The decision by the US, EU, UK, and Canada to impose sanctions on a number of senior Chinese officials over the brutal treatment and imprisonment of up to one million Uighurs in the Xinjiang region is a welcome assertion of their prioritisation of human rights in foreign policy. China is accused of using torture, forced labour and sterilisations – it denies rights abuses and says its camps provide vocational training and are needed to fight extremism.
The sanctions mark an important, restrained, wider multilateral recalibration of relationships with China as the EU talks to the US about how to deal with the superpower. For the EU a decision to impose the first significant sanctions since an arms embargo in 1989 following the Tiananmen Square crackdown indicates a change in posture
There will be a price to pay, and democracies should be ready to pay it. In recent years China's bullying diplomacy has too often cowed critics – an independent report for UCC on a now-cancelled proposed relationship with China's Minzu University warns that in developing such links Ireland walks "a tightrope between its commercial ambitions and political views on China". If UCC cancelled there would be "repercussions", the report warns, if Beijing thought the project was being abandoned for ethical reasons.
China has already retaliated over the latest sanctions by imposing restrictions, largely travel bans, on several thinktanks, EU foreign policy ambassadors, and some MEPs. In return MEPs are threatening to delay ratification of an important trade deal which would make life easier for key EU investors in China such as carmakers. Bernd Lange, Socialist chairman of the parliament’s trade committee, warns that “today’s events clearly do not allow to continue with business as usual”.
The sanctions decision, backed by all 27 EU governments, although Hungary, called them "harmful" and "pointless", comes only days after similar measures were also applied by the US to Chinese officials and institutions over legislation aimed at silencing protests in Hong Kong. And hard on the heels of a bad-tempered exchange of mutual name-calling in Alaska at the first foreign minister-level meeting between the US and China since Joe Biden became president. US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, will today be in Brussels to relaunch a US-EU China dialogue with Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief.
That is expected to see a meeting of minds – the EU has been careful until recently to avoid perceptions that it is part of a global anti-China alliance, maintaining its 2019 policy of viewing it simultaneously as a partner, economic competitor and “systemic rival”. But the Biden administration’s willingness to temper some of Donald Trump’s language and its desire for a multilateral approach seems set to produce a transatlantic convergence on ramping up pressure on Beijing.