Behind the Niceties of Chinese Leader’s Visit, France Is Wary

By Adam Nossiter

President Emmanuel Macron of France with Xi Jinping at a news conference in Paris on Monday.
PARIS — France rolled out red carpets and honor guards for Xi Jinping on Monday, but beneath the pomp, there were wary statements about China’s influence by his host, President Emmanuel Macron.
With Italy last week breaking from Europe in signing on to China’s global infrastructure project for moving Chinese goods, Mr. Macron has made it clear that a unified European response, in his view, is critical in dealing with the Chinese hegemon.
He reiterated that sentiment Monday as Xi listened in a deal-signing ceremony at the presidential Élysée Palace, where more than a dozen commercial and governmental treaties were signed worth billions of euros.
Earlier Mr. Macron welcomed Xi at a symbol of French imperial history and power, the Arc de Triomphe.
Beneath the tight smiles and brisk handshakes, Mr. Macron’s sharpened words resonated as the template for France’s attitude toward China, a country that floods France with luxury-shopping tourists but competes directly with it in a principal arena of mutual geopolitical interest, Africa.
Mr. Macron, keenly aware of France’s small position in the Chinese market — between 1 and 2 percent of imports — talks about Europe when he talks about China. 

Germany’s position is nearly five times as large.
After saying last week that the era of European “naïveté was over,” and that China had “played on our divisions,” he emphasized to the Chinese leader Monday that in talking to France, he was talking to Europe.
It was not immediately clear how France had avoided the “naïveté” Mr. Macron criticized, nor how it had reinforced the multilateral unified European approach he promulgated, in signing the French deals with the Chinese on Monday.
Still, unlike Italy, France has not signed on to China’s global goods-moving project, which it calls “One Belt One Road.”
Making reference to Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s famous declaration in 1964 that recognizing China was a matter of “reason” and “evidence,” Mr. Macron said Monday at the Élysée that those same words applied to the “choice” of the 21st century: the “relationship between Europeans and Chinese.”
De Gaulle was bucking the United States when he uttered those words, and Mr. Macron, 55 years later, was doing something of the same.
Appealing to China as a partner, he made a pointed reference to the United States under President Trump, who has repudiated multinational agreements like the Paris Climate accord and Iran nuclear deal.
“The order of things has been shaken,” the French president said, and “faced with the risk of the destruction of the multilateral order, France and China have a responsibility,” as permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.
“No country can redefine the rules of the international game,” Mr. Macron asserted, saying that France, like China, would stick to an agreement with Iran, and saying the two countries had made progress on the subject of climate change, and on the lifting of import restrictions for French beef and poultry.
Earlier French and Chinese officials and executives signed agreements on aeronautics — the Chinese are buying 300 airplanes from Airbus — and on space, banking and investment, shipbuilding and cultural exchanges.
On human rights violations in China, a subject that preoccupies French media but not official discourse or French business, Mr. Macron made only a hurried reference. 

Xi is visiting at a time when Galeries Lafayette, the emblematic French department store, is projecting a rapid expansion in China, which represents a third of the world market for luxury goods.
Jet-lagged Chinese tourists are bussed directly from the airport to the Galeries Lafayette store in central Paris, and the Rue Saint Honoré, a thoroughfare studded with luxury shops, routinely decks itself out for Chinese New Year.
The Chinese have invested in a wide scattering of French sectors, including wine, hotels, and industrial food production, including milk. 

France was the recipient of 9 percent of Chinese investments in the European Union in 2018; the Chinese have bought more than 150 wineries in Bordeaux, and China is the top export market for Bordeaux wine. 

The Chinese push into that culturally symbolic sector has created some backlash, but not enough to stop French owners from selling their properties.
With Xi silently listening Monday Mr. Macron said that Europe had never considered individual rights as “culturally specific,” and that its preoccupation remained for “the respect of fundamental and individual rights.” 

He said that the two had “had frank exchanges” on the subject.
But French analysts of relations with China said Monday that commercial relations were the real subject of preoccupation. 

