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Legislators representing parties across the political spectrum in nine countries, plus a dozen "advisers",  have jointly formed a global alliance, the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, to push their governments to take a stronger stance on relations with the increasingly assertive communist ruled country. Deutsche Rundschau is publishing the group's mission statement

   "Developing a coherent response to the rise of the People’s Republic of China as led by the Chinese Communist Party is a defining challenge for the world’s democratic states. This challenge will outlast individual governments and administrations; its scope transcends party politics and traditional divides between foreign and domestic policy.

   The assumptions that once underpinned our engagement with Beijing no longer correspond to the reality. The Chinese Communist Party repeatedly and explicitly states its intention to expand its global influence. As a direct result, democratic values and practices have come under increasing pressure.

   When countries have stood up to Beijing, they have done so alone. Rather than mounting a common defence of shared principles, countries have instead been mindful of their own national interests, which are increasingly dependent on the People’s Republic of China for crucial minerals, components, and products.

   No country should have to bear the burden of standing up for fundamental liberties and the integrity of the international order by itself.

   The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China has been created to promote a coordinated response between democratic states to challenges posed by the present conduct and future ambitions of the People’s Republic of China. We believe that the natural home for this partnership is in the freely elected national legislatures of our peoples. Coordination at this level allows us to meet a challenge that will persist through changes in individual governments and administrations. We firmly believe that there is strength in unity and continuity. By developing a common set of principles and frameworks that transcend domestic party divisions and international borders, our democracies will be able to keep the rules-based and human rights systems true to their founding purposes."

Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China

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   Armenia’s government is undertaking a new effort to reverse the country’s demographic decline, including by testing the fertility of teenage girls.

   Armenians have long been concerned about the declining population of the country, which currently stands at about 3 million at most. According to the latest projections from the United Nations Population Fund, that number is expected to decline further, to about 2.8 million, by 2050.

   Former President Serzh Sargsyan announced in 2017 a plan to increase the population to 4 million by 2040 by increasing the birthrate and discouraging emigration. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, after taking over the next year, one-upped Sargsyan by promising to boost the population to 5 million by 2050.

   Health Minister Arsen Torosyan has rolled out the new government’s program, and it included three components. The first is “additional screening of 15-year-old girls, who are entering the age of fertility, to identify health problems and to prevent and cure infertility,” Torosyan said during a government meeting on March 5. Secondly, newly married couples will be provided medical check-ups “to identify and treat most of the problems that occur during pregnancy planning,” he said. And third, the government will expand a program providing prenatal exams “to reduce the number of miscarriages,” Torosyan said. 

“The program is aimed at carrying out demographic reforms and promoting fertility,” he said.

   Public reaction to the proposal so far has been relatively quiet, but the apparent focus on women as the source of infertility did not sit well with some.

   One Facebook user, commenting under Torosyan’s post announcing the policy, suggested that it was sexist, to which Torosyan replied: “Our boys have been examined for a long time now as military conscripts. I would ask you to change your tone.”

“This kind of wording only aggravates the long-rooted subconscious understanding that women are to blame for infertility,” the user responded in turn.

   Another commenter asked, “what about couples who want a baby but who aren’t married?”

   Most of the commenters under Torosyan’s post were women, but of the few men who commented most were supportive of the new plan.

Originally published by Ani Mejlumyan -- Eurasianet

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The President and his Secretary are currently enjoying their attacks at the World Health Organisation WHO which they accuse of being excessively close to China and having hidden vital information on the scope and danger of the Covid pandemic in its early stages, thus allegedly preventing the U.S. and the world from taking timely action. To emphasize his displeasure, the President blocked all payments to WHO. When the German foreign minister Maas had the temerity to address President Trump, asking him to reinstate the U.S. contributions to the world body in order to ensure its proper functioning during the Covid crisis, he received a bruising answer lecturing him on America’s role in the history of the global agency.

   The entire affair reveals a stunning lack of understanding of the world body and the way it works.

    First things first: there is no WHO as an independent organization that can take autonomous decisions, favor certain governments over others and can hide information from member governments.

