Irish Examiner view: A gamble on the long game with China

Irish Examiner

17-05-2025

It is a truism in the West that one of the national characteristics of the Chinese peoples is an abiding interest in the influence of luck on everyday lives.
Destinies can be decided by the zodiac calendar; relations governed by computations of the personality and compatibility of 12 animal signs; decisions delayed because dates are inauspicious.
Gambling is hugely popular and the games — Pai gow, or mahjong for example — can appear fiendishly complicated to untutored eyes.
It is nearly 12 months since Mr He Xiangdong, China's ambassador to Ireland, took a sponsored page in the Irish Examiner to reflect on 45 years of diplomatic ties between China and Ireland.
While he pressed all the normal cultural buttons — namechecking the GAA, Yeats, Joyce, Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Riverdance and Westlife — it was the burgeoning business relationship which formed the bedrock of his observations.
In the 13 years since the then Taoiseach Enda Kenny visited Beijing to establish the 'Strategic Partnership for Mutually Beneficial Cooperation' China has become the world's second largest economy.
Trade between the two countries in 2023 was estimated at just under €20bn, 4,200 times the level that existed in 1979.
Irish exports have surged fivefold since that Enda Kenny visit, making the Republic one of four EU countries to maintain a trade surplus.
Chinese investments in Ireland are around €10bn supporting thousands of jobs.
Nearly 50,000 Chinese citizens study, work, and live here.
Because this is now a major relationship, it is incumbent upon us to maintain a clear view about what China is attempting to achieve internationally and its potential consequences for us, and for our European partners.
While we are reaping economic bounty, matters are much more complicated when we consider the new world order.
The Chinese ambassador was keen to stress the importance of international law within a system centred on the United Nations.
But this is difficult to reconcile with China's attitude towards the invasion of Ukraine and its steadfast help, alongside North Korea and Iran, for Vladimir Putin.
On important occasions China's leader Xi Jinping has made supportive public statements and symbolic appearances alongside the Russian leader.
The most recent of these was on Russia's VE Day at a time that European and American pressure was mounting for a ceasefire and negotiations to deliver a settlement.
China has actively assisted Moscow to evade financial and economic sanctions.
This matters because what happens with Ukraine, and the reaction of our faltering democracies to it, will establish the playbook by which the future conflict over Taiwan will be enacted if, and when, the People's Republic makes its move.
In recreating another economic dependency, we risk making the same fatal error that handicapped us in 2014 when Crimea was annexed.
On that occasion it was Europe's appetite for gas and oil which clouded judgements and heightened desire for shabby compromise.
This time it is Chinese technology and innovation which is establishing itself in all our markets.
The AI start-up DeepSeek, and the technology and EV giants Huawei and BYD are well-known global players.
It is the leading nation for electric vehicles, solar panels and drones and is driving to the front in the robotics industry.
But even more significant is the grip that China has on the supply and processing capacity for rare earth minerals which are the key component of tomorrow's industries and without which the chances of meeting net zero climate targets are precisely zero.
China controls 69% of rare earth production and over 90% of global processing capacity.
Part of its response to the Trump tariffs was to place new export controls on rare earth elements.
This leverage is not down to luck despite Chinese belief in the importance of providence.
It is a matter of calculation and strategy.
Beijing is playing the long game. Europe and Ireland must not be gulled.
It would be strange indeed to protest so volubly over Palestine and then at some stage in the future allow Taiwan to be taken over on the nod.
Cork celebration of Rory Gallagher
It may never be as big as Graceland but it is entirely appropriate that Ireland, and Cork in particular, should do more to celebrate the memory of Rory Gallagher, the guitar legend who sold 30m albums and influenced a generation of musicians.
This summer is the 30th anniversary of his untimely death at the age of 47 when he contracted what was then a little-known infection — MRSA — three months after a liver transplant in Kings College Hospital, London.
Cork Rocks for Rory will see photographic and original memorabilia exhibitions this June, as well as a city-wide walking trail that will commemorate the life and legacy of the blues and rock icon.Picture: Fin Costello/Redferns
Now his estate, working with Cork City Council and Cork City Libraries, is planning a series of events and activities as a rolling tribute to the man that the Lord Mayor, Dan Boyle, describes as Cork's 'finest cultural export across the world'.
Cork Rocks for Rory will see photographic and original memorabilia exhibitions this June, as well as a city-wide walking trail that will commemorate the life and legacy of the blues and rock icon.
Events taking place from June 14 include a display of Gallagher's first guitar.
Exhibitions will include first recordings; never-before-seen images of the musician; a display of some of Gallagher's handwritten lyrics; selections from his personal vinyl and book collections, and a display of tour memorabilia, instruments, and amps.
One of Gallagher's best known tracks was 'A Million Miles Away.'
We can remember this summer that this is how far recognition of his talent and contribution has spread.
Who is going to have the last word?
There are very few people in this world who are more far-sighted than the Canadian Margaret Atwood whose coruscating observations of what has happened to Western society will be compulsory reading for the next century.
Atwood, author of more than 70 books of prose and poetry, has won two Booker prizes and is feted for the insights provided in her landmark dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale, and her portrayal of a world changed irrevocably by genetics, eco-terrorism, and technology, the compelling Oryx and Crake trilogy.
She is famous for asserting that her plotlines are drawn from events which have taken place, or are possible within the current state of human knowledge and experience.
So when, at the age of 85, she says that she cannot remember another point in her life 'when words themselves have felt under such threat' we should sit up and pay attention.
In an acceptance speech for a 'freedom to publish prize' at the British Book Awards, she observed that political and religious polarisation, once on the wane, has increased alarmingly in the past decade.
'The world feels to me more like the 1930s and 40s at present than it has in the intervening 80 years,' she said.
The award for the book of the year went to Patriot by Alexei Navalny, the opponent of Vladimir Putin who was poisoned and died in an Arctic prison, or 'corrective colony', where he was serving a 19-year sentence.
Margaret Atwood.
Atwood commented tartly that she had never been imprisoned, although she may have to 'revise that statistic if I attempt to cross into the United States in the near future'.
Authors and original thinkers have, perhaps, a more compelling case to be listened to than, say, the Belfast rappers Kneecap, who have been most recently drawn into controversy over artistic freedoms.
Those with experience can often take advantage of their fame and knowledge to provide acute commentary and warning.
The Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn may not be as well-read as he was when he won the Nobel Prize for The Gulag Archipelago, his devastating insight into Soviet Russia.
But the predictions he provided in a series of lecture tours in 1975 and 1976 resonate alongside Atwood's critique.
He thought that Europe, the US, and Britain were veering towards moral and spiritual bankruptcy.
With it would disappear the world's one hope against tyranny and totalitarianism.
Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West is still available online. It repays the reading.