EU and China: Pander complex

Looking for ways to please a new friend

FITTINGLY, for two up-and-coming “strategic partners”, as the European Union and China now like to think of themselves, it was red carpets all the way for China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, on a five-nation tour that took him to Brussels, Rome and Berlin, and this week to London and Dublin. With the EU now rivalling the United States and Japan as trading partner and investor for China's burgeoning economy, China's new leaders have been assiduous in their courtship. The Europeans, keen to offset a huge trade deficit, lined up along Mr Wen's route to promote new agreements and contracts on everything from sustainable development to space technology. Yet one prize eluded Mr Wen: a long-sought promise to lift the EU's 15-year-old embargo on arms sales to China.

Seen by some in Europe as outdated, anachronistic and a residual tarnish on an otherwise shiny new relationship, the lethal-weapons ban was slapped on after the Tiananmen Square massacre of democracy activists in 1989. But France has been lobbying against it for some months. Earlier this year, President Jacques Chirac called formally for it to be lifted; keen to please China's visiting president, Hu Jintao, he also criticised Taiwan's plan for a controversial referendum (China has long threatened force should Taiwan, which it claims as its own, move towards formal independence). Germany's chancellor, Gerhard Schroder also favoured scrapping the embargo, and others agreed. Why, they asked, bracket China with Myanmar, Sudan and Zimbabwe, three pariahs under a similar ban? Yet so far the embargo, though not quite watertight, endures.

China has changed a great deal since Tiananmen, yet some of those locked up in 1989 are still not free, point out human-rights watchers. The death penalty is widely applied, and people still get locked up for their political or religious beliefs. China recently suspended its human-rights dialogue with America after it introduced a critical resolution at the UN Human Rights Commission. The EU, for its part, is still pressing China to ratify the UN's Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Meanwhile, Mr Schroder, in particular, was unkeen to pick a fight now over the embargo with his Green partners ahead of next month's European elections.

Lifting the embargo would cause other problems. The United States has lobbied hard against the idea. Pledged to help defend Taiwan should China's threats ever turn to outright aggression, America would take it “quite personally”, says one senior administration official, should China be able to rely on weapons supplied by NATO allies. What is more, under pressure from successive NATO secretaries-general, the State Department and the Pentagon have been working to apply America's restrictions on transatlantic collaboration in high-tech weapons and sensitive technologies more selectively. Britain hopes to win Europe's first formal exemption from some of these curbs. Yet Congress must approve such deals, and will take a dim view if the EU declares itself open for arms business with China.

That, say EU officials, is not quite what is under discussion. Rather, ways are being explored to tighten up and make more transparent the EU's catch-all code of conduct on arms transfers. This calls for export licences to be denied where equipment might be used to abuse human rights, assert territorial claims by force, upset a regional balance or harm the interests of friends and allies. But the code is not binding. It will be hard for the EU to please its new friend, China, without offending is oldest friend, America.