A lot has been written about Norway’s normalisation of relations with China after six years of boycott. Most of what I read boils down to either ‘it’s good for seafood’ or ‘it’s a national humiliation’. I thought it could be interesting to assess how much the agreement is worth to China as foreign policy ‘goods’, rather than how much of a win (or loss) it is to Norway. China spent an amount of effort on enacting (more or less covert) diplomatic and trade sanctions against Norway, and after a few years won a sort of (non-)apology from Norway, together with, more importantly, the ‘normalisation’ of covert sanctions as a tool for extraterritorial enforcement of its policies on dissent. I’d say the existence of those two quantities is clear to everyone involved, as is the fact that they add up to a net policy win for China, but the question is how big a win it was. So one thing I set out to do was clarifying the nature and ‘cost’ of the Chinese sanctions against Norway. It turns out the sanctions were very shallow, with hardly any significant effect on China-Norway trade, let alone on the Norwegian economy. If you look at the numbers, rather than basing your analysis on literary criticism of the Beijing joint statement, you’ll see that the ‘normalisation’ agreement indeed handed China a considerable victory.

I guess you could say that such is the nature of relations between countries the size of those two, and that such an assymetric end result can’t beused to judge the expertise of the Norwegian diplomats and policy makers involved. I’m not going to discuss their policy-fu, although word has it that the Norwegian ambassador in Beijing, Svein Ole Sæther, did work on his tennis skills during his long tenure. (As of press time, it’s not clear to me if he learnt Chinese; at any rate, as any fule no, 闲中好，尽日松为侣。) But one way to approach the issue of whether this big victory for China was the only possible result is to look at another example of Chinese sanction policy: Mongolia after the last Dalai Lama visit. Now Mongolia is very different from Norway in many ways, especially vis-à-vis China, but it’s probably the best approximation to the Norwegian case. China sanctioned both countries for (how to put this) allowing non-state local entities (the Nobel committee and Buddhist clergy) to interact with individuals the Party-state dislikes (Liu Xiaobo and the Dalai Lama). In both cases China threw a diplomatic tantrum, and applied sort-of-covert economic sanctions. In both cases the boycott ended with deniably contrite statements of ‘acknowledgment’ of China’s ‘core interest’. And those statements, remarkably enough, came out within days of each other, for reasons that probably involve larger geopolitics than the relations with these two countries. So I think the comparison is warranted.

Now to do that comparison you need to do the same thing as in the Norwegian case: look at what the sanction policy against Mongolia looked like, and what China got in return. Here it’s easy to see that sanctions against Mongolia were potentially crippling, what in turns also means they were somewhat risky for China (you don’t normally want to destroy an economy that overwhelmingly depends on you). That part is uncontroversial. On the other hand, the ‘win’ for China has been reported as Mongolia ‘banning’ future Dalai Lama visits, which indeed would be a big concession were it true. Only it isn’t. In fashionable parlance, it’s ‘fake news’, or maybe guidance of public opinion, which I think can be traced back to a specific Xinhua story. To put it briefly, the Mongolians stated their non-apology through Mongolian media, then Chinese media spun it out of control. To understand how big the Mongolian concession actually was, you need to go to Mongolian-language sources and that’s another thing I did.

The details of the analysis of the less known among these quantities (the costs and ‘wins’ for China, Norway and Mongolia) are in my latest piece for the CPI Analysis blog, reposted by The News Lens with slightly modified spelling (and the Chinese bits in traditional characters). Next week I’ll post an extended version on this blog, including the numbers I used to measure the impact of sanctions on Norway, and more details from the work of Chen and Garcia, the authors of what I think is the best analysis of the salmon boycott.