- G7 promise better labor rights than Belt and Road Initiative
- Tencent and Bytedance fight for market share
- Hong Kong: journalists arrested for their articles
- CDU election manifesto: China as biggest challenge
- US: no exemptions on minimum tax for China
- Regulators investigate practices at DiDi
- Johnny Erling: China – Home Alone
China’s Belt and Road Initiative is often criticized because of Beijing’s associated geopolitical ambitions. To the exploitation of Chinese labor on the construction sites of the projects, however, less attention is paid. The G7 wants to distance itself from this and promises high labor standards in its recently adopted global infrastructure initiative. Will this convince the major Western economies? After all, cheap labor is a cynical, competitive advantage in the struggle for international contracts and prestige.
The IT giants Bytedance and Tencent are engaged in a fierce battle for dominance of the Chinese Internet. Christiane Kuehl describes how hard the battle is fought: Tencent excludes the competitor’s offers from its platforms. Bytedance counters with lawsuits. In turn, local patriotic judges help Tencent. Billions are turned over online in China, too – the stakes are high. Those who lose in this battle are in danger of going under.
In today’s column, Johnny Erling also addresses a conflict issue: the undiplomatic behavior of the “wolf warrior”. He looks at how Beijing’s foreign policymakers and ambassadors are becoming increasingly aggressive and arrogant. A new trend that does not fit at all with the art of “Jiang Li”, the ABC of pragmatic diplomacy cultivated at the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s and brought Beijing great diplomatic successes.
Nico Beckert
Feature
Allegations of forced labor at Silk Road construction sites
At their summit meeting last weekend, the G7 countries agreed on a “new global infrastructure initiative” called Build Back Better World (B3W). Developing and emerging countries are to receive greater support in building their infrastructure, in the health sector, in digitalization and in technologies to combat climate change. The G7 Infrastructure Initiative is to be implemented in a “transparent and sustainable manner – financially, environmentally, and socially“.
High labor standards are also to become “a central component of the G7 approach“. The G7 thus wants to distinguish itself from China. This is urgently needed because China’s Belt and Road Initiative all too often goes hand in hand with the exploitation of Chinese workers, as civil society organizations have found out. The working conditions of local workers are generally somewhat better, but there is some evidence of labor rights violations, too.
Beijing’s New Silk Road is a multi-billion dollar project that now spans 139 countries. Like China’s economic boom, the Silk Road infrastructure projects rely heavily on workers who build roads, bridges and energy projects for low wages. According to official figures, nearly one million Chinese are working abroad – many of them on New Silk Road projects. In addition, countless workers are working illegally abroad on tourist visas, as well as numerous local workers hired for New Silk Road projects.
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