Latest news with #Europe-China
Bloomberg
4 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
China Fails to Capitalize on Europe's Grievances Over US Tariffs
I'm Chris Anstey, an economics editor in Boston. Today we're looking at Europe-China ties. Send us feedback and tips to ecodaily@ And if you aren't yet signed up to receive this newsletter, you can do so here. Fifty years after the European Economic Community (now the European Union) established diplomatic ties with mainland China, relations with Beijing are at an ' inflection point.'
The Sun
6 days ago
- Business
- The Sun
Xi urges China-EU trust amid global turbulence at Beijing summit
BEIJING: Chinese President Xi Jinping emphasised the need for China and the European Union to deepen trust and make 'correct strategic choices' in a turbulent world during a summit in Beijing on Thursday. The talks, marking 50 years of diplomatic ties, highlighted both cooperation and friction on issues like trade, Ukraine, and market access. 'The more severe and complex the international situation is, the more important it is for China and the EU to strengthen communication, increase mutual trust, and deepen cooperation,' Xi said. He welcomed EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council chief Antonio Costa, urging both sides to meet public expectations and historical challenges. Despite Xi's call for unity, divisions remain sharp. The EU seeks to address its $360 billion trade deficit with China, which von der Leyen called 'unsustainable.' Brussels also demands better market access for European firms and fewer export controls on rare earths. Meanwhile, China has launched probes into European pork, brandy, and dairy products after the EU imposed tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. Another key tension is China's stance on Russia's war in Ukraine. The EU accuses Beijing of indirectly supporting Moscow by supplying dual-use goods. 'We know that Chinese companies supply around 80 percent of the dual-use goods to the war,' a senior EU official said. 'We're not naive. We're not asking China to cut relations, but to step up customs and financial controls.' Von der Leyen expressed cautious optimism, stating the summit offered 'the opportunity to both advance and rebalance our relationship.' Costa added, 'We need concrete progress on issues related to trade and the economy.' Analysts, however, doubt major breakthroughs. 'This summit is not going to change the course of Europe-China relations, which is one of deterioration due to structural issues,' said Abigael Vasselier of the MERICS think tank. - AFP
Sky News
06-04-2025
- Politics
- Sky News
Who are the two MPs deported by Israel – and what have they said about the war in Gaza?
Two Labour MPs have been left "astounded" after they were refused entry to Israel. A political row erupted after news of Yuan Yang and Abtisam Mohamed's deportation broke late on Saturday. The Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU) says it organised the women's "parliamentary delegation" alongside Medical Aid for Palestinians and has been running similar trips for decades. But Israeli officials said immigration officers found "no evidence to support the claim they were travelling as part of an official delegation" and "no politicians or government officials were aware they were coming". The Israeli immigration ministry accused them of planning to "document the activities of the security forces and spread anti-Israel hatred". UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy described the move as "disgraceful". Here we look at who the two Labour MPs are - and what they have said about Israel 's war in Gaza. Yuan Yang Yuan Yang, 35, moved to the UK from China at the age of four - and is the first China-born MP in the House of Commons. She was a journalist before she was chosen as Labour's parliamentary candidate for the newly created constituency of Earley and Woodley in Berkshire in 2023. Her family had lived there for 14 years beforehand. Ms Yang worked for the Financial Times as their deputy Beijing bureau chief, economics correspondent, and Europe-China correspondent. She also made regular appearances on BBC News. She co-founded Rethinking Economics, a non-profit campaign to promote students being able to choose different schools of thought on economics. She won her seat in the 2024 election by 18,209 votes. Just before she was elected, in May 2024, her book, Private Revolutions, was published about four women born in China in the 1980s and 1990s coming of age in a society changed beyond recognition. She identifies as a Quaker, has been a vocal critic of the Chinese government's 2020 Hong Kong national security law, and backed the rights of Hong Kongers in the UK. What has she said about Israel-Gaza? Since entering Commons for the first time in July last year - Ms Yang has only spoken on Israel-Gaza once. On 16 January, after a ceasefire deal was declared, she called on the government to ensure journalists could continue to work safely in Gaza. "The ceasefire deal gives families in Israel and Palestine, as well as their relatives in my constituency, hope for longer-lasting peace and security," she said. "However, there can be no security without accountability, and there is no accountability without scrutiny. This war has been the deadliest on record for journalists, so what can the government do to ensure that all journalists in Palestine, including my former colleagues, can do their job without fear for their lives?" On 28 February she tweeted on the same issue, claiming "many" of her former colleagues have been "repeatedly denied entry into the region". She stressed that: "Palestinian journalists stuck in Gaza have been working in deadly conditions and fear being targeted while working. Media freedom and access is a core part of democracy, and reporters must be allowed into Gaza to be able to accurately report on the continued humanitarian situation." She welcomed Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy's intervention on the issue. In December, she met commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) on his visit to Parliament. 