Reuters World News - What's the G7 to do about China?

Episode Date: May 20, 2023

President Joe Biden wants to send a tough message to Beijing from this year’s G7 summit. But China’s trade ties with other G7 countries are complicating Biden’s goal. Japan’s hopes for concrete action on nuclear disarmament also look out of reach as countries stock up on missiles and warheads. We hear from disillusioned atomic bomb survivors and visit an arms factory in South Korea to see firsthand the business of war. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt-out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, leaders of the world's richest democracies are gathered in Hiroshima. Russian aggression against Ukraine and the threat of Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific are top of the agenda at the G7 meeting. But will President Biden be able to convince his peers to act tough on China? I mean, all of these economies are just so intertwined that it's very hard to come up with a way of deterring China that can get everybody on the same page. And how will Beijing react? As country stockpile weapons to counter an increasingly unstable world order, we hear from atomic bomb survivors disillusioned about the prospects for disarmament

and visit an arms factory in South Korea cashing in on the military buildup. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes. I'm Kim Vinal in London. Joe Biden's big moment to project US power in the Asia-Pacific region, region is being cut short by a fiscal crisis at home. I spoke to White House correspondent Trevor Hunigert about his chances of getting a unified message on China. It's going to be very difficult for Biden to get everybody on the same page. All of the countries are economically intertwined with China. And there's no real path forward that all of

them can agree on. Germany has cars to sell. China's the biggest market. Japan is right next door to China. They import food from them. They export all of their high-tech devices to them. And then on the other side, President Xi is also on a mission to sort of rouse his own team. That's right. So President Xi has been on a charm offensive in the Pacific, in Central Asia, in Africa. And so we're going to see more of that from him at the same time as Biden is trying to rally the closest allies that he has. And of course at home, President Biden is dealing with the debt-sealing talks and looming default, which means he last-minute canceled the trip to Papua New Guinea and to Australia for the quad meeting.

What does that do to his credibility and to his mission in the South Pacific? Well, it depends who you ask. If you ask the government officials in some of these Pacific Island nations, you know, they're very disappointed. But if you ask the Biden administration, they say that in the long term, they feel that these nations will recognize that the commitment of the United States is there. There's going to be security arrangements. There's going to be new embassies opened in these Pacific Islands. And their hope is that this will just be seen as one little blip and that President Biden can eventually visit the region again.

What does it do to his China mission? Because these countries are in the region. And key to President Biden being able to play out what he wants. in Asia? Definitely. I think President Xi has visited Papua New Guinea three times, and President Biden, a U.S. President, has never visited that country. So China is investing hugely in this region. And so there's kind of a race at this point because there's a recognition that if there were ever any kind of military conflict, that these nations would all of a sudden be extremely important to the great powers that are clashing in the Pacific.

Hiroshima, ground zero for the world's first nuclear attack, is the perfect venue to pledge an end to nuclear weapons. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida brought world leaders to his ancestral city to persuade them to do just that. But the mood music is all wrong. Nuclear threats from Russia and North Korea, and China's growing military might, have countries around the world stockpiling weapons, including Japan. Sakura Murakami spoke to Shigaki Mori, one of the survivors of the atomic bomb, about the fading chances for disarmament.

His life story, it's absolutely incredible. He was kind of walking along a bridge when the bomb dropped, and he remembers it. He was eight years old at the time, and he was knocked and conscious. But when he came to, I mean, the scenes he saw are absolutely horrific. He saw a woman just kind of bloodied, holding her own entrails in her hand and asking where the closest hospital was. So he also spent years basically researching the identities of 12 American prisoners of war who actually died from the bomb. something the US government actually denied for some time, that there were any US victims. His work basically on unearth the identities of 12 American people. And that meant he was invited to basically meet Obama when Obama visited in 2016. And you've probably seen clips of it.

But in the moment that Shigeaki-Mori, he kind of meets President Obama, he sort of loses, he gets very emotional. sort of, not crumples, but he collapses almost a little bit. And in that moment, Obama kind of takes him up into an embrace. And that became the defining image of that visit. So I spoke to Mori at his home in Hiroshima, and he put on a very brave face. He said that he will continue to hope for results. He wouldn't ever stop.

hoping for strong wording on nuclear disarmament. But at the same time, he spoke a lot about how times have changed and he knew how difficult it would be for the leaders to really commit. The sense that I got was that he doesn't have the same kind of hope that he would have had. The global rush for weapons is a big opportunity for South Korea. Seoul wants to become one of the world's top arms dealers and last year signed its biggest military export deal, selling tanks and fighter jets to Poland.

Joyce Lee visited one of the companies helping to fill that order in Changwon, South Korea. I'm in a factory run by Hanna Aerospace, a South Korean defense company. Next to me, machines are busy assembling K-9 howitzers. The company is working around the clock, to meet $10 billion worth of export orders one last year alone. A big chunk of that was a Russia order from Poland for 212 howitzers after Russia invaded Ukraine.

It's been 70 years since the end of the Korean War, but tensions on the Korean Peninsula remain palpable. The South Korean defense industry had to grow up fast to meet local demand. And now has the room to serve other countries as well. The Poland arms deal last year was a game changer. Defense deals can take four to five years, but Han Hua says this order went from first contact to delivery in less than a year. It remains to be seen whether this is the year Korea transforms,

from an underdog to its dream of a global defense export powerhouse. I am Joyce Lee from Chang'an, South Korea. So how is China countering U.S. efforts to ISIL? on the world stage. Divide and conquer seems to be the name of the game, as John Getty, China News Editor, explains. One thing that Beijing is often keen to impress upon members of the G7 is they need to form their own policies independent of the US. And I suppose we could point to one sort of example of where this played out, and that was the recent visit to China by French President Emmanuel Macron.

and, you know, China really rolled out the red carpet for Macron, and, you know, they issued this joint statement and where they spoke about this idea of strategic autonomy, which is effectively means, you know, the ability of a country to pursue its own interests without relying heavily on another. But at the end of Macron's trip to China, he made some comments about Europe not wanting to be drawn into a conflict over Taiwan, and that courted a lot of controversy back in Europe, but analysts said it served as a sign that Beijing's attempt to sow division between the US and its allies on some of these key points, you know, maybe working. I think another example you could maybe point to would be China's position on Ukraine. Of course, there's deep suspicion led by the United

States about China's peace efforts in Ukraine, given its very close ties to Russia and the fact that, you know, it hasn't condemned Russia over the invasion. But you have seen, you know, in a series of visits by European leaders to China recently, them trying to sort of press Beijing on becoming more involved in some kind of peace deal in China. And again, that sort of will help to, from China's point, if you reinforce this idea that, hey, look, we're out there doing good in the world while the US tries to paint us as problematic. That's it for this special edition of Reuters World News. We'll be back on Monday to get all our shows in your podcast feed, make sure you follow us on your favorite platform or download the Reuters app.