West Meets East

Europe is scrambling to cash in on China's amazing boom - and forge a political alliance that can boost its global fortunes. Will it work? A close look at an affair to remember

It is one thing to travel hopefully to Asia; it is another to arrive there. As Jacques Chirac, the President of France, landed in Chengdu, China, last Friday night on a much-ballyhooed visit to promote trade, trade and more trade, he would have been wise to reflect on the fate of St. Francis Xavier, a brilliant teacher at the University of Paris who became a Jesuit missionary in the East. St. Francis died in 1552 on an island in the South China Sea, without ever achieving his ambition of preaching the gospel in China. Part of his arm now lies in a former seminary in Macao, a city that was once at the center of a Portuguese commercial system that stretched from India to Japan, and whose traders epitomized a long-held European belief that Asian markets were a source of unparalleled prosperity. In 19th century Manchester, cotton barons used to dream of the riches that would come their way if every Chinese shirt was an inch longer.

The successors of those optimists are still at it. "What a prospect: If you could sell 1.3 billion toothbrushes in the China market!" gushed Jacques Gravereau, president of the HEC Eurasia Institute in Paris, while attending the Asia-Europe meeting in Hanoi last week along with Chirac, German Chancellor Gerhard Schrφder, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and other dignitaries. But in the past, many of Europe's Asian dreams have dissolved into sepia-tinted memories. The treaty ports along the China coast -enclaves of Europe wrested from the Chinese dynastic rulers in their waning days - are no more. The European imperial order in Asia collapsed under the onslaught of Japanese military power in World War II and national liberation movements after it. Batavia became Jakarta; Rue Catinat in Saigon became Dong Khoi in Ho Chi Minh City. And for more than 150 years, Europeans have had competition for influence in Asia. It was the black ships of the U.S. Navy that entered Tokyo Bay in 1853 and forced Japan to open up to world trade, and Richard Nixon whose visit to China in 1972 ended Beijing's political isolation. American missionaries tramped through China, American officers and diplomats shaped Japan's political and economic system after 1945. In both Japan and China today, there are twice as many American residents as there are French, Germans and British combined.

Nevertheless, there's a new swing to Europe's long dance with Asia - and it takes its beat from the astonishing rise of China in global politics and economics. Bilateral trade between the European Union and China more than doubled between 1999 and 2003. European brands, from handbags to luxury cars, are increasingly coveted by China's growing middle class, while many of the country's technology needs are now supplied by European firms. Most importantly, China's leadership sees value in establishing a strategic relationship with the E.U. Jiang Zemin, who led the Chinese Communist Party from 1989 to 2002, regarded the establishment of stable relations with the U.S as essential. But Hu Jintao, who replaced Jiang as Communist Party chief in 2002, began courting Europe almost immediately after taking power. Since Hu took over, members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of China's Communist Party - the true leaders of the country - have made a combined seven trips to countries that are now E.U. members, but just one to the U.S. Wen made a special point of being the first non-European leader to visit Brussels after the E.U. expanded from 15 members to 25 earlier this year. His trip, said Xinhua, the state-run news agency, was the start of a new "honeymoon relationship" between Europe and China. To some extent, that is because an old romance has cooled. Chinese officials complain bitterly of how hard it is to travel to the U.S., now that America's border controls have been tightened after Sept. 11, 2001, while Chinese students, for the same reason, are looking to study in European universities rather than U.S. ones. So close are ties becoming that David Shambaugh, director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University in Washington, calls the China-E.U. relationship "a new axis in world affairs."

For France, especially, the potential of a strategic relationship between Europe and China is too delicious to pass up. Certainly, the opportunity to sell couture and nuclear-power technology to the Chinese was the prime motivation for Chirac's state visit. But it also offers the chance to breathe life into Chirac's Gaullist dream of a multipolar world in which the cultural, economic and political power of the U.S. is reined in by others. Chirac reminds listeners that he himself first met Deng Xiaoping, the architect of modern China, as early as 1975. (Deng, Chirac told the People's Daily in August, saw French-Chinese relations as the "cornerstone of China's foreign policy.") When Hu visited France last January, he got the whole bulldozer treatment from Chirac: the Eiffel Tower lit up in red, a parade up the Champs Elysιes and every other sign of affection the French President could muster. One, in particular, pleased the Chinese. At a press conference with Hu, Chirac stated his opposition to the E.U. embargo on selling arms to China, imposed after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. "The embargo," said Chirac, in terms he has used in the months since, "no longer corresponds at all with the realities of the contemporary world."

For the U.S., desperate not to tip the balance of Asia's military power China's way, a decision by the E.U. to lift the embargo would be evidence that multipolarity was more than just a mouthful - that it had real implications. "Both China and Europe," writes Shambaugh, "seek ways to constrain American power." But a closer look at the arms embargo shows the limits to a strategic relationship between the E.U. and China. A top official at the European Council says flatly that there is "very little prospect" of the embargo being lifted this year. The reason is simple: France and Europe are not coterminous; however much Paris (and Berlin) might want to sell arms to China, other European capitals do not. The British don't want to upset the Americans, while the Scandinavians, whose concerns for human rights in China have a political weight uncharacteristic of the rest of Europe, are adamantly opposed. A top official from Europe's biggest arms company says that "it would be big news to me" if the embargo was lifted. Schrφder and Chirac, he says, seem to bring the subject up only "when there's a Chinese official within earshot."

If Europe's divisions are one reason why its Asian love affair may turn out to be somewhat less orgasmic than some hope, the continuing strength of the U.S. in the region is another. Beijing may want to talk to people other than Americans; but that is not the same thing as saying that the Chinese leadership doesn't realize that it has to talk to Americans first. The U.S. is just too present in Asia, too much a guarantor of the balance of power, to be ignored. It is the U.S. Seventh Fleet (the E.U. doesn't have a First one) that is based in Japan, the U.S. whose troops are a trip wire against catastrophe on the Korean peninsula, the U.S. to whom China has to talk if it wants to moderate those in Taiwan who dream of independence. And it is the U.S. - certainly not any European nation - that has a strategic relationship with Japan, still the world's second-largest economy.

Nor are U.S. companies slouches when it comes to Asian trade. Asians may love Louis Vuitton bags - but they love American pizzazz, too. In Hanoi, Chirac said that a world shaped solely by U.S. cultural values would be an "ecological catastrophe." Alas, that's just one more reason why he should have stopped by Macao. In the city of the old Jesuit priests, the waterfront is now dominated not by churches but by a huge new U.S.-owned casino, brimming with Chinese. For the millions of Chinese just now learning to enjoy prosperity, a clone of Las Vegas on the shores of the South China Sea still seems to trump an Eiffel Tower bathed in red. Europe may be wildly in love with China, but China - as it always has - is playing hard to get.