Who are you Callin’ “Yeller”?

Do your best to get through the condescension:

Five years ago, China was the Great Yellow Hope of the European Union (EU). Brussels believed the Middle Kingdom was moving along the same path of postmodern pacificism being taken by Europe. Today, Europeans recognise this was a Great Western Delusion.

Or rather, a great European delusion.

Brussels began to see values in Beijing’s worldview that were invisible to countries closer to China. China, it was said, sought a multipolar world based on international law.

That’s the China that beheads prisoners and harvests organs before sundown, which, it seems is okay if you keep repeating “international law,” whatever European delusion is associated with that, and hoping they don’t imagine any seriousness in your population’s “Free Tibet” loons, those hardcore advocates of ‘regime change’ if there ever were any.

Its politik was all about soft power. EU President Jose Manuel Barroso, after a 2005 visit to China, spoke of an EU-China-US “triangulation” that would mould “a 21st century world order.” He envisioned a “cooperative Eurasia under Sino-European leadership and a China-centred US policy towards Asia.” Some saw Europe as an elder statesmen teaching the Chinese novice the ways of the world.

What arrogance. One can easily imagine that sort of arrogance at work too. The notion that the Europeans have been geostrategic big-dick daddies all along (when all they’ve been doing for half a century is warming the bench), and that the Chinese wouldn’t notice, or even submit to “triangulation” against the US, with whom their relationship is far broader and more meaningful.

There’s also the assumption that for the chance to touch Europe’s blessed hem, that the Chinese government would willingly be used as a political tool. Who do they think they are?

In Beijing they could have surely heard the crackle of that crack-pipe in Brussels, and realized full well that the Europeans are a sort of Jonathan Winters in the global barnyard: they’re the comic relief, but have something tragically disturbing about them.

China had no illusions of what Europe meant to it. Europeans were wealthy but weak. They should be wooed for economic reasons, but ignored for strategic ones. Beijing treated the relationship like a game of chess “with 27 opponents crowding the other side of the board and squabbling about which piece to move.”