China and NATO agree: Dangerous to depend on each other
Joel Gehrke
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China is vulnerable to international restrictions on its ability to import vital supplies “once the international situation changes,” a senior official fears.
“China has a high degree of foreign dependence on some important mineral resources, and once the international situation changes, it will certainly affect economic security or even national security,” Chinese Natural Resources Minister Wang Guanghua told state media, per a South China Morning Post translation.
The widespread sentiment has emerged as a paradoxical point of consensus between Beijing and Western capitals, in part due to Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping’s high-profile alignment with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the days before Russia launched the campaign to overthrow the Ukrainian government.
“It is dangerous to depend on authoritarian regimes. It was not long ago that many believed that buying gas from Russia was purely a commercial matter,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday at a Norwegian business conference. “We must not repeat this mistake with other authoritarian regimes, not least China.”
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The former Norwegian prime minister raised the same kinds of misgivings voiced by Wang, the natural resources chief.
“We must not make ourselves vulnerable by becoming too dependent on critical raw materials and products,” he told the conference. “We must not export technology that can, in turn, be used to threaten us. We must not lose control of critical infrastructure, which is essential both for civil society and for military activity. … We will still trade with China, but it must be done in ways that do not undermine our security.”
That appeal touched on a potential fault line of the trans-Atlantic relationship due to decades of Chinese economic inroads in Europe. Xi has seen his star fade in the United States and Europe due to a mix of controversies — the censorship of early warnings about the coronavirus pandemic, the atrocities against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, and the crackdown in Hong Kong, for instance — but the extent of economic entanglements between the communist regime and Western economic sectors could prove painful to disentangle.
“The Russia debate is being tackled head-on. The China debate is now coming, in which German industry — Russia, for German industry, was not that important; let’s be honest. China — it’s really important,” Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies senior fellow Daniel Hamilton said during an Atlantic Council event in November. “And so, you see German industrialist now saying, ‘Hold on. We can’t possibly reconsider the terms of our engagement.’ That’s going to be the next big debate in Germany. It’s already happening.”
Stoltenberg, at the forum of Norwegian industrialists, gave a general challenge to that impulse.
“We cannot take as a starting point that every profitable project should be carried out just because it is profitable,” he said. “It is often said that war is too serious to be left to generals. Similarly, we can say that business activities are too serious to be left to business leaders alone.”
The difficulty that Germany faces in unwinding economic ties to China has been exacerbated by recent U.S. economic policy choices, such as the Inflation Reduction Act’s subsidies for electric vehicles produced in the U.S., according to a senior German politician. Social Democratic Party Chairman Lars Klingbeil, who leads the party that boasts German Chancellor Olaf Scholz as a member, warned recently that Germany can’t be expected to crack down on economic relations with China in the way that Washington desires if European states also are losing jobs to the U.S.
“If a result of the American industry politics is that jobs and industry is going from Germany and Europe to the United States, it’s a critical situation for the trans-Atlantic partnership,” said Klingbeil during the Atlantic Council panel discussion with Hamilton. “We have to be prepared if [China is] attacking Taiwan, then we have to cut off everything like we did with Russia in these days, and it also means that that we need to define areas of the economy where we not allow China to get in … but if we have a fight with China on [the] economic question, and we have a critical situation with the United States on the other hand, then maybe we lose support [among] the German population.”
U.S. and European powers must find a way to ensure such coordination, Stoltenberg emphasized Thursday.
“We are so much stronger together than alone,” he said. “NATO represents 50% of the world’s economic power and 50% of the world’s military power. In a way, that is half the world brought together to secure peace for each other and to continue to preserve our freedom and democracy.”
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And Beijing will be working to mitigate the effectiveness of such tactics. “International geopolitics has become an important factor affecting China’s resource supply,” China’s director for metal mines, Wang Yunmin, said last month.