New year begins with frictions
- Source: Global Times
- [03:14 January 07 2010]
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Anders Powell, a professor of media studies at Stockholm University in Sweden, told the Global Times that Europe-China relations are more likely to become aggravated in the new year.
Some European countries, lacking US-style pragmatism, may get even tougher on China on political issues, driven by a kind of envy and hostility triggered by China's important role and good performance in countering the crisis in 2009, Powell said.
Already the third-biggest economy on the planet, China is set to overtake Germany as the world's top exporter and also holds the largest foreign exchange reserves, a whopping $2.27 trillion, including $800 billion in US Treasury bonds.
China's rising economic power has aroused much anticipation and a call for it to fulfill more obligations.
The world heard a lot about the "G2 (US-China) hypothesis" during the climate-change conference in Copenhagen, which implied that China should pay for the greenhouse-gas emissions of developed countries.
But Chinese officials said the country has done what it can as a developing country.
China's yuan is also facing a new round of appreciation pressure. Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, predicted that "2010 will be the year of China. And not in a good way."
"China has become a major financial and trade power. But it doesn't act like other big economies. Instead, it follows a mercantilist policy, keeping its trade surplus artificially high. And in today's depressed world, that policy is, to put it bluntly, predatory," the columnist wrote on December 31 in the New York Times.
The logic that prevails in Western countries is based on the theory of "China's international obligation," Ni Feng, a researcher at the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said.
"However, they seemed to have ignored the fact that China, as a developing nation, should put most of its strength into domestic issues, including economic growth, employment and social discrepancies," he said.
Western countries turned their unrealistic expectations on China into complaints when they realized the huge gap between their hopes and the actual problems China faces, Ni said.
According to the 2010 White Paper of Diplomacy, China's role on the world stage and its development experience won greater attention from the international community, but some have overestimated China's development and demand China shoulder global responsibilities that are beyond its national strength.
Although China has been doing relatively well in these times of global economic downturn, its GDP is just over 6 percent of the world's total, while the US' is nearly 21 percent.
Qiu Wei contributed to this story.
