Dawn of Asian century

Dawn of Asian century puts pressure on Europe to choose sides, says diplomat

Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor London Guardian

EU foreign affairs chief says end of US-led global system may have arrived and Europe needs robust strategy for China

Xi Jinping meets Angela Merkel on a visit to Germany, where China’s popularity has fallen over the past year. Photograph: Michele Tantussi/Getty Images

The Asian century may have arrived marking the end of a US-led global system, the EU’s foreign affairs chief has said amid a growing discussion in Europe on how to weave a path between China and the US.

“Analysts have long talked about the end of an American-led system and the arrival of an Asian century. This is now happening in front of our eyes,” Josep Borrell told a group of German diplomats on Monday, adding that the coronavirus pandemic could be seen as a turning point and that the “pressure to choose sides is growing”.

In remarks that appear to confirm that the European Union will speed up a shift to a more independent and aggressive posture towards Beijing, he said the 27-nation bloc “should follow our own interests and values and avoid being instrumentalised by one or the other”.

“We need a more robust strategy for China, which also requires better relations with the rest of democratic Asia,” he added.

The EU has been reluctant to side with Donald Trump’s confrontational stance towards China, but Beijing’s assault on the independence of Hong Kong, its growing willingness to side with Europe’s populists and its refusal to open its markets has led to a change of heart, according to analysts.

Margrethe Vestager, the EU competition commissioner and a key figure in how Europe will handle China in the future, has recently noted what she describes as a lack of reciprocity. “In the part of west Norway in which I grew up, we were taught that if you invite a guest to dinner and they do not invite you back, you stop inviting them,” she explained. She said Europe needed “to be more assertive and confident about who we are”.

Borrell has previously admitted the EU has been naive about aspects of China, but said this was now coming to an end. In an article published this month in many European newspapers, he urged more collective discipline towards China.

Riot police detain an anti-government protester in Sheung Shui, Hong Kong. Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong is altering European opinion. Photograph: Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters

Already a raft of senior politicians in France and Germany are becoming more vocal in their criticism of China, seeing echoes of Russian efforts to divide the bloc through a mixture of disinformation or pandering to rightwing populists who ideologically should be anathema to Chinese communists.

No one knows yet how far this “new realism” will take the EU in altering its economic relationship to China. Daily EU imports from China amount to €1bn (£895m), but economists say there are already signs that some trade is not returning.

On issues ranging from supply chains to telecoms security, diversification has become the watchword. Borrell has spoken of his surprise at discovering that all of Europe’s supplies of paracetamol derive from China. The German cabinet has already approved new laws to prevent foreign takeovers of medical companies. The French finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, has said “some companies are vulnerable, some technologies are fragile and could be bought by foreign competitors at a low cost. I won’t let it happen.” Sweden’s relations with China are close to breakdown.

Andrew Small, an associate senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations thinktank, said Beijing had been able until recently to hide behind EU suspicions of Russia.

He wrote: “It benefited from the contrast that many Europeans drew between China and Russia. In this view, whereas Russia was actively hostile to the EU, China only sought to stymie European unity on a set of narrowly Sinocentric issues; whereas Russia thrived on chaos, China could be relied on as a status quo actor during crises; and whereas Russia pumped out disinformation, targeted European citizens, and sought to bring populists to power, China focused on positive image management and behind-the-scenes elite capture.”

China had after all helped Europe’s economic recovery in 2007-8 by buying debts and failing assets after the financial crash. It did not join Russia in becoming part of Nigel Farage’s Brexit chorus and it avoided support for Russia over Ukraine.

The EU’s natural desire to be tougher on China has been held back by revulsion at Trump’s methods and a fear that if Europe jettisoned China altogether, its chief partner would have to be Trump.

A key change came in spring 2019 when, frustrated by difficulties accessing the Chinese market and alarmed by the nationalist direction of Xi Jinping’s leadership, the EU labelled China “a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance” in a landmark strategy paper. Even now it is used in evidence by the US state department for similarities to its own stance.

Many factors prompted a change of heart. The expected bonanza from China’s “belt and road” initiative had by and large failed to materialise as China’s own economy slowed down. “The period of romantic optimism had come to an end,” said Latvia’s foreign minister, Edgars Rinkēvičs. “Four years ago it was only about the economy, about trade, about the ‘belt and road’, about more investment. Now, it is more balanced.” Emmanuel Macron, the French president, in particular lobbied for the change, urging Europe to look to Russia for an alliance.

But it was not immediately clear how much the 2019 strategy paper would translate at a nation-state level. In the same month it was published, Italy became the first European country to sign a “belt and road” investment memorandum with China. Many European countries individually gave Huawei the go-ahead to run their 5G networks.

