Chirac Goes to China for a Sympathetic Paradigm
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

French president Jacques Chirac has returned from a trip to Asia. After all, where else but Communist Vietnam and Communist China does Monsieur le president go to bash America? While in Hanoi, Mr. Chirac lashed out at perceived American cultural dominance. “There is a tendency towards a majority Anglo-Saxon culture which erases others. All other cultures would be stifled to the benefit of American culture. …If there was a single language, a single culture, it would be a real ecological disaster.”
It was ironic to hear the president of a former colonial ruler of Vietnam denouncing American cultural dominance. But then, maybe Mr. Chirac had to go abroad to find sympathy for his views. Back at home, his protege turned rival, Nicholas Sarkozy, defended American culture as something his own children quite like.
Of course, Mr. Chirac had other things to attend to. After Vietnam, it was on to China to see what he could do to ingratiate himself with Beijing. He did everything he could to charm his hosts, even abandoning his own French chauvinism to recite Chinese poetry and handing over a list of political prisoners with the least possible urgency. Mr. Chirac also maintained his position as the most slavish proponent of Beijing’s agenda to rid the E.U. arms embargo on China – denouncing it, rather than the Tiananmen Square massacre of democracy demonstrators, as “a measure motivated purely and simply by hostility.”
Again, back home Mr. Chirac was criticized – including by Liberation, which warned against “exaggerated sycophancy.” Of course, sycophancy has its rewards. Mr. Chirac did indeed bring back to Paris $4 billion in contracts. But France continues to lag behind Germany and Great Britain in investment deals and the trip caused some disappointment among business leaders, who had hoped for even more. There is more where these deals – for gas stations and water treatment plants – came from. For now, however, Chinese leaders have not yet gotten what they are bargaining for.
A year-long campaign, including sustained diplomatic pressure and economic incentives to get the E.U. to lift its embargo on arms sales is unlikely to succeed by the time of an early December E.U.-China meeting in the Hague. The fate of the embargo is unclear. While France and Germany are out front, the sympathies of other countries are less clear. A few more are being counted as firmly on the side of maintaining the ban – including some, like Great Britain, that have appeared wobbly in the past.
But in order to survive a fresh Chinese assault sure to be launched next year the embargo needs to be updated to fit current conditions. The 15 years that have passed since the Tiananmen Square massacre have allowed memories to dim, and advocates to argue that the conditions that triggered the embargo no longer exist.
Beijing’s refusal to revise its verdict of the 1989 protests as counterrevolutionary would be sufficient grounds for the world’s freest nations to refuse to countenance sales of weapons to a one party state engaged in a massive military modernization. But, there are other ample human rights grounds – including the deterioration of the past few years, especially restrictions on free speech and religion and the treatment of Tibetan and Uighur minorities. Other things have changed in the last 15 years as well. China is poised to be come a serious threat to Taiwan as early as next year. American officials are telling their European counterparts that the consequences of arms sales to China would be much greater today than just a few years ago.
Such appeals may not be working. Two weeks ago at a conference in Berlin, one of Germany’s officials charged with American relations dismissed American concerns about European arms sales to Beijing as unimportant and a sign of American hypocrisy in light of U.S. weapons sales around the world.
Considering Germany’s role in arming Saddam Hussein, that was a bit hard to take. But it can be seen as a symptom of something profound. Europe seems instinctively to define its role toward China more or less in opposition to the U.S. rather than to focus on the actual strategic situation. In most respects, Europe’s strategic impact in Asia is not terribly significant. The potential sale of arms to Beijing is a large exception. It’s a pity that is not obvious to European leaders more interested in kicking Washington in the shins than in using E.U. leverage to improve human rights and maintain stability in Asia.
Ms. Bork is deputy director of the Project for the New American Century.