“It’s the question of reciprocity,” said Jean-Philippe Béja of Sciences-Po, the research university. “We’ve been open towards trade and investment, and the Chinese have never let us enter their state procurements process.”
Europeans had also become more aware, and wary, of technology transfers and investments that “help the Chinese government develop its potential, and in the case of artificial intelligence it’s about control, and exporting control,” said Mr. Béja, referring to advances in Chinese government surveillance of its own citizenry.
“We’re more fearful than the other” members of the European Union about Chinese power and hegemony, said François Godement, an expert at the Institut Montaigne research center in Paris. “China is pushing its own pawns,” he said, particularly in parts of Africa where for decades French dominance has been undisputed.
Mr. Macron insisted Monday that France and China were “not strategic rivals” in Africa, though he said the two nations could be “much more important partners,” appearing to reflect a worry about Chinese investment on the continent.

Axis of Evil

The Quiet Rivalry Between China and Russia
By ROBERT D. KAPLAN

China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative, an economic expansion plan that follows the trade routes of the medieval Tang and Yuan dynasties across Eurasia, is overly ambitious because, like all grand strategies, it is aspirational. 

Yet the future of Eurasia is written into its design.
This new Silk Road serves several goals of China’s leaders, who are intent on making their country a full-fledged superpower. 

It is a branding operation for many of the roads, bridges, pipelines and railroads that China has already built, linking it with the former-Soviet-controlled countries of energy-rich Central Asia. 

In the process, One Belt, One Road seeks to develop — and at the same time surround — the Muslim region of China that abuts Central Asia.
Further westward, China intends to create an organic alliance with Iran, a state that because of its immense size, location and population, as well as its long imperial tradition, functions as the fulcrum for the Middle East and Central Asia.
The larger Chinese goal is to dominate Eurasia, which means relegating Russia to a second-tier power.
China and Russia share a land border of more than 2,600 miles, an interminable stretch of birch forest separating mainly the Russian Far East from Chinese Manchuria, whose particulars were formally agreed upon only in the last decade. 

In 1969, the dispatch of about 30 Soviet divisions to this border, and China’s deployment of 59 divisions in response, deepened the Chinese-Soviet split and allowed for Richard Nixon’s opening to China and his détente with the Soviet Union.
In few areas is the Russian state so feeble as in its far east. 

The ethnic Russian population is only an estimated 6 million. 

Chinese migrants are moving steadily north into this vastly underpopulated Siberian back-of-beyond, rich in the natural gas, oil, timber, diamonds and gold that China covets. 

China lost part of this region to Russia only in the 19th century, when the Qing dynasty was in its death throes, and the rest in the 20th century.
At the same time, China is vanquishing Russia in Central Asia. 

In the last decade, the China National Petroleum Corporation has become Central Asia’s main energy player. 

China pumps Kazakh oil to Europe and also to China through a pipeline, and the Chinese transport natural gas from Turkmenistan to western China. 

Chinese money has also been coursing through Central Asia to build power grids and transportation infrastructure, altering the landscape and forming the backbone of the One Belt, One Road plan.
The prize is Iran. 

Lying at the other end of Central Asia from China, Iran has 80 million people and straddles the oil and gas fields of the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, providing Beijing with the incentive to build rail lines through the Iranian plateau, make energy deals with Tehran, use Chinese state companies to excavate Iranian mines, and send armies of entrepreneurs there. 

Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union, including Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, was formed in 2014 to counter China’s growing influence in Eurasia.
Russia is not only losing out to China in its far east and Central Asia, but in Europe, too. 

While Moscow has been undermining the independence of the former Soviet republics in the Baltic and Black Sea basins through subversion and military incursions, Beijing has been strengthening trade ties throughout Europe. 

The Trump administration’s aversion to free trade — combined with its apparent ambivalence about defending European allies — has provided China with an opportunity in Europe, further enhancing Beijing’s plans for the western terminus of One Belt, One Road. 