Beijing itself wanted to halt the slide in relations, declaring 2020 would be the year of Europe with two large summits and many ceremonial signings. China also continued courting eastern Europe in what has been known as the 17+1 group.

Philippe Le Corre, a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says Covid has been “the game-changer” in finally altering European perceptions of China. “Chinese diplomacy backfired. It did not acknowledge the initial help Europe gave to China, perhaps due to the regime being discomforted by foreigners providing help. There were fake videos in Rome of Italians singing the Chinese national anthem. It was very strange.”

Small suggested Beijing appeared to have decided to use Europe at a moment of deep internal strain in a broad information battle about the supposed inadequacies of western democracy. “It was not enough to argue that the Chinese Communist party had succeeded; others had to be seen to fail,” he said.

Borrell called China’s “politics of generosity” a stunt and the European External Action Service, the EU’s diplomatic arm, swung into action accusing China of running a “global disinformation campaign to deflect blame for the outbreak of the pandemic and improve its international image”.

China’s behaviour has also backfired with European public opinion. A poll published by the Körber-Stiftung thinktank showed that 71% of Germans believe “greater transparency by China would have mitigated the corona epidemic”. A net 68% of Germans said their opinion of the US had deteriorated over the past year, but China’s reputation had also suffered, dropping by a net 11%. In France, an Ifop/Reputation Squad poll conducted at the end of April found only 12% saw China as best placed to meet the challenges of the next decade.

The key exception is Italy, but it has long been more sympathetic to China, and opinion appears fluid.

The question for European politicians now is how to harness this new awareness to resist China, without tumbling into Trump’s cold war. The first step is to compile what is being described as inventory of dependence on China, and investment screening reviews are now under way in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Le Maire has promised “to strengthen our sovereignty in strategic value chains”, such as those of the automotive, aerospace and pharmaceutical industries.

The next test is China’s own direction. Veteran officials and advisers are not enamoured by what has been described as China’s “Sopranos school of diplomacy”. The Chinese scholar Lanxin Xiang admits he has kicked up quite a bit of dust by arguing it undermines China’s strategic objective of turning the EU into a buffer zone against the US.

Similarly Long Yongtu, who negotiated China’s passage to the World Trade Organization in 2001, which led to China’s astonishing economic growth, warned in May that China risked isolating itself from a new global economic order. “China is also an important participant in globalisation, so when somebody begins to talk about ‘deglobalisation’, of course, we need to be highly wary of that,” he said.

But with Trump seeking to rally the G7 – and specifically European powers – against China, using the fate of Hong Kong as his cause, China may find it is too late to get Europe to turn back.

Why a ‘Strange and Nerdy’ Book About Eels Is Making Waves

Why a ‘Strange and Nerdy’ Book About Eels Is Making Waves

By Lisa Abend

Patrik Svensson mixed natural history with memoir for his debut, which has become a surprise best seller and award winner in his native Sweden.

“I had the feeling my story, and my family’s story, is not something to write books about,” said Patrik Svensson, who connected with his father, a road paver, during childhood fishing trips. “The eels gave me something to hide behind.”Credit...Julia Lindemalm

MALMO, Sweden — In the 1980s, American scientists devised an experiment that they were convinced would solve the mystery of how eels reproduce.

They took 100 females, injected them with hormones to induce sexual maturity, and prepared to bring them to the Sargasso Sea, that evocative patch of the Atlantic Ocean that begins some 300 miles off the eastern coast of the U.S. and is known to be where European and American eels go to spawn. There, the scientists planned to set the females in cages attached to buoys intended to function as lures that would, essentially, bring all the boys to the yard.

Yet 95 of the eels died before they reached the sea. The remaining five, put in cages and attached to buoys as planned, disappeared along with the contraptions that housed them.

Odd tales like that compelled Patrik Svensson to write “The Book of Eels.” A combination of natural history, memoir and metaphysical musing, the book, which comes out in the U.S. on Tuesday, is a debut for the 47-year-old journalist. It is already a best seller in his native Sweden, where it won the August Prize, the country’s most prestigious literary award.

“He takes scientific mysteries and makes them part of a lived experience; a story between father and son that people can relate to,” Emi-Simone Zawall, a book critic for the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet and a former juror for the August Prize, said in a phone interview. “But I think the reason for [the book’s] success is that he combines them with a level of literary craftsmanship that is quite rare.”

No one is more surprised by that success than its author. “It’s a very strange and nerdy book,” Svensson said in an interview this month in Malmo. A culture reporter who reviews books and films, he grew up in a rural area north of the city where his decision to go to university — to say nothing of his interest in the arts — was difficult for his father, who worked as a road paver, to understand.

