The possible sale of Volkswagen plants in Germany to Chinese investors would be a turning point. For decades, it was the other way around. Money flowed from Germany to the People’s Republic, which BMW, Mercedes and other manufacturers used to build plants there. A turning point that was unimaginable years ago. Leonardo Pape has analyzed the deeper significance of such a development for Europe.
Meanwhile, Fabian Peltsch looks at a kind of mass migration that is currently underway in the US due to a potential TikTok ban. Hundreds of thousands of social media refugees are making their way over to alternative Chinese apps, where they suddenly and unexpectedly meet and interact with Chinese users. Beijing could not have hoped for such an increase in soft power on its own soil.
Finally, our China Perspective column focuses on the charm offensive by Chinese diplomats and state media shortly before Donald Trump’s inauguration. The tone is moderate, and the usual chaos coverage of disasters and violence in the United States is massively dialed down. Newspapers didn’t even cover the Los Angeles fires, which would have been a real feast for them in the past. Our Chinese authors from the People’s Republic assess the situation.
Lastly, I have a small request. We would like to hear from you what you like about China.Table – and in which areas you would like to see more coverage from us. Please use this link to give us your feedback. It will only take a few minutes.
Thank you very much and have a pleasant read!
The Volkswagen Group has been investing in production facilities in China for around 40 years. Now, for the first time, it could go in the other direction: Chinese investors are interested in struggling VW plants in Germany, according to a Reuters report. The news agency cites an insider who refers to the government in Beijing, which is supposed to dictate the pace of a takeover bid. After all, such a step would have to be approved by politicians and the trade unions in Germany. That is why China’s leadership is waiting for the outcome of the German snap election in February.
According to Reuters, VW itself is open to a takeover of the Osnabrück plant, which is threatened with closure. A VW spokesperson for the plant did not want to comment on such “speculation” when asked by Table.Briefings. Lower Saxony’s Minister-President Stephan Weil, who is a member of the VW Supervisory Board, also declined to comment. An official confirmation from the Chinese government is still pending, but a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs urged that Chinese companies should be able to invest in Germany just as easily as vice versa.
For Beatrix Keim from the private research institute Center Automotive Research (CAR), who already worked at the Chinese Volkswagen site in Changchun in the late 1990s, takeover bids from China for German VW plants would be a turning point that she would not have previously thought possible. For the German industry, however, the plans could be good news. With the federal elections approaching, “every party has an interest in maintaining Germany as an industrial hub and keeping jobs here.”
As the planned closure of the VW subsidiary Audi plant in Brussels in late February shows, the outlook for Volkswagen in Europe is anything but bright. So far, no buyer has been found for the plant and 3,000 employees could lose their jobs.
In turn, by moving into Europe, Chinese companies could avoid the recently imposed EU tariffs on imported EVs from the People’s Republic. Localization efforts have already been underway for some time: BYD has been active in Hungary since 2017, for example, and has built an electric bus plant there. The planned plant in Szeged would be the first new production facility for passenger cars in Europe to be built by a Chinese automotive company. Most recently, manufacturer Chery also acquired a Nissan plant in Spain.
Analyst Keim sees the takeover of the Osnabrück plant in particular as a genuine opportunity for Chinese companies. The end of production there is “almost a done deal.” With around 2,000 employees, the VW T-Roc Cabrio will continue to be manufactured at the plant until mid-2027, after which the plant could be sold. The plant also offers a well-trained workforce and a network in the supplier industry. The rather modest capacity of the plant, around 28,000 vehicles in 2023, is a good profile for Chinese manufacturers. The Transparent Factory in Dresden, which employs around 300 people, will cease to build cars in 2026
Stephan Soldanski, representative of trade union IG Metall in Osnabrück, told Reuters that the workforce would have no objection to building Chinese cars for a VW joint venture partner. The company cooperates with SAIC, FAW, and Xpeng in China. “I could imagine that we would produce something for a China joint venture,” he said. However, he stresses that the employee representatives demand the proper framework conditions. “The VW logo must continue to light up on the large painting tower, and VW conditions must be maintained in the plant.”
Even if the VW logo were to stay on the paint tower, the cars rolling out of the plant in Osnabrück could bear very different emblems in the event of a takeover. According to Keim, it is conceivable that the state-owned SAIC Group could participate with vehicles from the Roewe series, which were once the result of the acquisition of the production rights for models 25 and 75 from the insolvent British manufacturer Rover. Geely could also be interested in the Osnabrück site, for example with the production of Smarts for the European market. Geely has been building the brand’s vehicles in a joint venture with Daimler since 2019. Keim considers an offer from EV industry leader BYD or NIO rather unlikely.
