With one week to go until the inauguration, Joe Biden will become the 46th president of the United States of America. The expectations of him couldn’t be higher – in terms of domestic policy, but just as much in terms of his foreign policy. Biden’s predecessor in office seriously damaged the transatlantic relationship and provoked China until his final hours. The China.Table team has been asking around in Washington, Beijing, Brussels and Berlin these days and analyses the expectations of the new US president’s China policy. In today’s Opinion, Jeffrey D. Sachs warns against a continuation of Trump’s policy of disengagement. Despite all the conflicts, the US economist says China is needed to overcome international crises.
Where is Jack Ma? For weeks there has been nothing but conjecture about the fate of the Chinese flagship tech pioneer. Marcel Grzanna has picked up his trail and explores the question of what conclusions other successful Chinese entrepreneurs can draw from Ma’s fate. Beijing’s harshness could become a brake on innovation and thus on growth .
Finn Mayer-Kuckuk to reports on the consequences of the alliance between Baidu and Geely, two heavyweights of the Chinese technology scene, for the future of autonomous driving – not only in China but also in Germany.
Welcome to China.Table,
US-China policy: a years-long trade war and accusations that China is to blame for the Covid pandemic – US relations with the People’s Republic have not been as bad as under Donald Trump for more than four decades. And although Trump’s administration has only a few days left, it’s stepping it up a notch. At the weekend, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lifted the restrictions on official contacts with Taiwan that had previously applied. An affront. After all, the CP China demands that the rest of the world does not officially recognize Taiwan as an independent country. The US is now opposing that with this move.
The “complex internal restrictions” on diplomats dealing with Taipei, among others, had been an “attempt to appease the communist regime in Beijing,” the also-outgoing US secretary of state said. “That’s over.” There will be no more deference to Beijing, he added. The move comes ahead of a visit to Taiwan by US Ambassador to the UN Kelly Craft, scheduled for next weekend.
Now all those involved could relax and ignore this provocation. After all, what can you expect from a government that will be stepping down in a few days anyway? But it’s not that simple. Even with the new administration under Joe Biden little will change in the conflicts between Washington and Beijing.
“Democrats may choose different language and not talk about decoupling from China,” Julianne Smith said last summer. She was deputy national security adviser when Biden was vice president and is now being touted as the new NATO ambassador. But she said the USA would stick to the broad outlines of the Trump administration’s China policy even under a new president. “One key difference will be that European allies will be more engaged again”.
But precisely this difference could become quite significant for the German government. Because in the four Trump years, Chancellor Angela Merkel actually did well with her policy of staying out of global conflicts as much as possible. But Trump didn’t care much for transatlantic coordination anyway; his expectations of Germany and Europe were low. That is likely to change under Biden. Not least with regard to China, he expects more loyalty to the alliance from the German government.
This was demonstrated not least at the end of the year when China and the EU agreed to conclude the investment protection agreement after all at the last minute of the German Council Presidency. The two sides had been negotiating for more than seven years. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s incoming national security adviser, called on the Europeans to pause the signing of the agreement – at least until they had a chance to discuss it with the new government. He has been ignored. Some commentators in the US had already demanded beforehand: Germany would have to decide which side they were on in future.
Sigmar Gabriel, chairman of the Atlantic Bridge and foreign minister until 2018, also sees the relationship with China as the “greatest challenge to the transatlantic relationship”. The dispute over NATO contributions is “a fly in the ointment compared to that”, he tells China.Table.
Gabriel nevertheless believes it is right that the EU has reached an agreement with China on the investment protection agreement.“It is in our interest to protect our investments,” says the former SPD leader. After all, he said, so do the Americans. “That doesn’t mean we can’t develop a joint China strategy.”
A large majority of Germans would go even further and insist on complete political neutrality. According to an Infratest poll commissioned by Welt am Sonntag, 77 percent of Germans are in favor of staying out of a conflict between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. This desire, on the other hand, closes one’s eyes to geopolitical realities, warns Norbert Roettgen, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Bundestag, who is running for the CDU presidency this weekend. “If you ignore realities, they will strike all the harder.”