But father and son connected over eels, and it was from his dad’s stories that the younger Svensson became fascinated by the animal. The eel’s biology has captivated and baffled some of the West’s greatest minds, from Aristotle to Freud (who spent a postgraduate research gig in a futile quest to locate the fish’s testes, a failure that, as Svensson suggests, may have given the future father of psychoanalysis some ideas about genital absence). The Danish marine biologist Johanne Schmidt, who was obsessed with the eel, spent 20 years establishing its origins in the Sargasso.

It wasn’t until his father’s death from cancer, however, that Svensson decided to try his own hand at researching the creature. “I wouldn’t have written the book if my father hadn’t died,” he said. “Yes, it is a book about science and science history. But it’s also a way for me to try to write my way back to my origin, to my own Sargasso Sea.” In “The Book of Eels,” the younger Svensson’s memories of their nighttime fishing trips — the moonlit stillness giving way to a sudden thrash of slime — are lyrically recalled, and alternate with the natural history chapters.

Svensson’s insecurities surrounding his working-class background — evident, for example, in a passage in which he describes his boyhood envy for the superior fishing grounds of a local fishing club, “with their expensive fly fishing rods and their ridiculous little hats” — partly explain why he twined his past with the eel’s. “I had the feeling my story, and my family’s story, is not something to write books about,” he said. “The eels gave me something to hide behind.”

Image

Svensson was a winner of Sweden’s August Prize for “The Book of Eels.”Credit...Julia Lindemalm

It helped that the eels themselves have kept so much hidden. As he wrote, Svensson found his book’s two stories coming together in strange ways. He would recall a willow that grew the bank of the stream where he and his father fished, for example, then discover that scientists describe the eel larva as shaped like a willow leaf. And much like an eel, his father turned out to have some ancestral secrets of his own.

In recent years, eels have become a flash point in southern Sweden. Although there is a long tradition of fishing them, the catch is strictly regulated, and the species, now endangered, has become a focus for environmental activists. With the exception of one his mother won in a Christmas lottery a few years back, Svensson no longer eats the fish as a matter of principle. But it is a tribute to the sensitivity with which he presents both the local culture and the eels’ plight that both fishermen and conservationists have praised the book.

In his quiet, studied way, Svensson is thrilled that readers have embraced his efforts to blend popular science with literary memoir. But more than anything, he believes they are responding to the eels’ own unknowable nature.

“We need enigmas,” he said. “We need questions that aren’t answered yet. Eels argue with our confidence that the world is explained.”

How Science Trumps Denial

How Science Trumps Denial

Scientists putting their career and health on the line can take heart from Galileo.

BY MARIO LIVIOMAY 6, 2020

There’s an old belief that truth will always overcome error. Alas, history tells us something different. Without someone to fight for it, to put error on the defensive, truth may languish. It may even be lost, at least for some time. No one understood this better than the renowned Italian scientist Galileo Galilei.

It is easy to imagine the man who for a while almost single-handedly founded the methods and practices of modern science as some sort of Renaissance ivory-tower intellectual, uninterested and unwilling to sully himself by getting down into the trenches in defense of science. But Galileo was not only a relentless advocate for what science could teach the rest of us. He was a master in outreach and a brilliant pioneer in the art of getting his message across.

Today it may be hard to believe that science needs to be defended. But a political storm that denies the facts of science has swept across the land. This denialism ranges from the initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic to the reality of climate change. It’s heard in the preposterous arguments against vaccinating children and Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection. The scientists putting their careers, reputations, and even their health on the line to educate the public can take heart from Galileo, whose courageous resistance led the way.

A crucial first step, one that took Galileo a bit of time to take, was to switch from publishing his findings in Latin, as was the custom for scientific writings at the time, to the Italian vernacular, the speech of the common people. This enabled not just the highly educated elite but anyone who was intellectually curious to hear and learn about the new scientific work. Even when risking offense (which Galileo never shied away from)—for instance, in responding to a German Jesuit astronomer who disagreed with him on the nature of sunspots (mysterious dark areas observed on the surface of the sun)—Galileo replied in the vernacular, because, as he explained, “I must have everyone able to read it.” An additional motive may have been that Galileo wanted to ensure that no one would somehow distort the meaning of what he had written.

Galileo also understood that while the Church had the pomp and magic of decades of art and music, science had the enchantment of a new invention—the telescope. Even he wasn’t immune to its seductive powers, writing in his famous booklet The Sidereal Messenger: “In this short treatise I propose great things for inspection and contemplation by every explorer of Nature. Great, I say, because of the excellence of the things themselves, because of their newness, unheard of through the ages, and also because of the instrument with the benefit of which they make themselves manifest to our sight. “ And that gave him his second plan for an ambitious outreach campaign.

