Norway
wants China to forget about the human rights thing and eat salmon instead
Echo Huang & Isabella Steger
June 14, 2017
Norway is the world’s biggest
producer of salmon. But hardly any of it goes to China, the biggest consumer of
seafood.
Since the Nobel Prize was awarded
to human rights activist Liu Xiaobo in 2010—at a ceremony in Oslo where the
award was famously placed on an empty chair as Liu was in prison in
China—Norway, and its fish, have been given the cold shoulder in China. In
2010, the country almost accounted for all of China’s salmon exports, according
to data from the Norwegian government and DNB Markets, a Norwegian bank. Since
then, its salmon exports to the mainland have plummeted, and by 2015 even the
Faroe Islands, Norway’s tiny Nordic neighbor, was exporting more salmon to
China.
So strained were relations that
Norway’s ambassador to China, Svein O. Sæther, remained five years longer than
the usual four-year tenure in his post for fear that a new ambassador may not
be confirmed by Beijing, according to Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten (link in Norwegian).
In December, the two countries
made a breakthrough when they normalized relations (paywall) after Norway’s
foreign minister visited Beijing. China said that Norway had “deeply reflected
upon the reasons bilateral mutual trust was harmed.” Norway’s foreign ministry
didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.
Last month, Norway’s seafood
industry appeared to get the firmest sign yet that the Chinese market would be
fully opened back to them when a delegation visited China and signed a seafood
trade agreement, with the aim of exporting $1.45 billion worth of salmon to
China by 2025. The agreement came after Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg’s
visit to e-commerce giant Alibaba in April. Taobao and Juhuasuan, two Alibaba-affiliated
shopping sites, hosted promotional events for Norwegian salmon in May.
A Chinese state-owned company
will also deliver intelligent offshorefish farms—installations equipped with
advanced technologies—estimated to be worth around $300 million, to Norwegian
fish-farming giant SalMar, China Daily reported on June 5.
Ivar Kolstad, an economist,
calculated in a paper for Norwegian think-tank CMI that the freeze in
Norway-China relations cost Norway $780 million to $1.3 billion in exports and
said that China had become “too big to fault,” according to the Financial Times
(paywall). Norway’s annual global exports totaled $104 billion in 2015.
Norwegian fisheries minister Per
Sandberg, head of the delegation, said that Norway “speaks up about human
rights in many other circumstances,” and added “This time it is fish that
matters!” according to Aftenposten (link in Norwegian) and a statement from the
Norwegian Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries.
A spokesman for the ministry told
Quartz that as part of prime minister’s Solberg’s April visit, Norway and China
agreed to regularly discuss matters including human rights.
A spokesman for the Norwegian
foreign ministry told Quartz that “the normalization of relations” would
“create major business opportunities for both countries,” with discussions on a
free trade agreement to resume. “Norway and China has agreed to establish a
consultation mechanism at political level between our foreign ministries, where
we can discuss all matters of common interest, both bilateral and multilateral,
including issues relating to the UN, human rights, and trade policy,” the
spokesman added.
In a counter view, more Norwegian
salmon may have been reaching Chinese consumers than the official numbers
suggest. In a paper (pdf, paywall) published last year, researchers at the
Norwegian University of Life Sciences, said Norwegian salmon likely made its
way around rules aimed at the product, possibly by entering the mainland via
Vietnam, which appeared to see a sudden surge in salmon imports from Norway
around 2011. The researchers based their conclusions on export figures in the
region and interviews with stakeholders.
In general, the overall impact of
the Chinese salmon freeze on Norway’s economy has been “negligible,” according
to an independent researcher on China and the Arctic who writes under a
pseudonym, adding that overall trade between Norway and China continued have
grown since the Nobel incident. Still, blocking salmon was an important way for
China to express its “Nobel revenge” in a visible way, he said.
It seems to have had results—in
2015, no Norwegian government members would meet with Tibetan spiritual leader
the Dalai Lama, who is labeled as a separatist by Beijing, when he visited the
country.
“The Norwegian administration
took some domestic criticism for submitting to Chinese pressure in recent
years,” said the researcher, and if a salmon deal hadn’t been achieved “all
that China-friendliness can be perceived as delivering no results.”
Visen Liu contributed reporting