On Tuesday, the European Union imposed sanctions on China over its treatment of Hong Kong moving the EU closer to the Trump administration’s tougher stance toward Beijing.
Laurence Norman and James Marson for The Wall Street Journal:
The sanctions include limiting exports of equipment China could use for repression and reassessing extradition arrangements in light of Beijing’s imposition of a draconian national security law.
EU governments will work to ease visa and asylum opportunities for Hong Kong residents. The EU indicated it could take further steps at the end of the year.
China reacted angrily to the sanctions, with a spokesman for the Chinese mission to the EU telling the bloc “to stop meddling in Hong Kong affairs and China’s internal affairs in any way.”
European businesses, especially German companies, rely on China’s market for profits and growth, so a deep rupture like that between the U.S. and China appears unlikely… But in a sign that EU attitudes toward China are shifting closer to those in the U.S., Brussels and Washington recently began talks on creating a new trans-Atlantic channel to coordinate positions on China. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell proposed the forum last month and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo quickly seized on the idea.
“Once we’re confident that we have a shared understanding of the threat that is posed by the Chinese Communist Party, then we can begin to take action,” Mr. Pompeo said after taking up Mr. Borrell’s proposal.
MacDailyNews Take: China’s moves in Hong Kong and their mishandling of the COVID-19 virus at its outset have woken up a long-slumbering world.
Understanding of their threat is long overdue but better late than never. Whether it is all too late is the question but at the very least any slowing of their economic and political efforts to dominate the World Order are welcome. Time might be everything.
Hong Kong was done in 1999, 3-5 million new Chinese coming to the West coast of North America and a million to the UK…..Hong Kong plan B. Open up and support the new citizens.
Support/welcome the citizenry, NOT the CCP. The people are the hope.
MORE OF DONALD’S AND EU’S SANCTIONS ON CHINA?
By this lock-step colonialist reaction, the West is moving closer to a new but always lucrative international group-war.
Who will pay for it? Congress will tell the Federal Reserve Bank will make the free money for the always hungry spy/military network so that the former can get kickbacks to fund its election and reelection campaigns, this, while the unconnected poor will get an increase in taxes, more oppression, more opportunities to live in homeless encampments, an positive expansion of lower and lower paying jobs, and more poverty in order to give churches an increased opportunity to convert the more emotionally succeptible to Fundie Christianity; The profiteering rich’s taxes will be lowered while their acquisitive behavior extolled as the epitomy of exemplary democracy.
This factual process, of course, must change.