So far, there is still no clear line on how to deal with Chinese car companies setting up operations in Europe, either at a national or EU level. Keim believes that a joint venture obligation is conceivable to ensure a coordinated response to Chinese takeover bids across the EU and to protect its own interests. The Chinese government could hardly object to this, as it has been using the same practice for 40 years and continues to impose specific conditions on foreign companies.
In the US, President-elect Donald Trump had shown openness to Chinese car companies setting up shop in his country. In March last year, Trump threatened 100 percent tariffs on Chinese car imports during the US election campaign, but added: “If they want to build a plant in Michigan, in Ohio, in South Carolina, they can, using American workers.”
In view of alleged opening measures for foreign companies in China, the German side should also remain open and “provide a fair and non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese companies,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry demanded. Chinese media, such as the party-affiliated “Observer,” further disseminated the Reuters news under the headline of a possible “win-win deal.”
Beyond all the speculation, Volkswagen faces huge challenges at its domestic sites. VW plans over 35,000 layoffs by 2030 and to reduce capacity across the board. Last year, the VW Group sold around nine million vehicles worldwide, 2.3 percent fewer than in the previous year. Leonardo Pape
It’s an unintentionally funny and, in a way, accidental soft power victory for China: As TikTok will be banned in the US, thousands of American users of the short video app have decided to switch to entirely Chinese platforms in a collective gesture of protest. Along the lines of: “If the US government is worried that China could access our data, we might as well hand it over directly,” as one of the self-declared “TikTok refugees” put it.
However, it was not Douyin, the Chinese equivalent of TikTok, also owned by Bytedance, that topped the US Apple and Google download charts this week, but Xiaohongshu 小红书. The simple reason for this is that Xiaohongshu is one of the few Chinese apps that even allow foreign phone numbers when registering, whereas a search for Douyin in US app stores automatically redirects back to TikTok.
Xiaohongshu, which means “little red book,” was already a real phenomenon in China. The app is the country’s fastest-growing social media platform. Its mix of social media, recommendation forum and e-commerce has been particularly popular with young Chinese people, so much so that Bytedance launched a competitor with a similar concept, Lemon8. However, Xiaohongshu is far ahead, with around 300 million users, around 218 million from China. And thanks to its surprising popularity in the United States and growing popularity in Europe, this figure will likely continue to rise rapidly.
Even though the user interface is almost entirely in Mandarin, a handful of foreigners have already been active on Xiaohongshu, for example, to exchange languages or in the hope of gaining social media fame in China. Western celebrities such as Kim Kardashian have also set up official accounts here. Still, these were primarily aimed at promoting cosmetics and clothing brands to the Chinese buying public rather than a personal cultural exchange.
However, this exchange is now taking place on a scale that is likely to surprise even Xiaohongshu President Miranda Qu, one of China’s most influential businesswomen. Chinese and US users are making direct contact on her app, sharing photos, videos, memes and tutorials – for example, how best to use the Chinese-language app or create Chinese subtitles for their own content.
Numerous screenshots of bonding moments are circulating online: Americans who have never had any contact with China are amazed at how many of their new Chinese friends speak good English. And the fact that they are also capable of irony only adds to the culture shock. Some Chinese users have already offered themselves to American “TikTok refugees” as their “personal Chinese spies.”
“Nothing will be better for US-China people-to-people relations than Americans discovering the incredible wit and humor of China’s ‘netizens’ via Xiaohongshu,” says Chinese-American podcaster Kaiser Kuo happily on X. Xiaohongshu is particularly popular with educated young urbanites, who are generally better informed about life in the USA than vice versa. In the US media, China’s young internet users have recently been mainly portrayed as out-of-control nationalists, known as “little pinks.” For them, the scenes on Xiaohongshu are actually a gift. After all, they don’t even have to trash-talk the Americans there. They are already doing it themselves.
On China’s social networks, but also Elon Musk’s X, chat conversations are shared with undisguised pride, showing how shocked young Americans are that the Chinese pay less for food or healthcare. “Compared to China, the US is a sad country,” says a young American woman in a video shared on X by pro-Beijing podcaster Carl Zha. And Hu Xijin, the former editor-in-chief of the state-run Global Times, urged all TikTok refugees from the USA to be welcomed. No wonder: There is no better place to have a one-sided discussion about topics such as censorship (“You have it in the USA too, see the TikTok ban”) or democracy (“You don’t have it. Otherwise you could keep TikTok”) than on a Chinese app like Xiaohongshu.
