Ambassador TANG Songgen

“China is bombarding European markets with electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines and other products”, warns the Economist. What a terrifying prospect it is, to be bombarded with affordable clean energy and cheap electric cars, at a time when we’re supposed to be dealing with a climate emergency and a cost-of-living crisis. The whole leader reads like a war briefing: “economic warfare”, “second-strike trade weapons”. China is the enemy, and solar panels are the guns! This is another example of the Chinese being very strange imperialists. After all, bombardment from the Western powers usually comes in the form of, well, bombs. Yugoslavia: 78 days of NATO bombing in 1999, including depleted uranium and cluster munitions. Afghanistan: two decades of US-led war, topped off with the first-ever combat use of the “Mother of All Bombs”. Iraq: “shock and awe”, depleted uranium, white phosphorus in Fallujah, hundreds of thousands dead. Libya: a NATO air campaign that turned the country with the highest living standards in Africa into a failed state with open slave markets. Iran: Now in the eighth month of the criminal US-Israeli war. China’s version of “bombardment” consists of goods that Europe wants and needs. Europe’s real economic problem is that its industry stopped investing, its governments embraced austerity, privatisation and financialisation, and its energy policy was handed to Washington. China kept planning and building. That really didn’t need to be a “China shock”.