strapped Europe scrambles to woo China's support for a financial rescue package, human rights groups and dissidents are warning that in taking such help, the West will sacrifice some leverage over China. To clinch a deal, Chinese negotiators will insist on safeguards for their money possibly including preferential creditor terms or guarantees should the crisis worsen. More than that, however, Europe's desire for China's foreign reserves to calm markets and normalize sovereign borrowing costs could see China push hard for concessions, including market economy status and easing restrictions on high-tech imports. A big China bail-out “could represent a major change in the global landscape: the consolidation of China's economic dominance at the expense of the status quo powers – the United States and Europe,” Arvind Subramanian, with the Center for Global Development, wrote recently. The idea of Europe going cap in hand to an autocratic regime with a poor rights record and an increasingly assertive political and economic agenda is making many in the Chinese dissident and human rights communities nervous. “If you take from somebody you have a shorter hand. If you eat from somebody you have a softer mouth,” said Wu'er Kaixi, an exiled Chinese dissident and former student leader of the 1989 pro-democracy Tiananmen Square demonstrations. “There's tremendous political risk in letting China have its way,” Wu'er told Reuters by telephone from Paris. “When you give China so much power, they use it in their own way. They don't follow the rules or codes.” The 17-nation currency zone's bureaucracy and lumbering politics make the likelihood of deep concessions to China remote, particularly any compromise on a longstanding arms embargo imposed after the Tiananmen Square crackdown. But China's $3 trillion in reserves remain a tantalizing target for the bloc. “Although the US has borrowed extensively from China for a decade without making major concessions, European disunity on debt management will make it a struggle for the EU to avoid such concessions to Beijing,” write François Godement and Jonas Parello-Plesner, senior policy fellows with the European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank, in an upcoming report. Already, China has acquired a vast number of strategic assets globally, including car makers like MG and Volvo, stakes in ports and airports, as well as bond-purchases from European states that have built goodwill for future Chinese contracts. While European leaders like French President Nicolas Sarkozy court China, there remains a deep undercurrent of suspicion about its intentions in European political circles. European manufacturing associations fear a China-funded bail-out will lead to Europe further opening its doors to Chinese imports, dealing a further blow to EU manufacturers. __