6:23 Abtisam Mohamed also entered parliament for the first time last year, winning her Sheffield Central seat with a 26.1% majority. Having moved to the UK at the age of two, she is also the first Yemeni woman to be elected as a British MP. She was raised in a conservative family - with traditional views on the place of women and girls. She only gained four GCSEs but after finishing school she went back to Yemen and received the qualifications to study further, qualifying as a teacher, then a lawyer. She initially became a community worker then a solicitor, establishing her own human rights and immigration practice working. In 2016, Mohamed became a local councillor and was selected as the Sheffield Central Labour candidate over comedian Eddie Izzard and former BBC Newsnight economics editor Paul Mason. She is a member of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee. 1:05 What has she said on Israel-Gaza? Despite only being in the Commons since July, Ms Mohamed has spoken on Israel-Gaza five times. Most recently she gave a short speech on events in Gaza on the first day of Eid al Fitr - 30 March. She described Israel's actions there as "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" and urged ministers to condemn them. Ms Mohamed said the world is witnessing "forced displacement", "ethnic cleansing", "the complete destruction of Gaza", and "permanent occupation of Gaza and the West Bank". Israel denies ethnic cleansing and says evacuation orders in Gaza are designed to protect civilians from its operations against Hamas. On 17 February, Ms Mohamed tweeted to say she had spearheaded a cross-party call from 61 MPs for a UK ban on Israeli goods. She said: "The ICJ's [International Court of Justice] advisory opinion has said that third party states shouldn't aid or assist Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. "Importing goods from settlements gives them legitimacy and further entrenches the occupation." She compared the situation to the UK's ban on imports from Crimea. Responding to Donald Trump's plans for a "Gaza riviera" in February, Ms Mohamed tweeted a clip of the president with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying: "What kind of world do we live in when the war crime of forcible displacement/ethnic cleansing is so openly discussed?" In January she retweeted a news article about Loose Women panellist Nadia Sawalha who "questioned why the media, celebrities and influencers worldwide have not responded to events in Gaza with the same urgency as they have to the LA fires". In January, she spoke again in the Commons to say "ethnic cleansing is taking place before our very eyes, and the world remains silent" - and to call on the government to urge Israel to allow evacuated Palestinians to return to northern Gaza. In November last year she praised the International Criminal Court (ICC)'s decision to pursue South Africa's case against Israel for crimes against humanity, describing it as a "crucial step". Israel denies all the accusations. On 15 October last year, she stood up in the Commons to speak on Gaza for the first time, condemning the "totally inexcusable" actions of Israel - blocking food deliveries into northern Gaza and "using starvation as a weapon of war".
The Guardian
12-02-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Questions raised over Lord Mandelson's work with Chinese ‘influence operation'
Peter Mandelson's face appeared at the top of the screen. Below him was Li Keqiang, then the Chinese premier. Ringed around them in the online 'Europe-China business dialogue' meeting were top executives from some of the biggest European multinationals. Covid was still rife so the February 2021 gathering took place online, with the British Labour peer in the chair. When a copy of the minutes was leaked, they contained fawning opening remarks from Mandelson about China's rulers and their ability to 'prove [their critics] wrong'. But as Mandelson's new post as UK ambassador in Washington draws scrutiny of his relationships in Beijing, the most striking aspect of that 2021 meeting has been overlooked. The China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT), the agency that arranged it alongside Mandelson's Global Counsel consultancy, is believed by experts to be a longstanding Chinese Communist party influence operation with a covert mission to co-opt western businesspeople. The meeting was attended by 20 senior European bosses from Airbus, AstraZeneca, Maersk, Nokia, Prudential and Suez and other major corporations. The CCPIT has 'a United Front function', said Charles Parton, who spent 22 years working in and on China as a UK diplomat and now advises the UK parliament's foreign affairs committee. The United Front is the Chinese Communist party's campaign to secure support from influential figures, including on sensitive questions such as the fate of Taiwan and Tibet. Parton said: 'Anyone with good experience of China should know that. So either Lord Mandelson has a shallow knowledge of China – which is dangerous given the work he has done for Chinese companies, thus