Undesirable topics are filtered out on Xiaohongshu as it is customary in China or is shadow-banned. “Try to search for Uyghur 维吾尔 / 维族 / 新疆, Tibet 西藏 / 藏族, Taiwan 台湾 / 湾湾, and compare with the results on non-Chinese apps,” writes White Paper activist Rei Xia on her social media pages. Even a seemingly harmless word such as “narrow-necked vase” 細頸花瓶 is banned on Xiaohongshu because it is phonetically similar to the name Xi Jinping. She expressed her disappointment at how quickly the events were instrumentalized and that “most Americans have thrown their first-world trouble over the real pain and suffering of people under another regime.”
Indeed, Xiaohongshu now shows what Washington wanted to prevent with a TikTok ban: That Chinese narratives would ultimately spread outside China via Chinese social media channels. Whether US users will stay loyal to Xiaohongshu and learn Chinese, as some are already claiming, now also depends on what happens with TikTok. On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that Donald Trump, whose term of office begins one day after the TikTok ban, wants to suspend enforcement for another 60 to 90 days by issuing an executive order. Even if it is not entirely clear how he intends to enforce this legally, TikTok’s days in the US may not yet be numbered.
Xiaohongshu has not yet made an official statement about its recent surge in popularity among US users. However, the team behind the app recently carried out tests to make the video template even more similar to that of TikTok – probably to make it easier for foreign users to navigate the app easier. This may well annoy Chinese users – they already have Douyin – and Beijing. After all, there is a chance that the US will also try to influence Chinese users in the opposite direction. “The censors at Xiaohongshu have definitely been working overtime since this week,” says a Chinese app user who lives in Berlin.
Incidentally, this is not the first time that Xiaohongshu has made Beijing nervous. In 2021, the authorities had already urged the company to reconsider a planned IPO in the US and instead switch to Hong Kong as an alternative. They argued that the amount of stored user data that could migrate overseas with Xiaohongshu posed too high a security risk.
As of last November, South Koreans can travel to China without a visa. Shanghai in particular has seen a sharp rise in visitor numbers since then. In addition to landmarks such as the Pearl Tower, an unassuming house in the financial district of Xintiandi attracts Korean visitors. The South Korean exile government established its headquarters here in 1919 after Japanese colonial authorities in South Korea had taken increasingly violent and repressive action against the population. During a visit, former South Korean President Kim Young-sam described the place as a “sanctuary of independence.”
The possible sale of Volkswagen plants in Germany to Chinese investors would be a turning point. For decades, it was the other way around. Money flowed from Germany to the People’s Republic, which BMW, Mercedes and other manufacturers used to build plants there. A turning point that was unimaginable years ago. Leonardo Pape has analyzed the deeper significance of such a development for Europe.
Meanwhile, Fabian Peltsch looks at a kind of mass migration that is currently underway in the US due to a potential TikTok ban. Hundreds of thousands of social media refugees are making their way over to alternative Chinese apps, where they suddenly and unexpectedly meet and interact with Chinese users. Beijing could not have hoped for such an increase in soft power on its own soil.
Finally, our China Perspective column focuses on the charm offensive by Chinese diplomats and state media shortly before Donald Trump’s inauguration. The tone is moderate, and the usual chaos coverage of disasters and violence in the United States is massively dialed down. Newspapers didn’t even cover the Los Angeles fires, which would have been a real feast for them in the past. Our Chinese authors from the People’s Republic assess the situation.
Lastly, I have a small request. We would like to hear from you what you like about China.Table – and in which areas you would like to see more coverage from us. Please use this link to give us your feedback. It will only take a few minutes.
Thank you very much and have a pleasant read!
The Volkswagen Group has been investing in production facilities in China for around 40 years. Now, for the first time, it could go in the other direction: Chinese investors are interested in struggling VW plants in Germany, according to a Reuters report. The news agency cites an insider who refers to the government in Beijing, which is supposed to dictate the pace of a takeover bid. After all, such a step would have to be approved by politicians and the trade unions in Germany. That is why China’s leadership is waiting for the outcome of the German snap election in February.
According to Reuters, VW itself is open to a takeover of the Osnabrück plant, which is threatened with closure. A VW spokesperson for the plant did not want to comment on such “speculation” when asked by Table.Briefings. Lower Saxony’s Minister-President Stephan Weil, who is a member of the VW Supervisory Board, also declined to comment. An official confirmation from the Chinese government is still pending, but a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs urged that Chinese companies should be able to invest in Germany just as easily as vice versa.
For Beatrix Keim from the private research institute Center Automotive Research (CAR), who already worked at the Chinese Volkswagen site in Changchun in the late 1990s, takeover bids from China for German VW plants would be a turning point that she would not have previously thought possible. For the German industry, however, the plans could be good news. With the federal elections approaching, “every party has an interest in maintaining Germany as an industrial hub and keeping jobs here.”