   The WHO is like all United Nations agencies an intergovernmental body consisting of a Director General and his or her secretariat, working under close governmental oversight.

   A member government criticizing WHO resembles Don Quijote’s battle against the windmill. The United States is prominently represented on the governing bodies of WHO. Due to its dominant contribution to the agencies’ regular budget, the American representatives are very influential, receive  all available information, and enjoy instant access to the Director General.

    There is a two-tier oversight body guiding the Director General, the Executive Board and the World Health Assembly, both made up of government representatives. Numerous committees and commissions are taking care of individual health issues, staffed by government representatives and individual experts nominated by governments.

    In addition, there are hundreds of American nationals members of the staff of WHO or serving as experts. Most of them probably have close ties to Washington, D.C., to American universities or are outposted U.S. government officials. Taken together, they are keeping a running watch on what WHO is planning and doing.

    Given this framework, how could WHO favor one country (China) over another one (the U.S.), as President Trump alleges? All UN agencies are essentially government clubs. The agency heads are expected to serve the member governments. For an agency chief it is not done to criticize an individual government. To praise is permissible, to criticize is unheard of.

    The current Director General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is an Ethiopian nominated by the former TPLF-dominated government which had socialist roots. He is accused by Washington of being subservient to China which allegedly supported his candidacy for the position of DG. Be it as it may.

    The structure of UN agencies allows an agency head to populate the staff with candidates from his or her region. Tedros. for instance, could favor Africans for vacant or newly created posts if he wished to do so – which is not sure. But pandering to China is outside of his reach.

    He praised China for its radical lockdown policy in the early days of the Wuhan-originated epidemy, but so did President Donald Trump. Both gentlemen probably hoped that the epidemy would remain isolated in China, not knowing that it had already spread over much of the world.

    The technical agencies of the United Nations are the global equivalent of government ministries. WHO functions like a world health ministry. Weakening its work during a pandemic has a somewhat suicidal connotation.

    True to tradition, the U.S. government has suspended its payments to WHO. America is the only member state that exploits its role as major contributor by withholding contributions to UN agencies whenever it is dissatisfied with the organization’s policies or performance. UNESCO, for instance, fell victim of such blackmail, usually because of the Palestinian problem.

    In putting thumbscrews on an agency, various U.S. administrations revealed a rather limited understanding of democracy. Everywhere in the United Nations family of organizations, developing countries constitute the majority of member states. Whenever they take a decision the White House does not like– for instance to admit Palestine as a member – Washington cuts off the funding. Of course other rich member countries could pick up the tab and provide the agency with extra-budgetary funds to replace, at least partly, the missing U.S. contribution.

    Why don’t they do that in the current case of WHO? Because they fear that Washington will say: thank you, and reduce its future contributions as it already did as regards the UN by insisting on a ceiling limiting individual contributions.

    The ongoing U.S.-China spat is less about the pandemic; it’s more about winning elections. Many Americans, especially conservative ones, don’t like the United Nations anyway. Bashing them is popular; withholding contributions seems thrifty. America first!

Heinrich von Loesch

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    Europeans are not looking to the US to lead during the pandemic emergency, as they might have done in the past.

    Over the past four years, Europe has moved from shock at Donald Trump’s election to confusion about what it means for the Atlantic alliance to increasing repudiation of American leadership. European leaders are now beginning to imagine a world order without the US at the centre.

    Transatlantic relations, a symbolic linchpin of the Western-led global order, are in a parlous state. This reflects both internal crises in the US and in many European nations and a loss of faith in broader visions of supranational alliances. The coronavirus pandemic has not triggered a reinvestment in multilateral actions. It has instead brought greater rigidity to the ideologies of political elites and revealed how unprepared Western states are for crisis management.

The European Project

    It has also underlined the frailty of the “European project” and deepened anxiety about its future.

    Writing in the Irish Times in mid-April, columnist Fintan O’Toole was forthright in his view that “Donald Trump has destroyed the country he has promised to make great again”:

It is hard not to feel sorry for Americans … The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful … the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated … who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?

