By Ankit Panda
There are immense barriers to France ever selling its Mistral-class ships to China.
Yesterday, I took a look at the largely apocryphal notion that China may be eyeing France’s Mistral-class advanced amphibous warfare ships — specifically, the two ships that were originally built for Russia but later withheld after Vladimir Putin’s decision to annex Crimea and support anti-government rebels in the Donbass. In that piece, I perhaps focused a bit too much on the impressive hardware of the Mistral itself and less so on the huge reasons why it is incredibly unlikely that China will ever purchase or operate one of these ships as part of the People’s Liberation Army Navy. I outline the reasons for that in what follows.
The first, and most important reason, is the European Union’s arms embargo against a China. While I briefly mentioned this, it’s worth emphasizing the extent to which this makes this sale basically impossible. The embargo was put in place by the European Council of Ministers to convey the group’s disapproval of the Chinese government’s use of force against peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the embargo was implemented without a precise legal understanding of precisely what forms of commerce with China were prohibited. Per SIPRI, “it was up to individual member states to interpret the embargo in the context of their national laws, regulations and decision making processes.”
Over the years, the European Union’s relationship with China has transformed, and simultaneously, member state positions on the utility of the embargo have shifted. France, in the mid-2000s, actually became one of the major proponents of ending the embargo. The context of the French push to end the embargo is important. It came at a time when China was swiftly ascending on the global stage as a major economy. China had acceded to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and seemed to be playing by the rules internationally. The fear that China would behave as a revisionist power on the international stage existed, but had little in the way of evidence to support it. The concerns that exist today about Chinese assertiveness within the First Island Chain and Beijing’s overall interest in military modernization were far less widespread.
Read the full story at The Diplomat