promoting China's interests. Or he is wilfully working with a United Front organisation, which is unpardonable.' It was partly for alleged United Front activity that Yang Tengbo, the Chinese businessman who befriended Prince Andrew, was barred from the UK. That case has highlighted the dilemma facing democracies in their dealings with China: how to seek economic rewards from an authoritarian power that is aggressively targeting western states with sophisticated espionage. Mandelson's access to the regime in Beijing goes back to his time as the EU's trade commissioner after China's admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001. Global Counsel's clients have included some of China's most controversial companies such as TikTok, the social media app banned from UK government devices over security fears, and Shein, the online fashion retailer accused of using forced labour. Mandelson co-founded Global Counsel and was its chair until June 2024, when he moved to a new role of president and chair of the firm's international advisory board. He quit as president of the consultancy to take up the ambassadorship but its latest filings show he retains a major stake in a business whose annual turnover has reached £16m. Since his links to China led allies of Donald Trump to object to his nomination as ambassador, Mandelson has gone on US television sounding hawkish. 'I have more important things to deal with just now than your propaganda and I am making no comment,' Mandelson told the Guardian. Global Counsel declined to comment. After the 2021 meeting, a Global Counsel representative wrote to Valdis Dombrovskis, who holds Mandelson's old post of trade commissioner in Brussels, to tell him about it, according to partly redacted documents released by the European Commission in response to a freedom of information request by the Guardian. 'It is anticipated that the dialogue will become a regular platform for discussion at a high level and that Chinese business leaders will be drawn in in due course,' a Global Counsel representative told Dombrovskis, requesting a meeting to brief him. Minutes of that meeting say a representative of Mandelson's consultancy 'sought to coordinate future activities' with the trade commissioner. There have been no public accounts of further formal meetings of the Europe-China business dialogue but it is understood that Global Counsel has had other interactions with the CCPIT. 'You can't engage with China without being exposed to Chinese influence operations,' said William Matthews, a China expert at the Chatham House foreign policy thinktank. 'China's not going away. We want to be able to engage but we also don't want to be exploited.' In a 2018 post on Global Counsel's website, Mandelson recounted one of his many visits to China, to meet the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. 'China is good at remembering its old friends, as I saw this week,' Mandelson wrote, adding that he hoped Europe would not join Trump's 'anti-China crusade'. The delegation that Xi received in the Great Hall of the People was there to commemorate the Icebreakers, British businesspeople who in 1953 travelled to Mao Zedong's China to break the cold war trade embargo. 'I'm glad to see that the new generation of Icebreakers … is continuing to engage in the China-UK friendship with enthusiasm,' Xi said. The visitors in 2018 were thrown a banquet by the same organisation that had hosted the sanctions-busters all those years earlier – the CCPIT. Founded with a mission to coax foreign businesspeople into violating the embargo, the CCPIT's first bosses were a brilliant spy and a central bank governor who spent much of his career on United Front work. Although the CCPIT is not formally part of the United Front Work Department – an arm of the Chinese government that organises Beijing's influence operations – it 'serves as the primary Chinese Communist party-controlled body for fostering 'friendly contacts' and conducting United Front work with foreign business circles', said Martin Hála, a Czech academic who has studied China in Shanghai and at Harvard. Sinopsis, a China research organisation Hála founded, has tracked the CCPIT's activities from Italy to Malaysia. Because the CCPIT 'takes deliberate steps to obscure' its true mission, Hála said, it was 'difficult to blame the targeted business individuals'. But he added: 'However, the expectations should be different for specialised consultancies. If they position themselves as intermediaries for such organisations, a higher standard of due diligence would seem warranted. 'By 2021, a lot of publicly available information was already accessible about the CCPIT. They [Global Counsel] either failed to consult it, or they did but chose to ignore it. Both scenarios would raise questions.' Three years after attending the Icebreakers commemoration, Mandelson personally moderated the gathering of European corporate bosses that the CCPIT arranged with Global Counsel. Clive Hamilton, an Australian academic and the author of two books on Chinese influence, called Mandelson 'one of the most valuable influencers for the Chinese Communist party in Europe'. He said the CCPIT 'belongs to the party's United Front system for extending overseas influence, and does so using trade relations as a cover'. China's ministry of foreign affairs said the CCPIT 'is dedicated to fostering trade, investment, and economic and technological cooperation between China and other countries and regions, as well as enhancing mutual understanding and friendship between the Chinese people and the business communities worldwide'.