As the planned closure of the VW subsidiary Audi plant in Brussels in late February shows, the outlook for Volkswagen in Europe is anything but bright. So far, no buyer has been found for the plant and 3,000 employees could lose their jobs.
In turn, by moving into Europe, Chinese companies could avoid the recently imposed EU tariffs on imported EVs from the People’s Republic. Localization efforts have already been underway for some time: BYD has been active in Hungary since 2017, for example, and has built an electric bus plant there. The planned plant in Szeged would be the first new production facility for passenger cars in Europe to be built by a Chinese automotive company. Most recently, manufacturer Chery also acquired a Nissan plant in Spain.
Analyst Keim sees the takeover of the Osnabrück plant in particular as a genuine opportunity for Chinese companies. The end of production there is “almost a done deal.” With around 2,000 employees, the VW T-Roc Cabrio will continue to be manufactured at the plant until mid-2027, after which the plant could be sold. The plant also offers a well-trained workforce and a network in the supplier industry. The rather modest capacity of the plant, around 28,000 vehicles in 2023, is a good profile for Chinese manufacturers. The Transparent Factory in Dresden, which employs around 300 people, will cease to build cars in 2026
Stephan Soldanski, representative of trade union IG Metall in Osnabrück, told Reuters that the workforce would have no objection to building Chinese cars for a VW joint venture partner. The company cooperates with SAIC, FAW, and Xpeng in China. “I could imagine that we would produce something for a China joint venture,” he said. However, he stresses that the employee representatives demand the proper framework conditions. “The VW logo must continue to light up on the large painting tower, and VW conditions must be maintained in the plant.”
Even if the VW logo were to stay on the paint tower, the cars rolling out of the plant in Osnabrück could bear very different emblems in the event of a takeover. According to Keim, it is conceivable that the state-owned SAIC Group could participate with vehicles from the Roewe series, which were once the result of the acquisition of the production rights for models 25 and 75 from the insolvent British manufacturer Rover. Geely could also be interested in the Osnabrück site, for example with the production of Smarts for the European market. Geely has been building the brand’s vehicles in a joint venture with Daimler since 2019. Keim considers an offer from EV industry leader BYD or NIO rather unlikely.
So far, there is still no clear line on how to deal with Chinese car companies setting up operations in Europe, either at a national or EU level. Keim believes that a joint venture obligation is conceivable to ensure a coordinated response to Chinese takeover bids across the EU and to protect its own interests. The Chinese government could hardly object to this, as it has been using the same practice for 40 years and continues to impose specific conditions on foreign companies.
In the US, President-elect Donald Trump had shown openness to Chinese car companies setting up shop in his country. In March last year, Trump threatened 100 percent tariffs on Chinese car imports during the US election campaign, but added: “If they want to build a plant in Michigan, in Ohio, in South Carolina, they can, using American workers.”
In view of alleged opening measures for foreign companies in China, the German side should also remain open and “provide a fair and non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese companies,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry demanded. Chinese media, such as the party-affiliated “Observer,” further disseminated the Reuters news under the headline of a possible “win-win deal.”
Beyond all the speculation, Volkswagen faces huge challenges at its domestic sites. VW plans over 35,000 layoffs by 2030 and to reduce capacity across the board. Last year, the VW Group sold around nine million vehicles worldwide, 2.3 percent fewer than in the previous year. Leonardo Pape
It’s an unintentionally funny and, in a way, accidental soft power victory for China: As TikTok will be banned in the US, thousands of American users of the short video app have decided to switch to entirely Chinese platforms in a collective gesture of protest. Along the lines of: “If the US government is worried that China could access our data, we might as well hand it over directly,” as one of the self-declared “TikTok refugees” put it.
However, it was not Douyin, the Chinese equivalent of TikTok, also owned by Bytedance, that topped the US Apple and Google download charts this week, but Xiaohongshu 小红书. The simple reason for this is that Xiaohongshu is one of the few Chinese apps that even allow foreign phone numbers when registering, whereas a search for Douyin in US app stores automatically redirects back to TikTok.
Xiaohongshu, which means “little red book,” was already a real phenomenon in China. The app is the country’s fastest-growing social media platform. Its mix of social media, recommendation forum and e-commerce has been particularly popular with young Chinese people, so much so that Bytedance launched a competitor with a similar concept, Lemon8. However, Xiaohongshu is far ahead, with around 300 million users, around 218 million from China. And thanks to its surprising popularity in the United States and growing popularity in Europe, this figure will likely continue to rise rapidly.