Beijing’s leaders are themselves appealing to US President-elect Joe Biden for prudence: “Both countries should return to a path that restores mutual trust and benefits both,” China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said a week ago Monday. These are very different tones from the “wolf warrior diplomacy” of recent months, along the lines of: We won’t put up with anything now. Just three weeks ago, Chinese think tank South China Sea Probing Initiative (SCSPI) had poured oil on the fire, claiming to Newsweek that “the risk of conflict is growing.” Dangerous encounters between the two sides in the South China Sea were increasing, it said. And earlier this week, anger flared once again in the English-language edition of the party’s Global Times when Twitter deleted a comment on Xinjiang from the Chinese embassy in Washington. In view of the announced visit to Taiwan by the US ambassador to the UN, Beijing also said on Monday that Taiwan was “an inseparable part of Chinese territory” and that China reserved the right to “retaliate” in the event of further provocations.
But that is now rather an exception. Moderating voices now dominate the picture. Voices like those of Xu Xiaonian, the chief economist of CICC, one of China’s largest investment banks. In a text published in English in the business magazine Caixin last Sunday, he clearly warned the nationalists in the party not to overstate the case.
Despite China’s comparatively great economic success last year, he said Beijing should “not underestimate the consequences of the US policy of cutting China off from American technology. ” In this post-industrial era, it is “no longer enough for China to rely on the so-called troika of consumption, external demand and investment.” To those in Chinese politics who are already hoping that China can now limit itself to domestic consumption and trade with Asia, he speaks to their conscience. Thinking that way “could do profound damage to our economy.” A large part of China’s economy is still based on foreign technologies, “which cannot be replaced in a day with only large investments.
At the same time, Xu warned against too high expectations of a course correction by the new president Joe Biden. He considers it “wishful thinking” that Biden will pursue a “less hostile policy” towards China. American policy must be guided by public opinion, he said, and public opinion is not friendly toward China. “Until that changes, it’s difficult for the Biden administration to change course”.
That’s why hardly anyone in Beijing is surprised that Biden has already declared that he wants to keep the tariffs in place for the time being. For a good reason: The US trade deficit with China is still huge despite Trump’s tariff war.
On the other hand, in the Covid crisis, American companies need the Chinese market more than ever, and American citizens need cheap “made in China” products more than ever, the Trumpists object. The Global Times is already arguing that Trump only lost the election because he cut off farmers and factory workers in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania from global trade with his trade war.
What the commentators seem to forget: Covid’s economic impact has played a much bigger role.
Still, there’s no denying that some 23 million Americans were already on unemployment benefits at the beginning of October – up from just 1.4 million during the same period a year earlier. “Biden needs to help these people and that can only be done with China, not against it,” says a senior Chinese diplomat. This is where Beijing’s negotiations come in. The main question at the moment is how to help Biden solve his domestic problem and where he might be willing to give in to China because of it.
When Joe Biden takes the oath of office before the Washington Capitol on Jan. 20, one Brussels institution, in particular, will take a deep breath: described as “obsolete” by Biden’s predecessor, NATO hopes for a relaxation of tensions in the transatlantic alliance.
For NATO it is important that according to Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, there is now once again a “strong supporter of transatlantic relations” in the White House. The alliance is fighting for international recognition – and for a common strategy vis-à-vis China, which in the long term could overtake Russia as its biggest military opponent.
In order to counter Beijing with one voice, the establishment of a separate advisory body with a China focus is now being considered. However, NATO sources told China.Table that it is not yet possible to predict when this body could begin its work.
Former US diplomat A. Wess Mitchell stresses that the rise of China will bring about the “biggest and most drastic change in Nato strategy” and that Nato must reckon with this rise. The foreign policy expert co-chairs the so-called Nato Reflection Group with former German interior and defense minister Thomas de Maizière, which aims to make the alliance fit for the coming decade.
“NATO must devote much more time, political resources, and action to the security challenges
posed by China,” the panel concluded in its November 2020 report, in which China was given its own chapter. NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg noted: “It’s not a matter of bringing NATO into the South China Sea, but of taking into account that China is getting closer to us.”
Through the Silk Road projects, China has acquired infrastructure across Europe, which could affect communications and information sharing among member states, the defense alliance warned. There are also concerns about the close relationship between China and Russia and their joint naval exercises in the Euro-Atlantic area.
The first major meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with representatives of the Biden administration will be the meeting of defense ministers in early February. The main item on the agenda will be NATO’s mission in Afghanistan – an important operation in China’s neighborhood.
