China's help for Europe has its price

China is helping out Europe with money but the services demanded in return undermine Europe's sovereignty, writes the conservative daily Lidové noviny: "China doesn't want the Eurozone to collapse. After all, it's an export market. But Beijing's interests go further than that. It wants to influence European policy and an end to criticism of its own human rights policy. The financial aid serves this goal. On the one hand it's about small gestures: Serbia, for example, whose infrastructure China is generously financing, boycotted the award ceremony of the Nobel Peace Prize to a Chinese dissident. And on the other hand it's about large gestures: the attitude of individual EU countries to lifting the embargo on weapon exports to China, for example, more or less reflects these countries' need for Chinese money. Normally one would say: you don't look a gift horse in the mouth. But in international politics that leads to severe encroachments on political sovereignty."

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