Brown’s trip to the Far East at the start of the “parliamentary slugfest” over Europe (see: The ‘nauseating volte-face’ over Europe) was timed to emphasise that the “globe matters more than Europe”, says The Guardian.
China and India are playing increasingly dominant roles in the global economy, and Brown is keen to make sure that UK plc gets its slice of the cake. Brown and Premier Wen Jiabao agreed to expand bilateral trade by 50% to $60bn by 2010 and Brown’s delegation of businessmen signed deals with a total value of about $800m.
Brown also wants Britain to become the number-one investment destination of China’s new $200bn sovereign wealth fund, says George Parker in the FT. His “wooing of China Investment Corp” won a “warm response” from Wen, who, sensitive to criticism of his country’s motives, assured Brown that CIC would be “entirely commercial” and “transparent and open”.
The US, Germany and France have not been quite so welcoming. In the US, Chinese investments are a “hot topic”: political worries stymied a bid by China’s state-controlled oil company CNOOC for Unocal in 2005 and the US is reviewing the involvement of a Chinese telecoms company in a takeover of its US rival 3com.
Accepting Chinese assurances that the sovereign wealth fund will be transparent is a “constitutional and political impossibility”, says Will Hutton in The Observer. “The Chinese state is constructed upon non-transparency and non-accountability.” Brown may be right to “preach the benefits of trade“, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t challenge China’s record of human rights abuses, manipulation of its exchange rate, intellectual property theft and energy inefficiency.
Sarkozy, Merkel and even Bush managed to express fears over China’s authoritarianism and still won big trade deals. Our best Asia policy would be to befriend India – the other awakening giant and a “much more congenial ally” – while serving notice on China that we “cannot turn a blind eye to repression and authoritarianism“.