China’s gains will weaken not only American influence in Europe, but Russian influence, too.
For example, Greece, because of its tensions with the European Union and its Orthodox religion, should be drifting closer to Russia. 

But it is slipping into China’s economic grasp, as the port of Piraeus becomes another western endpoint of the new Silk Road. 

China is also competing for nuclear power plants and other energy infrastructure in Bulgaria, Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic. 

Vladimir Putin’s compulsion to challenge the West — while China under Xi Jinping is quietly on the march all around him — demonstrates his strategic shortsightedness at a time of Russian economic vulnerability.
China and Russia refer to their relationship as a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” in which Russia supplies oil to China and the two countries hold joint military exercises. 

And, officially, their relationship has rarely been better.
But trade is lopsided in China’s favor; the fall in energy prices has made China considerably less dependent on Russia. 

Russia sells arms to China’s adversaries, India and Vietnam. 

And China has copied Russian weapons designs.
These deeper geopolitical realities mean China and Russia will be only allies of convenience. 

And because the Beijing-Moscow rivalry is long-term, understated and focused on remote terrain, thus lacking in appeal for the news media, it is easy to ignore.
China’s geopolitical ambitions, like Russia’s, arise out of internal insecurity. 

The Chinese state is weakest in the west — that is in East Turkestan — home to the Muslim Turkic Uighur minority, which the dominant ethnic group, the Han Chinese, view with trepidation.
Islam represents an alternative identity for the Uighurs, one independent of the Chinese state. 

Unlike the Tibetans with their Dalai Lama, the Uighurs don’t have an elite leadership with which to communicate with Beijing. 

Rather, they embody an anarchic force that could be provoked into upheaval by an environmental disaster or other emergency. 

China’s One Belt, One Road initiative, by joining the rest of Turkic Central Asia economically and politically closer to China, is meant in part to deny the Uighurs a rear base in an uprising.
China can be stopped only by its own internal demons. 

As Samuel P. Huntington wrote in his classic 1968 study, “Political Order in Changing Societies,” the more complex a society gets, the more responsive its institutions must become, otherwise the creation of a large middle class is destabilizing.
China’s autocracy, precisely because of its successes, could face a crisis of legitimacy as social, ethnic and religious tensions intensify in both Han and Uighur areas, especially in the event of any further slowdowns in economic growth that thwart the rising expectations of its people. 

That’s why the ultimate success of One Belt, One Road will be determined less by what happens in Central Asia and elsewhere than by what happens inside China itself.
The United States, which has longtime allies to defend against Chinese bullying in East Asia and against Russian bullying in Central and Eastern Europe, is helped by the quiet geopolitical rivalry between Beijing and Moscow. 

Because the contest between China and Russia is largely determined by their geographical proximity and therefore must persist, America will have the greater possibility to maneuver, hardening or softening its position toward each power as the situation demands.
The United States must only prevent China from dominating the Eastern Hemisphere to the same extent that it has dominated the Western Hemisphere. 

But it must do this without selling out Central Europe and parts of the Middle East to Russia.
The solution to this conundrum for the United States lies outside geopolitics. 

It is precisely because Washington has no territorial ambitions in Eurasia that Americans are not viewed with suspicion by local populations there the way the Chinese and Russians are. 

By relentlessly promoting free trade, human rights and civil society America will gain credibility with societies undergoing rapid social transformation across the region.
This is how the United States gains entry into Eurasia without crudely trying to balance one power off against the other at a moment when the Chinese-Russian rivalry is far more subtle than it was in Nixon’s time. 

The very economic development that China promotes will make societies along the path of the new Silk Road — particularly in the sterile dictatorships of Iran and Central Asia — harder to manage, and thus to rule.
It is precisely the universal values that Trump disdains that can now pay geopolitical dividends. 

A populist-nationalist agenda that confines American interests to North America will only marginalize the United States on the other side of the world.

