambassador to Greece hailed the cooperation between the two countries. 

“Greece and China will remain good friends in good and bad times, good partners for mutual progress,” said the envoy, Zou Xiaoli, according to Xinhua, the Chinese news agency.
China is seeking to expand its diplomatic influence worldwide, projecting itself as the chief proponent of international trade and cooperation as Trump stakes out an increasingly nationalist position for the United States. 

In the past month, the Chinese premier has made high-profile visits to Brussels, the European Union’s headquarters, and Berlin, the German capital.
After Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord this month, the European Union said it would work with China, the world’s largest polluter, to achieve the accord’s chief target: keeping global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius. 

China could well take advantage of the European Union’s silence in Geneva.
In the last Human Rights Council session in March, the European Union statement pointed to China’s detention of lawyers and human rights defenders. 

The statement also criticized Russia for its crackdown on civil liberties and the Philippines for its targeted drug-related killings.

The trial of Xie Yang, a human rights lawyer, was streamed online last month by the Changsha Intermediate People’s Court.

At the current Human Rights Council session, which ends this week, the European Union made no such statement on China because of Greek objections, European Union diplomats said.
“When the stability of a country is at stake, we need to be more constructive in the way we express our criticism,” a spokesman for the Greek Foreign Ministry said in a telephone interview, “because if the country collapses, there will be no human rights to protect.”
The spokesman, who requested anonymity because of diplomatic protocol in the country, added that was better to raise human rights issues in private meetings between diplomats from Brussels and Beijing.
It was an odd explanation, considering that China’s stability does not appear to be at risk. 

But in the face of the Greek objection, the European Union’s statement died on the vine.
“The global human rights agenda is best served when the E.U. speaks with one voice,” Maja Kocijancic, a spokeswoman for the European Union’s executive body, wrote Monday in an email.
“We will continue our work to bring all 28 together and hope it will, as we normally do, be possible to align positions” for the next session of the Human Rights Council later this year, she added.
Greece’s move to block the statement was first reported in The Guardian.
Human Rights Watch said it was “shameful that Greece sought to hold the E.U. hostage to prevent much-needed attention to China’s human rights crackdown.”
But it also said this was one of three occasions in the past three weeks when the bloc had “demonstrated no intention, compassion or strategic vision to stem the tide of human rights abuses in China.” 

It cited a summit meeting with Li Keqiang at the start of June and the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown as other recent occasions on which Europe had failed to forcefully condemn human rights abuses in China.
Diplomats in Geneva noted that Greece was not alone in arguing against the European Union’s statement to the council. 

Lengthy discussions in Brussels on the text of the statement failed to overcome Hungary’s objection to mentioning human rights concerns in Egypt.
After a tense emergency meeting of European ambassadors in Geneva just two hours before the Human Rights Council debate, Hungary relented and withdrew its objection, leaving Greece as the sole obstacle to consensus.