Europe Seeks Chinese

A day after European leaders unveiled their latest plan to save the euro, top officials opened talks with China in an effort to lure tens of billions of dollars in additional cash, giving China perhaps its biggest opportunity yet to exercise financial clout in the Western world. A senior Chinese official, Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao, said China — like the rest of the world — was still waiting for the Europeans to deliver crucial details on how the rescue fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, would operate and be profitable before deciding on whether to participate.

“This would be a tectonic shift,” said Pieter P. Bottelier, an expert on China who teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. “It would be so important economically and politically.”

Arvind Subramanian, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said Europe’s appeal was another sign that China is already a dominant global power.

The fear is that a failure to contain the crisis would lead to contagion in global financial markets on par with the Lehman Brothers debacle, and deliver a blow not only to the economies of Europe, but also to the United States and other major trading partners.

Such a deterioration would certainly be bad news for China, which could hardly afford to see two of its biggest markets hobbled at the same time.