“Meanwhile, the relatively new bilateral transatlantic China dialogue between the EU Commission and the US State Department, which was only introduced last year, is on standby. There is no date yet for a first meeting of this format between EU Foreign Affairs Commissioner Josep Borrell and US Secretary of State-designate Antony Blinken, the Commission said in response to a question from China.Table.
Borrell last spoke with Mike Pompeo at the end of October. They welcomed the dialogue format as a “special forum for EU and US experts to discuss the full range of issues related to China,” a joint statement said at the time. According to the statement, the bilateral talks will focus on topics such as human rights, security and multilateralism.
The next meeting will now wait for the Biden administration to take office, a Commission spokesman said. According to the Brussels-based authority, the dialogue format is supposed to become a “key mechanism” for joint positioning vis-à-vis Beijing. Close cooperation with the White House to align strategic goals and support democratic progress in Asia will be essential, the EU Commission stressed in December.
It is questionable which approach the EU and the US will take. Critics have recently described the CAI as a magical welcome gift for the Biden administration and a major concession to China, but this view is far too simplistic, according to EU-Asia analyst and Brussels insider Shada Islam. “The EU is not the junior partner of the US,” she tells China.Table, adding that anyone who thinks that way is underestimating the EU. Washington must realize that the world has also changed geopolitically, Islam says. “We need a strong and democratic US, but there are other partners who are just as committed.” The agreement is also a kind of reality check for the new administration in Washington, she says. Felix Lee/Amelie Richter/Frank Sieren
For decades, Jack Ma was always a few steps ahead of the Chinese state. His vision, entrepreneurial spirit and determination set the standard for internet commerce in the world and digital payments. With his online empire, Alibaba, Jack Ma eclipsed the achievements of Chinese technocrats. His success culminated in the largest new issue in history in 2014, when his digital trading platform raised $25 billion on the New York Stock Exchange, another $3 billion more than Agricultural Bank of China, a state-owned enterprise, had raised four years earlier.
It was something like the Chinese translation of the American Dream that Jack Ma realized in the nominally communist People’s Republic of China of all places: From a gaunt freak who lived on instant noodles to an Internet rock star who had an entire generation at his feet and who proved that it was possible to leave your mark on the country without the party behind you. The entrepreneur increasingly turned his triumph into political influence. Around the 2016 G20 summit in Hangzhou, Ma even hosted various heads of state at his company headquarters to brainstorm about a global trading system for the digital economy. Small and medium-sized enterprises around the world should benefit from this.
Some China insiders believe Jack Ma’s confident appearance back then plays an important role in helping them better understand the events of the past few months. The 56-year-old has been out of the public eye since late October. Days earlier, he had accused financial regulators of using a pawnshop mentality to hinder innovation by private companies in China. He wasn’t even the first to say so. Senior Chinese politicians had done the same before him.
But as a self-confessed critic of a political system in which the players live on favors and support each other through mutual dependencies, Ma had probably overstepped the mark. Party leader Xi Jinping apparently broke the baton personally over Ma, whose independent activities he had suspiciously followed closely for years as an official in Zhejiang, where Alibaba’s headquarters are based. Xi put a short-term stop to the planned record IPO of Ant Group ($37 billion), Alibaba’s financial arm. Ant’s management had to answer to the authorities, and the company is under investigation for monopoly allegations. All this despite the fact that Jack Ma had already resigned from all official positions of the group in the fall of 2019.
But where is Jack Ma? The government recently announced via Beijing’s propaganda paper, the People’s Daily, that the disgraced man is under surveillance at an unnamed location and is not allowed to leave the country. In a dictatorship like China’s, this is not good news for those affected. Teng Biao, a Chinese dissident and lawyer who has lived in American exile for several years, has also been held against his will by Chinese security agencies in the past. “Prominent people of the rank of Jack Ma are certainly given concessions when they are barred from making any public appearances. They are treated better than ordinary citizens. Still, it’s becoming clear that really anyone can get caught in China,” Teng says.
China’s penal code contains an article abbreviated in English to RSDL, “Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location.” The article legalizes the domestic surveillance of criminals or those the state so designates. However, it is not yet clear whether Jack Ma will be monitored using the RSDL article.
“On the surface, the Alibaba case is about a lack of regulation of internet companies, but in reality, the state wants to demonstrate its power to remind Chinese entrepreneurs who they have to submit to,” says Teng.
