China’s ambassador warns ‘relations will suffer’ if Swiss adopt sanctions

China is Switzerland largest trading partner in Asia, and its third largest trading partner globally. Keystone / Alex Plavevski

Chinese-Swiss relations will suffer if Switzerland adopts European Union sanctions against China, says the country’s ambassador in Bern, Wang Shihting, in an interview in the NZZamSonntag.

More than a year ago, the EU imposed sanctions on selected Chinese Community Party officials and organisations over alleged human rights abuses of Uyghurs and other minority groups in the Xinjiang region. Switzerland has not decided whether to follow suit but pressure has been mounting from parliamentarians and civil society to do so.

In an interviewExternal link in the NZZamSonntag, China’s ambassador to Switzerland, Wang Shihting warned that such a move could have consequences. “Anyone who really cares about the friendly relations between the two countries and who makes responsible polities will not agree to the sanctions,” said Shihting. “If Switzerland takes over the sanctions and the situation develops in an uncontrolled direction, Sino-Swiss relations will suffer.”

In early September, the United Nations Human Rights Office in Geneva published a long-awaited report that found “credible evidence” of torture and sexual violence against the Uyghur minority in western China.  The ambassador rejected the report’s findings saying it was “based entirely on lies and rumours”, adding that the “whole thing is an absurd farce funded by the US and Western anti-China forces.”

Switzerland has had strong political and economic ties with China. In 1950, Switzerland was one of the first western countries to recognise the People’s Republic of China. It’s also one of the only European countries to have concluded a free trade agreement with China. Since 2010, China has been its biggest trading partner in Asia and its third-largest globally after the EU and the United States.

However, the Swiss government has been more vocal on the human rights situation recently. When it unveiled its new China strategy last year, Swiss foreign minister Ignazio Cassis said that Switzerland would be more critical on human rights and that this represented a policy shift.

In May, Swiss media reported that efforts by Switzerland to update the free trade agreement with China have stalled as Bern takes a more critical view of Beijing’s human rights record.  Shihting denied that talks have stalled and said the two countries continue to be in in-depth discussions about the scope of revising the agreement.

“The free trade agreement is economically oriented, human rights are not an issue,” the Ambassador told the NZZ.

Other sensitive topics

The Swiss parliament has also been discussing ways to reduce dependency on China such as excluding Chinese tech company Huawei from the 5G network. Ambassador Shihting said that such a proposal is purely politically motivated and that he strongly opposed the “use of state force to contain Chinese companies”.

Another source of tension has been relations with Taiwan. Switzerland does not officially recognise the Asian island state but maintains relations through intricate channels. In recent years there have been repeated calls for a free-trade agreement with Taiwan. There is also a motion in parliament to deepen ties with Taiwan in various areas. To this Ambassador Shihting said: “I can only emphasize that the one-China principle is the political basis for China having relations with other countries.”