Even though the user interface is almost entirely in Mandarin, a handful of foreigners have already been active on Xiaohongshu, for example, to exchange languages or in the hope of gaining social media fame in China. Western celebrities such as Kim Kardashian have also set up official accounts here. Still, these were primarily aimed at promoting cosmetics and clothing brands to the Chinese buying public rather than a personal cultural exchange.
However, this exchange is now taking place on a scale that is likely to surprise even Xiaohongshu President Miranda Qu, one of China’s most influential businesswomen. Chinese and US users are making direct contact on her app, sharing photos, videos, memes and tutorials – for example, how best to use the Chinese-language app or create Chinese subtitles for their own content.
Numerous screenshots of bonding moments are circulating online: Americans who have never had any contact with China are amazed at how many of their new Chinese friends speak good English. And the fact that they are also capable of irony only adds to the culture shock. Some Chinese users have already offered themselves to American “TikTok refugees” as their “personal Chinese spies.”
“Nothing will be better for US-China people-to-people relations than Americans discovering the incredible wit and humor of China’s ‘netizens’ via Xiaohongshu,” says Chinese-American podcaster Kaiser Kuo happily on X. Xiaohongshu is particularly popular with educated young urbanites, who are generally better informed about life in the USA than vice versa. In the US media, China’s young internet users have recently been mainly portrayed as out-of-control nationalists, known as “little pinks.” For them, the scenes on Xiaohongshu are actually a gift. After all, they don’t even have to trash-talk the Americans there. They are already doing it themselves.
On China’s social networks, but also Elon Musk’s X, chat conversations are shared with undisguised pride, showing how shocked young Americans are that the Chinese pay less for food or healthcare. “Compared to China, the US is a sad country,” says a young American woman in a video shared on X by pro-Beijing podcaster Carl Zha. And Hu Xijin, the former editor-in-chief of the state-run Global Times, urged all TikTok refugees from the USA to be welcomed. No wonder: There is no better place to have a one-sided discussion about topics such as censorship (“You have it in the USA too, see the TikTok ban”) or democracy (“You don’t have it. Otherwise you could keep TikTok”) than on a Chinese app like Xiaohongshu.
Undesirable topics are filtered out on Xiaohongshu as it is customary in China or is shadow-banned. “Try to search for Uyghur 维吾尔 / 维族 / 新疆, Tibet 西藏 / 藏族, Taiwan 台湾 / 湾湾, and compare with the results on non-Chinese apps,” writes White Paper activist Rei Xia on her social media pages. Even a seemingly harmless word such as “narrow-necked vase” 細頸花瓶 is banned on Xiaohongshu because it is phonetically similar to the name Xi Jinping. She expressed her disappointment at how quickly the events were instrumentalized and that “most Americans have thrown their first-world trouble over the real pain and suffering of people under another regime.”
Indeed, Xiaohongshu now shows what Washington wanted to prevent with a TikTok ban: That Chinese narratives would ultimately spread outside China via Chinese social media channels. Whether US users will stay loyal to Xiaohongshu and learn Chinese, as some are already claiming, now also depends on what happens with TikTok. On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that Donald Trump, whose term of office begins one day after the TikTok ban, wants to suspend enforcement for another 60 to 90 days by issuing an executive order. Even if it is not entirely clear how he intends to enforce this legally, TikTok’s days in the US may not yet be numbered.
Xiaohongshu has not yet made an official statement about its recent surge in popularity among US users. However, the team behind the app recently carried out tests to make the video template even more similar to that of TikTok – probably to make it easier for foreign users to navigate the app easier. This may well annoy Chinese users – they already have Douyin – and Beijing. After all, there is a chance that the US will also try to influence Chinese users in the opposite direction. “The censors at Xiaohongshu have definitely been working overtime since this week,” says a Chinese app user who lives in Berlin.
Incidentally, this is not the first time that Xiaohongshu has made Beijing nervous. In 2021, the authorities had already urged the company to reconsider a planned IPO in the US and instead switch to Hong Kong as an alternative. They argued that the amount of stored user data that could migrate overseas with Xiaohongshu posed too high a security risk.
As of last November, South Koreans can travel to China without a visa. Shanghai in particular has seen a sharp rise in visitor numbers since then. In addition to landmarks such as the Pearl Tower, an unassuming house in the financial district of Xintiandi attracts Korean visitors. The South Korean exile government established its headquarters here in 1919 after Japanese colonial authorities in South Korea had taken increasingly violent and repressive action against the population. During a visit, former South Korean President Kim Young-sam described the place as a “sanctuary of independence.”