Meanwhile, a Hangzhou-based Alibaba Group employee told China.Table Ma’s disappearance was not a big issue in China, but rather caused a stir abroad: “Jack Ma doesn’t even work for Alibaba anymore,” she said. Alibaba did not respond to an official inquiry.
Still, the news of “oversight” for the company’s founder is unlikely to miss its mark and will be a lasting reminder to all ambitious company owners should they consider criticizing the state and its institutions. Not coincidentally, state media stressed after Ma’s last public appearance that there was no Jack Ma era in China. No entrepreneur in the country would be able to build a billion-dollar business without the proper framework provided by state policies. The usually celebrated Ma also experienced savage abuse online. It is unclear whether this was part of a state campaign against the 56-year-old to denigrate him.
With its show of force, the Communist Party is consolidating its monopoly position in the short term. In the long term, it is taking a risk with such drastic actions against business leaders and important companies, because it could scare off entrepreneurs, their experience and their innovative strength. With looming consequences in sight, the willingness of private companies to critically engage with state policy will diminish. Those who want to play it safe prefer to remain silent instead of pointing out undesirable developments.
Chinese network equipment supplier Huawei accuses Sweden of breaching the investment agreement between Sweden and China by excluding the company from the Nordic country’s 5G network, according to a report by local media and trade portal Investment Arbitration Reporter (IAR). Sweden decided in October 2020 to exclude Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE from the rollout of its 5G network.
In a letter to Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Loefven, Huawei complains that the exclusion has severely affected the business prospects of its Swedish subsidiary. The principle of “fair and equitable treatment” of international investors in the Swedish-Chinese investment agreement has been violated, he says. Huawei calls on the Swedish government to negotiate. According to Investment Arbitration Reporter, Huawei keeps its options open for further steps under the investment agreement if the negotiations are not successful. After a three-month period, Huawei could take the dispute to either the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) or an “ad hoc tribunal” under the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules).
According to IAR, a Huawei spokesperson said the letter was more of a “cry for help” than a threat of arbitration. After international investors file lawsuits in investor-state arbitration, states often have to pay hundreds of millions of euros in “damages” to the affected investor. Huawei had already written a similar letter to the Czech Republic at the beginning of 2019, threatening to take the country to an investment court. At the time, Huawei complained that a report by the Czech Cyber and Information Security Agency (NUKIB) portrayed the company as a security risk and damaged its investments in the Czech Republic and other countries. According to IAR, it is not known whether Huawei has filed a lawsuit, as there is no requirement for transparency in investment court disputes. However, a spokesperson for Huawei Germany said no formal legal action had been taken on an investment lawsuit against the Czech Republic. nib
Kudos to the European Commission for finalizing a new investment agreement with China. Europe’s active diplomacy also played a role in China’s recent commitment to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 – a decision that was quickly followed by Japan’s pledge to decarbonize by 2050. Now it has yielded yet another major success.
The new EU-China investment agreement will benefit Europe, China, the world, and even the United States, despite the latter’s warnings against it. In general terms, the agreement signifies the intention of the EU and China to continue to deepen economic relations, by granting each party more assured access for investments in the other’s economy. European industry will gain better access to China’s enormous domestic market just as China embarks on a decade of green and digital economic restructuring, and at a time when Europe is striving to stay at the technological forefront in these areas.
The agreement comes in the face of deeply misguided – indeed, dangerous – attempts by US President Donald Trump’s administration not only to cut economic ties with China in high-tech industries, but also to contain China’s growth by forging a US-led alliance that Trump hoped would be backed by the EU and Asia-Pacific countries, including Australia, India, Japan, and South Korea. It appears that the incoming Biden administration may well lean in the same direction, though certainly with more finesse and less bombast than Trump.
The ostensible aim of US policy is to constrain China’s belligerence and human-rights violations, or so the US says. But it is worth noting that the policy is favored by a bipartisan US foreign-policy establishment that maintains some 800 overseas military bases, and that has repeatedly launched illegal wars, imposed illegal unilateral sanctions, and otherwise refused to abide by the United Nations Charter, treaties, and Security Council decisions. It’s certainly hard to argue that China is the belligerent party here.
China, no doubt, should improve its human-rights record – particularly to address the issues raised by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights regarding the situation in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. But let’s be clear: the US, Europe, India, and many Western nations should make similar improvements. Over the past 20 years, in particular, Muslim populations in the Middle East and South and Central Asia have repeatedly suffered from brutal wars waged by Western powers, domestic crackdowns, unilateral US sanctions, and other abuses.
