- ‘Only patriots’ stand for election in Hong Kong
- IfW: supply chain problems drag on
- US blacklists more tech companies
- Beijing condemns US sanctions
- Study: Sinovac offers little protection against Omicron
- New schedule for SenseTime IPO
- Johnny Erling’s Column: greetings, comrades!
- Global Times editor-in-chief resigns
The first official telephone call between Olaf Scholz and Xi Jinping is set for today. None other than former ambassador Shi Mingde has been instructed by the Chinese to assess the mood in Germany toward China in advance. Naturally, something like this can’t be done via video call and Zoom meeting. So Shi had to pack his bags, fly to Germany and spend more than a week touring the country in November to talk to old acquaintances from politics and business.
Whether Shi’s tour has achieved anything remains to be seen. Newly elected German Chancellor Scholz presented his new China policy of “fair” and “critical” treatment. We’ll keep you updated in the coming days if there’s any news on the new government’s relations with China.
On Sunday, Hong Kong’s citizens will elect a new parliament. Marcel Grzanna spoke with former parliamentarian Ted Hui and analyzed how the election preparations are going. Hui assumes that Hong Kong citizens will not participate in the election. They simply do not feel represented by the “patriotic” representatives standing for election. Meanwhile, Hui and other democracy activists from abroad have called from exile around the world to not take part in the election.
The latest part of the Global China Conversations series discussed the global supply chain situation. The world of supply chains will not be the same after the pandemic, analyzes Finn Mayer-Kuckuk. If presents are missing under the Christmas tree, this is not only due to Covid. Politics is partly to blame. Unfortunately, the talk at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy also features a rather pessimistic forecast for 2022.
“Hello, comrade!” That’s how proper socialists in China greeted each other for a long time. Then the term was hijacked by homosexuals. Ever since Xi Jinping took office, he wanted to clean up the language, hoping to bring socialism back into line by rehabilitating the term “comrade”. After all, in the Confucian sense, language shapes reality, as our author Johnny Erling writes in today’s column.
Have a wonderful fourth advent.
Ning Wang
Feature
Only ‘patriots’ left in the Hong Kong election
Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam called the announcement that public transport will be free for all citizens next Sunday a “gesture of collective responsibility”. The idea is to get people to vote, Lam said. This incentive is unlikely to be of much significance, as most polling stations are close to where voters live. But it is a sign that there is concern about low voter turnout.
But it is also a paradox. Not long after the People’s Republic of China has seized de facto control of the parliamentary elections in Hong Kong, 10,000 police officers are apparently needed to protect the ballot. Past elections – back when the elections of political representatives were a lot more independent – were always peaceful, even without police presence.
Yet the National People’s Congress in Beijing imposed its drastic electoral law reform on the special administrative zone in March specifically to bring peace to the city. The authorities now seem to be playing it safe to keep the peace when a new parliament is elected under new conditions by the city’s 4.5 million eligible voters on Sunday (December 19).
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