With alternative facts acting like real facts, there are Galileo’s heirs, throwing up their hands and attempts to make lies sound like truth.

What if he could distribute telescopes (together with detailed instructions for their use and his booklet about the discoveries) all across Europe, so that all the influential people, that is, the patrons of scientists—dukes and cardinals, could observe with their own eyes far out into the heavens. They would see the stunning craters and mountains that cover the surface of the moon, four previously unseen satellites of Jupiter, dark spots on the surface of the sun, and the vast number of stars that make up the Milky Way.

But telescopes were both expensive and technically difficult to produce. Their lenses had to be of the highest quality, to provide both the ability to see faint objects and high resolution. “Very fine lenses that can show all observations are quite rare and, of the more than sixty I have made, with great effort and expense, I have only been able to retain a very small number,” Galileo wrote on March 19, 1610. Who would front the cost of such a monumental and risky project?

Today the papacy is arguably the single most influential and powerful religious institution in the world. But its power is mostly in the moral and religious realms. In Galileo’s time, the papacy was a political power of significance, gobbling up failed dukedoms elsewhere, merging them into what became known as the “papal states.” The persons with the greatest interest in appearing strong in front of the papacy were the heads of neighboring states at the time.

So it is not surprising that Galileo presented his grandiose scheme to the Tuscan court and the Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici. Nor is it surprising that Cosimo agreed to finance the manufacturing of all the telescopes. On his own, he also instructed the Tuscan ambassadors to all the major European capitals to help publicize Galileo’s discoveries. In doing so he tied the House of Medici, ruler of the foundational city of the Renaissance, Florence, to modern science. A win-win for both the Grand Duke and Galileo.

Last, Galileo instinctively understood what modern PR specialists refer to as the “quick response.” He did not let even one unkind word be said about his discoveries without an immediate reply. And his pen could be sharp.

For example, the Jesuit mathematician Orazio Grassi (hiding behind the pseudonym of Sarsi) published a book entitled The Astronomical and Philosophical Balance, in which he criticized Galileo’s ideas on comets and on the nature of heat. In it, Grassi mistakenly thought that he would strengthen his argument by citing a legendary tale about the ancient Babylonians cooking eggs by whirling them on slings.

Really?

Galileo responded with a stupendous piece of polemic literature entitled The Assayer, in which he pounced on this fabled story like a cat on a mouse.

“If Sarsi wishes me to believe, on the word of Suidas [a Greek historian], that the Babylonians cooked eggs by whirling them rapidly in slings, I shall believe it; but I shall say that the cause of this effect is very far from the one he attributes to it,” he wrote. “ To discover the true cause, I reason as follows: ‘If we do not achieve an effect which others formerly achieved, it must be that we lack something in our operation which was the cause of this effect succeeding, and if we lack one thing only, then this alone can be the true cause. Now we do not lack eggs, or slings, or sturdy fellows to whirl them, and still they do not cook, but rather cool down faster if hot. And since we lack nothing except being Babylonians, then being Babylonian is the cause of the egg hardening.’”

Galileo understood what modern PR specialists refer to as the “quick response.” He did not let one unkind word go without an immediate reply.

Did Galileo’s efforts save science from being cast aside perhaps for decades, even centuries? Unfortunately, not quite. The trial in which he was convicted by the Inquisition for “vehement suspicion of heresy” exerted a chilling effect on progress in deciphering the laws governing the cosmos. The famous French philosopher and scientist René Descartes wrote in a letter: “I inquired in Leiden and Amsterdam whether Galileo’s World System was available, for I thought I had heard that it was published in Italy last year. I was told that it had indeed been published, but that all the copies had immediately been burnt in Rome, and that Galileo had been convicted and fined. I was so astonished at this that I almost decided to burn all my papers, or at least to let no one see them.”

I suspect that there are still too few of us who can tell exactly what Galileo discovered and why he is such an important figure to the birth of modern science. But around the world, in conversations as brittle as today’s politics, with alternative facts acting like real facts, there are Galileo’s heirs, throwing up their hands at such attempts to make lies seem like the truth and worse, the truth like a lie, responding with just four words: “And yet it moves.”

Galileo may have never really uttered these words. He surely didn’t say that phrase in front of the Inquisitors—that would have been insanely dangerous. But whether the motto came first from his own mouth, that of a supporter whom he met during the years the Church put him under house arrest after his trial, or a later historian, we know one thing for sure. That motto represents everything Galileo stood for. It conveys the clear message of: In spite of what you may believe, these are the facts! That science won at the end is not solely because of the methods and rules that Galileo set out for what we accept to be true. Science prevailed because Galileo put his life and his personal freedom on the line to defend it.

 

Mario Livio is an astrophysicist and author. His new book is Galileo: And the Science Deniers.