China and EU agree on investment deal:

Last week European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and EU Council president Charles Michel and Xi Zing Ping of China concluded seven-year-long negotiations “in principle” during a video conference. German Chancellor Angela Merkel presently holding rotating presidency of the EU and French president Emmanuel Macron also took part in the discussions. It will take several months before the text of the agreement is legally reviewed and translated and it is approved by the EU Council.

Earlier the EU expressed concerns about “the restrictions on freedom of expression, on access to information, and intimidation and surveillance of journalists, as well as detentions, trials and sentencing of human rights defenders, lawyers, and intellectuals in China.”

China is now the bloc’s second-biggest trading partner behind the United States, and the EU is China’s biggest trading partner. China and Europe trade on average over €1 billion a day. China is crucially important to Germany, where companies like BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen make a large share of their profits in the world’s largest car market.

According to the deal China committed following:

1. to pursue ratification of the International Labor Organization’s rules on forced labor;
2. correct an imbalance in market access and create new investment opportunities for European companies in China by ensuring they can compete on an equal footing;
3. to give additional access to EU in many areas including the electric cars and hybrid vehicles sector, as well as private hospitals, telecoms, cloud and financial services, international maritime transport and air transport-related services;
4. to provide provisions for settling disputes, should increase the transparency of Chinese state subsidies and make sustainable development a key element of the relationship;
5. to do away with forced transfer of technologies for access the market of China.

The interesting part is while this deal was finalized, the France and England is under lockdown due to covid-20 i.e. new strain of virus. This establishes the hegemony of China as number one economy of the world which can not be avoided.

Covid-19 is China’s Nagasaki moment:

Europe having failed to retaliate, inspite of high mortality and China’s non-cooperative if not hostile attitude has accepted it’s servile status before China. This will embolden China.

As regards agreement, Merkel and Macron would do well to use it to pour peanut and eat it while pondering what they will do when China fails to abide it’s part of agreement. The only thing China is always consistent in repeating.

There has been such agreements in the past with similar result. Search for Chamberlain and Hitler which was called “Peace for our time”. It was a declaration made by the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in his 30 September 1938 remarks in London concerning the Munich Agreement and the subsequent Anglo-German Declaration.

Interestingly Germany will be at receiving end this time. France will merely repeat it’s performance.