Australia rejects China push on Silk Road strategy

Canberra fears tying infrastructure fund to Beijing’s plans would hit US relations 
By Jamie Smyth in Sydney

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull reviews a military honour guard with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in Beijing last year.
Australia has rejected a Chinese push for a formal alignment of Canberra’s A$5bn state infrastructure fund with Beijing’s New Silk Road strategy, over concerns it could damage relations with the US at a time when it is asking Washington to do more in the region.
The Chinese initiative, also known as One Belt One Road, envisages investing $4tn in port, road and rail projects overseas — and Beijing has been pressing Asia-Pacific economies to sign up to its vision.
But Canberra has confirmed there will be no agreement over Australia’s Northern Development Infrastructure Facility during a trip to Australia this week by Li Keqiang.
“No formal memorandum on this issue will be signed during the visit,” said one Australian official speaking on condition of anonymity.
Li’s trip comes at a tricky time in Sino-Australian relations.
Canberra is pressing Washington to bolster its presence in the region and taking a tougher line on inward investment from China, recently blocking two high-profile takeovers.
Last week Julie Bishop, Australia’s foreign minister, called on the administration of Donald Trump to expand the US role in Asia to ensure stability and peace.
“While non-democracies such as China can thrive when participating in the present system, an essential pillar of our preferred order is democratic community,” she said in a speech in Singapore.
The debate over whether Australia should align its state infrastructure fund with One Belt One Road bears similarities to Canberra’s hesitation over joining the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
In 2014 Australia initially decided not to join the Chinese-led multilateral lender following lobbying by the US and Japan.
But when the UK and several other western nations broke ranks and signed up to the AIIB, Canberra joined them.
“There is a view in the defence/security community in Canberra that initiatives like the AIIB and One Belt One Road are a way to extend Chinese influence at the expense of the US,” said Geoff Raby, a former Australian ambassador to China, who runs a consultancy advising Chinese and Australian businesses.

Li Keqiang’s Australian agenda 
● Beijing is pressing Canberra to ratify an extradition treaty that would enable it to target corrupt officials that have fled to Australia following Xi Jinping’s crackdown on corruption at home. 
● Canberra is likely to raise the cases of 14 employees of Crown Resorts — the gaming company controlled by Australian billionaire James Packer — who remain in detention in China following their arrest in October. 
● Both countries are working to tackle technical issues that have hampered the free flow of goods between the two. Australian beef producers are seeking greater access to the Chinese market. 

Mr Raby said Australia-China relations had “gone adrift”, with Canberra increasingly taking an idealist approach to relations focused on values, rather than a more greedy approach aimed at boosting economic ties with its largest trading partner.
Australian companies have expressed an interest in getting involved in the New Silk Road plan and business leaders in the country have set up a One Belt One Road advisory group to facilitate this. Government officials in the Northern Territory have also sought to align the region with China’s plans, describing official Chinese overtures first made by Xi Jinping on a visit to Australia in 2014 as a great opportunity for Darwin as a hub servicing the New Silk Road.
But Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea, where it has laid claim to a vital trade route and lucrative fisheries area, has made Australia wary of its regional ambitions.
Canberra recently tightened scrutiny of foreign takeovers following the purchase of Darwin port by the Chinese company Landbridge — a transaction that alarmed Washington because of the nearby presence of a US army base.
Hugh White, professor of strategic studies at Australian National University, said Australia did not want to be left out of the Asian infrastructure network promised by One Belt One Road but nor did it want to be seen to be jumping on Beijing’s bandwagon too enthusiastically.
“Like everything else in Asia these days, OBOR has become a political and strategic symbol in the great contest between Washington and Beijing for regional leadership,” he said.
Shi Yinhong, professor of international relations at Remin University in Beijing, said port investments were by far the most sensitive direct investment by China in Australia.
“Obviously, there is a security concern over the ports,” he said.
“And on the Maritime Silk Road project, Australia has been hesitant because of a fundamental disagreement over the South China Sea.”