The fact is that few countries properly abide by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and the US, to its great shame, still has not even ratified the UN Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, while China and the EU’s 27 member states did so long ago. The correct response to genuine human-rights concerns is to raise them in a serious and constructive manner, without hypocritical finger-pointing, exaggeration, or disruptions to dialogue, diplomacy, and economic relations. Let the country without sin cast the first stone.
But America’s real intention in opposing China has nothing to do with human rights. Particularly under Trump’s lawless administration, US policies have been motivated by a hunger for dominance, plain and simple. The US is trying to stop China’s technological and economic rise in order to preserve its own predominance. The world economic system, however, cannot and should not operate for the benefit of US hegemony, especially considering that the US accounts for a mere 4 percent of the global population.
Following the tragedies of 2020, the world needs renewed global cooperation, not a new US-stoked cold war. It is time to get the pandemic under control and to chart a new course toward recovery and sustainable development. China can and should be involved as a full partner in tackling these challenges.
After all, China, unlike the US and Europe, successfully suppressed its COVID-19 epidemic in 2020 (as did most of its neighbors in the Asia-Pacific region). Now, China and its neighbors should help the rest of the world to implement the non-pharmaceutical interventions (testing, contact tracing, and quarantining) that have succeeded where US and European policies have failed. And provided that the new Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines are proven safe and effective with peer-reviewed data, China should start mass-producing and distributing these vaccines worldwide.
The EU, China, and US President-elect Joe Biden’s administration should also join forces to map out a green and digital global recovery. With leading emitters now pursuing carbon neutrality, and with Biden planning to return the US to the Paris climate agreement and to commit the US to decarbonization by 2050, we have the makings for a truly green broad-based recovery.
Moreover, development and deployment of new green technologies – renewable energy, electric vehicles (EV), and battery storage – will benefit immensely from global cooperation. For example, just this week, China’s Yahua Group, a major producer of lithium hydroxide, signed up to supply five years’ worth of inputs for battery production at Tesla, a US-based EV manufacturer.
Similar opportunities are available with digital technologies. In a world where digital access is crucial for economic participation, 5G-based technologies promise pathbreaking solutions to a host of challenges, from improving energy efficiency to scaling up e-commerce and e-health. Fortunately, the EU-China investment treaty will help drive digital cooperation, which could give a huge boost to sustainable development.
Still, it will be important for Europe to continue resisting US pressure against China. Trump’s main weapon against China has been to cut off the export of advanced technologies with the hope of bringing Huawei and other major Chinese tech firms to their knees. This move comes straight out of the US hegemony playbook, and was applied against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Trump’s administration justifies its approach vis-à-vis Huawei on the grounds that China might spy on others using Huawei’s 5G equipment. A more plausible reason is that Huawei equipment would make it more difficult for the US government to spy on others, including US citizens. An even more likely reason is that the US naively thinks it can maintain technological superiority indefinitely by cutting off advanced inputs to China. Yet China will probably be able to close the remaining technology gaps in advanced semiconductor production quickly.
Europe is right to engage actively, deeply, and constructively with China, while also attending to its abiding and admirable concerns about human rights around the world. Biden’s administration should resist the hegemonic impulse and instead restart constructive relations with China.
For now, the new EU-China investment agreement is a good way to end a dismal year. The EU is asserting its appropriate foreign-policy prerogatives independent of the US. But more challenges await us in 2021, when the world urgently needs to change course to end the pandemic and move onto a path toward sustainable development.
Jeffrey D. Sachs, University Professor at Columbia University, is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2020.
www.project-syndicate.org
More than 50 opposition activists have been arrested in Hong Kong, including Benny Tai. The 56-year-old former law professor is one of Hong Kong’s best-known democracy campaigners. Hundreds of police poured out last Monday in a coordinated effort to arrest 52 members of the democracy movement in the largest wave of arrests since the National Security Law was introduced. The security authorities were particularly targeting Tai, who they interpreted as the mastermind of an operation that allegedly threatened national security.
Tai and his fellow campaigners had organized unofficial primaries in the summer for the parliamentary elections that were due to be held at the time but were later postponed because of the Covid pandemic. Their goal was to find candidates who enjoyed the greatest possible support among the population.
