COMMENTARY

Summer 2010

by Jiang Ye

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May-Britt Stumbaum is right when she stresses that security issues have begun to gain a prominent place in relations between Europe and China. She is even more right that the EU should care about Chinese security strategies, aims and capabilities. But her analysis of China’s security policy strikes me as far from comprehensive, while the list of strategic matters she suggests European elites should study looks too Euro-centric to help Europe emerge as a global actor and deepen its strategic thinking toward China.

It is certainly true that security policy in China is closely interlinked with national unity and economic development. It is also correct that Chinese leaders have long followed Deng Xiaoping’s advice to lay low and bide their time while focusing on development. But Chinese security policies relate not only to traditional state and territorial concerns but also with non-traditional human security that embraces economic development, social justice, environmental protection, democratisation, disarmament, respect for human rights and the rule of law. Without unity, the security of China’s 56 ethnic groups can never be guaranteed, and China’s own history during the first half of the 20th century illustrates that all too clearly.

China’s security goals are also unquestionably to safeguard CCP rule. But what is also noteworthy is that China indirectly protects global safety too. In our globalised world the international impact if more than 1.3bn people were suddenly to find themselves in a country torn apart by violence and poverty would be hard to imagine. China‘s major contribution to global security in the last 30 years more has been the economic development and political stability created by the CCP.

Perhaps it is because Stumbaum neglects the link between China’s traditional state security and non-traditional human security, she omits two important issues that Chinese policymakers place high on their list of strategic concerns. The first is that Europe should accord China the full market economy status it has long sought, and the second is that the EU should lift its arms embargo against China. Both issues are closely inter-related with the others that May-Britt Stumbaum cites. China’s full market economy status issue is tightly linked with trade and investment, energy security, climate change and even pandemic, while the arms embargo issue connects with non-proliferation, dual-use trade and the PLA’s modernisation. The EU debate on China’s rise and its implications for European security can’t be comprehensive without including these two issues.

Both issues are also key to promoting EU-China security co-operation. China will be more willing to co-operate with Europe on all the issues Stumbaum describes if the EU were to give serious consideration to granting full market economy status and the arms embargo lifting.

Europe’s own emergence as a global actor means that it needs to adopt a truly independent approach to fashioning its common security policy towards China, because China, too, is an emerging power. The market status and arms embargo issues I’ve highlighted have long been influenced by the United States, and perhaps still are. But should Europe go on being satisfied with playing a supporting role in the transatlantic alliance?

One European politician at least who clearly is not satisfied with such a role, is Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. He has used Spain’s occupancy of the EU's rotating presidency to suggest that the EU should reconsider the arms embargo issue so as to make progress on global issues like climate change, the Iranian nuclear issue and the international financial crisis. With China now playing a key role in the construction of a new world order, it would seem that the practitioners of Europe’s Common foreign and security policy already know better how to deal with China on security issues than do European theorists who are still lagging a bit behind.