Feb 10, 2021
Europe's year-end investment accord with China was, to say the least, controversial on a number of fronts. The draft of the so-called CAI fails to even mention China's exploitation of its Uyghur minority, a concession made in the narrow-minded interest of securing market access for a segment of the European corporate establishment that has been revealed as wielding undue influence over foreign policy. Furthermore, the deal presented the new Biden administration with a fait accompli that upsets its plans of building a common transatlantic front to hold China accountable for its abuses, without so much as a advance notice. We sit down to discuss the background and the fallout from the deal with Reinhard Bütikofer, the German Green MEP who chairs the European Parliament's delegation for relations with China and co-chairs the newly-formed Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, and François Godement, a world-renowned China expert and Sinologist at Institut Montaigne in Paris.
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