    This unsparing judgement by one of Europe’s leading journalists would likely not have been made even five years ago. Now, it is resonant of op-eds across Europe. The growing consensus is that Europe’s American dream is busted and American exceptionalism is a discredited myth. There is no expectation, or even the vaguest hope, that the US will demonstrate moral leadership or promote liberal values.

    Transatlantic tensions are of course not new. European disavowals of American power and hubris have a long history. There have been waves of anti-American sentiment across the continent in the past in response to US militarism – in Vietnam and post-9/11 in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, testing as these moments of fracture were, they invariably involved protesting particulars of US foreign policy rather than the idea of America itself.

    In recent years Europeans have watched the US pull out of the Paris climate accords and withdraw from global, multilateral commitments. They have listened to Trump label NATO as “obsolete” and heard his many aggressive statements about Europe. In early February the American president told a gathering of US governors: “Europe has been treating us very badly. European Union. It was really formed so they could treat us badly.”

    As the pandemic emergency grew, Europeans have observed the Trump administration impose a 30-day ban on travel from Europe to the US, without consultation with European leaders. They have read media reports on how Trump offered $1 billion to a German pharmaceutical company to secure monopoly rights to a potential Covid-19 vaccine. While the much-reported story was denied by the Trump administration, many in Europe were prepared to believe it and the EU even put up funding to ensure it wouldn’t happen.

Post-America

    European policymakers and intellectuals are now regularly detailing Trump’s failed leadership during the pandemic crisis. Dominique Moisi, a political scientist at the Institut Montaigne in Paris, recently told the New York Times: “Europe’s social democratic systems are not only more human, they leave us better prepared and fit to deal with a crisis like this than the more brutal capitalistic system in the United States.”

    But while criticism of American leadership is merited here, such views do have a whiff of schadenfreude about them. It should be noted that there is also widespread apprehension in Europe that the EU is failing the stress test caused by the pandemic.

    In Italy in particular, there has been deep resentment at what is perceived to be the lacklustre response of the EU early on in the pandemic. More broadly, old fault lines between northern and southern Europe have emerged in the rancorous and now stalled discussions about calls for collective debt issuance to deal with the post-pandemic recovery.

Loss of leadership

    The EU has struggled to keep internal borders open and keep alive the principles of the single market and free movement. The governor of the Veneto region in Italy has stated that “Schengen no longer exists … It will be remembered only in the history books.” Meanwhile, Poland and Hungary slide further towards autocracy.

    The European loss of confidence in American leadership coincides with a consuming crisis in the European project.

    The Covid-19 pandemic has quickened the emergence of a new world order, which is likely to be a new era of great power competition. The “post-American world” that is taking shape will see it and other Western nations decline while the rest, most notably China, rise.

    A divided Europe will need to develop “an appetite for power” amid the realisation that it can no longer count on the US. If a post-American Europe is to collectively rise to the challenges of the new geopolitical realities it will need to be unified by something stronger than its distaste for the American president.


Liam Kennedy -- The Conversation

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   Desinization is a term known in Taiwan. Sinization, desinization and resinization are narratives of the Taiwanese people's confrontation with their Chinese past, their present striving for autonomy, and the future that China intends for them.

   Europe? Its geographical position "at the other end of the world" does not save Europe from having to deal with China claiming hegemony. At present, Europe is in a phase of sinization: gentler and more gradual than the processes ongoing in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but just as focused and determined 1).

   Sinization: a big word for Chinese investment in the infrastructure of poor European countries such as Greece and Montenegro, as well as in the industries and economies of rich countries such as Germany, France and Italy. Sinization also means China's attempts to exert massive influence on politics and public opinion; for example, Beijing's campaign to deny that the SARS Cov 2 virus originated in Wuhan.

   There is no doubt that China sees itself as the nascent hegemon to serve. The more the self-destruction of the US in the Trump mess progresses; the longer the Covid epidemic paralyses the still largest economy in the world; the more China is being offered the role of the new hegemon. China wants to prevent Trump's re-election, the incumbent claims. Ridiculous: China could not wish for a better ally than Trump if he had another four years to put the world at China's feet.

