Federal Chancellor Schröder harms transatlantic relations with his China politics

On Tuesday, the Society for Threatened Peoples (SfTP) reproached Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder for jeopardizing the traditionally good relations with the USA and for provoking resentment in the transatlantic relations by advocating the lifting of EU arms embargo against China. "One who says ‘No’ to the Iraq war should neither support the supply of arms to China, thereby playing with fire in the Taiwan conflict, nor ignore Taiwan’s, Japan’s, and the United-States’ security interests,” explains Ulrich Delius, the consultant for Asia at the SfTP desk in Göttingen.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, like President George W. Bush, criticized the disastrous human rights situation in the People’s Republic of China and this increasing military threat hovering over Taiwan caused by the possible lifting of the EU arms embargo. Last week, the Europe-friendly chairman of the foreign policy commission of the US Senate, Richard Lugar, advocated a halt in the exporting of US military technology to Europe. This would guarantee that no armament falls in the hands of the Chinese. Representatives from the US Congress would be ready to impose sanctions on European firms should the EU engage again in arm exports to the People’s Republic.

Last week, once again, Japan and the United-States corroborated their safety guarantees for Taiwan, threatened by a Chinese invasion, and demanded that the EU maintain the embargo. The embargo was placed in 1989 after the massacre on Peking’s Tiananmen Square.