WE SHOULD assume that Europe will start selling arms to China again soon.

This row is still capable of causing some bitterness with the US, which is passionately opposed to the embargo being lifted and is taken aback that the European Union has moved so far down this road.

But at the same time the row is an empty one. The end of the embargo, which the Chinese are right to call a symbolic barrier rather than a real one, has been in sight for some time.

It is only part of the hugely energetic attempt that EU countries, particularly Germany and France, are now making to court China (and India, too, up to a point).

The question of the 15-year-old embargo, imposed by Europe after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, has come to a head because of today’s EU-China summit in the Netherlands. In China this week, Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, prepared the way for talks on the embargo. The bargain is that Germany will press the EU to lift the embargo soon, and China will support Germany’s bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

China has the better of this deal, in that it looks likely to get what it wants rather sooner.

It has the warm support of France as well as Germany in pushing for the embargo to be lifted. Others have been cooler, notably Britain and the Netherlands, both of which are more sympathetic to the US.

Washington loathes the idea of lifting the embargo, partly on human rights grounds. It also predicts that China will go on a “buying spree” and equip itself with weapons that could threaten Taiwan.

As the US presidential campaign showed, there is enormous popular unease about China, which is seen as draining away “American” jobs and undermining US companies.

President Bush may be glad that the expected $1.5 billion bid for IBM’s personal computer business by Lenovo, the largest computer maker in China, has came after the election.

That deal, between the US-based giant and a Chinese company that has struggled to get a foothold in the global market, would have been hard to imagine a few years ago. But it shows why a lifting of the EU embargo would be largely symbolic: within years, rather than decades, China could probably make the weapons for itself.

The transformation of China’s manufacturing capability is reflected in new EU figures which show that it is now the second largest trading partner of member countries after the US. In the past four years, trade has more than doubled. Trade is also increasingly symmetrical in technical quality; the main EU exports are cars and aircraft, and the main imports are computers, phones and digital cameras.

This is the backdrop to the enthusiasm of France and Germany for a new look at the embargo. Britain, too, has now shifted closer to this view.

In an interview with The Times on November 4, Tony Blair said “there is a case for lifting [the embargo], but we need to do it in a careful and measured way”. He added: “I think we can resolve that actually in time.”

His officials have made the same point again since then: Britain will press China for assurances on human rights but is prepared to talk about lifting the embargo, perhaps in stages.

Britain is not, however, likely to back the French demand for secrecy about any future arms sales. Transparency is one of the conditions that would help to sell the change to a suspicious White House.

bronwen.maddox@thetimes.co.uk

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