Dumped summit exposes China-Europe rift

China’s ballooning trade surplus has fanned anti-dumping disputes over its goods, including shoes, garments and most recently screws and steel fasteners.

For its part, Beijing was dismayed when in 2005, Brussels backed away from lifting an arms sales embargo imposed on China after its military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in 1989.

Emboldened by the successful Beijing Olympics and the financial crisis battering the West, President Hu Jintao is now less willing to swallow his irritation with Europe, said Shi Yinhong, a professor at Renmin University in Beijing.

“China believes that Europe values its own values too much,” said Shi. “But China is becoming more self-confident and Hu Jintao is increasingly inclined to do things his own way.”

Shi said the discord was unlikely to directly hurt broader talks over the financial crisis, but Beijing’s ire could make it less willing to offer prompt concessions or champion EU views.

Even if the Lyons summit had gone ahead, it was not going to achieve much, said Andrew Small, a researcher for the German Marshall Fund think tank in Brussels, who recently visited Beijing for talks with officials and scholars.

“The summit was heading for a big failure even before this happened,” Small wrote in emailed comments. Neither side was offering the concessions on trade, security contacts and other issues that the other wants, he wrote.

Small summed up Beijing’s attitude as, “We don’t know where the European project is headed, Europe needs us more on the economic crisis than vice versa, the political atmospherics have become bad, so why should we make any concessions?”

After Sarkozy gives up the six-month rotating EU presidency in a few weeks, it goes to Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a combative critic of Communism who stayed away from the Beijing Games.

“Both sides will eventually find a way to step down over the Dalai Lama,” said Shi. “But the relationship is still a mess.”

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