   This possibility of another Trump term of office should make it clear to Europe that afterwards China will be the big shot. Many Americans traditionally reject international institutions such as the United Nations because they believe there is already one highest global authority, the President of the United States.  China is no different: during the unrest in Hong Kong, the vast majority of mainland Chinese supported the government's tough course against their cousins in Hong Kong.

   Why should Europe switch from sinization to desinization? Simply because the once benevolent hegemon USA, who protected and promoted Europe, is increasingly being replaced by a strict and selfish hegemon: China. This new supreme power has no emotional and kinship ties to Europe: no shared family histories, few friendships. It does not dream of Versailles, Heidelberg or the Highlands. For Beijing, Europe is a market, a potential vassal, at best a competitor. Just as Ankara's Erdogan, supported by millions of diaspora Turks, is brazenly meddling in German affairs, China is also exerting its influence in Germany, based on the power of its close economic ties.

   If Europe wants to avoid being told by Beijing what is right and what is wrong, it must choose the path of desinization. That means first and foremost: economic disengagement. It is not enough, as Anders Fogh Rasmussen* suggests, to subject Chinese investments in strategically important European companies to a control and approval procedure based on the Spanish model.

   It is not enough to closely monitor which infrastructural projects China is prepared to finance in virus-weakened countries such as Italy as part of the New Silk Road. In addition to these defensive measures, an active strategy is also required, namely the pursuit of a gradual reduction in Europe's economic ties with China. Gradually, cautiously, but targeted. The concept of China being the "extended workbench" of European companies should be considered redundant.

   It is obvious that large American and European industries are no longer viable without the hard-working Chinese, without the fine fingers and sharp eyes of Chinese women on the assembly lines. Nowhere else in the world, according to the opinion of American enterpreneurs**, is there a better place to do fine work than in China. It is no longer just the production costs that make China unbeatable: it is also the quality of the work.

   Knowing this, American and European companies have been trying for several years to lower costs and be less dependent by moving to other countries: Vietnam, Kampuchea, Thailand, Indonesia. The results have always been disappointing. What does this mean for Europe?

   The only hope of escaping the dependence on China's workers is offered by artificial intelligence. Until now, it was common practice to develop technically sophisticated devices in Europe, have them manufactured in China and sell them as Made in Germany/France/Italy. One can hope that AI will allow to bring production to Europe that can match Chinese quality and flexibility. This would be a high goal which can only be achieved if politicians identify with it.

   What we need is not a discriminatory policy that puts obstacles in the way of Made in PRC, but a policy that makes it possible to produce Chinese quality competitively in Europe by means of hi-tech.

   China as a workbench is only one aspect of European dependencies. Another one is the importance of the Chinese market for European exports. This is certainly no problem regarding perfumes and baby food, but it is for automobiles and machinery. Every news of record sales in China is prima facie welcome, but its flipside means that the manufacturer is becoming more dependent on the Chinese market and its unpredictable and omnipotent one-party government.

   Europe would be well advised to gradually reduce the interdependence of its economy with China, despite all the benefits of globalisation. The economic gain of an ever closer embrace with China does not outweigh the loss of political independence to an ever more rigorous hegemon.

   If Europe wants to retain its autonomy in the long term, it must reduce China's potential for exerting pressure.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Heinrich von Loesch
 
 
1)
An excellent presentation of China's strategy in Europe offers the Estonian annual secret service report
 International Security 2020 and Estonia (from p. 70), which considerably annoyed China.
 

* Süddeutsche Zeitung, 30.4/1.5.20

** Bringing Manufacturing Back

Dependent on China?
 
 
 
Update
"According to the current and former officials, the US Commerce Department, State and other agencies are increasingly searching for ways to push companies to move both sourcing and manufacturing out of China. Tax incentives and potential re-shoring subsidies are alongside measures being considered to spur changes." 
 
Update 2
 

... beyond politics, there “really is deep distrust of being too closely aligned” with China, especially when it comes to rare earths, technology and medical or pharmaceutical equipment, he said. At least a partial decoupling in some of these sectors is a “very real” possibility. Americans want to be more self-sufficient and certainly not bound to China, he added. (CNBC)

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