Around 600,000 Hong Kong citizens took part in the primary elections. The Democrats wanted to appear in the Hong Kong parliament with a strong parliamentary group. Since this would have allowed them to systematically block important government decisions, both this idea and the primaries themselves initially met with sharp criticism from the government and were ultimately classified as a “malicious subversion plan”.
All 52 activists were released on bail after a night in custody. But for many of them, this will have been just the prelude to more trouble with Hong Kong law enforcement. The option of leaving Hong Kong has also been off the table since the arrest for Tai, a professing Christian who cites civil rights activist Martin Luther King as a role model, as the authorities confiscated his passport.
Local media estimates that more than 350 activists have sought asylum abroad for fear of persecution since 2018. Others, like the equally prominent activist Joshua Wong, have stayed and been sentenced to prison for relatively minor offenses. Whether Tai will also meet this fate is still unclear, but there is no question that he is in acute danger after the events of the past few days.
The constitutional lawyer has spent most of his career as an academic at Hong Kong University, where he has taught since 1990. However, probably due to pressure from Beijing, he lost his tenure as a law professor last year.
The extent to which Tai, who has dedicated his life to law and was one of the founders of the pro-democratic Hong Kong Umbrella Movement six years ago, is burdened by the developments in his hometown became clear when he was released after spending the night in jail. In a flurry of camera flashes from photographers, he gave only a terse statement: “Hong Kong,” Tai said with a bleak expression, “has entered a cold winter. There is an icy wind blowing.” Gregor Koppenburg/Joern Petring
With one week to go until the inauguration, Joe Biden will become the 46th president of the United States of America. The expectations of him couldn’t be higher – in terms of domestic policy, but just as much in terms of his foreign policy. Biden’s predecessor in office seriously damaged the transatlantic relationship and provoked China until his final hours. The China.Table team has been asking around in Washington, Beijing, Brussels and Berlin these days and analyses the expectations of the new US president’s China policy. In today’s Opinion, Jeffrey D. Sachs warns against a continuation of Trump’s policy of disengagement. Despite all the conflicts, the US economist says China is needed to overcome international crises.
Where is Jack Ma? For weeks there has been nothing but conjecture about the fate of the Chinese flagship tech pioneer. Marcel Grzanna has picked up his trail and explores the question of what conclusions other successful Chinese entrepreneurs can draw from Ma’s fate. Beijing’s harshness could become a brake on innovation and thus on growth .
Finn Mayer-Kuckuk to reports on the consequences of the alliance between Baidu and Geely, two heavyweights of the Chinese technology scene, for the future of autonomous driving – not only in China but also in Germany.
Welcome to China.Table,
US-China policy: a years-long trade war and accusations that China is to blame for the Covid pandemic – US relations with the People’s Republic have not been as bad as under Donald Trump for more than four decades. And although Trump’s administration has only a few days left, it’s stepping it up a notch. At the weekend, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lifted the restrictions on official contacts with Taiwan that had previously applied. An affront. After all, the CP China demands that the rest of the world does not officially recognize Taiwan as an independent country. The US is now opposing that with this move.
The “complex internal restrictions” on diplomats dealing with Taipei, among others, had been an “attempt to appease the communist regime in Beijing,” the also-outgoing US secretary of state said. “That’s over.” There will be no more deference to Beijing, he added. The move comes ahead of a visit to Taiwan by US Ambassador to the UN Kelly Craft, scheduled for next weekend.
Now all those involved could relax and ignore this provocation. After all, what can you expect from a government that will be stepping down in a few days anyway? But it’s not that simple. Even with the new administration under Joe Biden little will change in the conflicts between Washington and Beijing.
“Democrats may choose different language and not talk about decoupling from China,” Julianne Smith said last summer. She was deputy national security adviser when Biden was vice president and is now being touted as the new NATO ambassador. But she said the USA would stick to the broad outlines of the Trump administration’s China policy even under a new president. “One key difference will be that European allies will be more engaged again”.
But precisely this difference could become quite significant for the German government. Because in the four Trump years, Chancellor Angela Merkel actually did well with her policy of staying out of global conflicts as much as possible. But Trump didn’t care much for transatlantic coordination anyway; his expectations of Germany and Europe were low. That is likely to change under Biden. Not least with regard to China, he expects more loyalty to the alliance from the German government.
This was demonstrated not least at the end of the year when China and the EU agreed to conclude the investment protection agreement after all at the last minute of the German Council Presidency. The two sides had been negotiating for more than seven years. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s incoming national security adviser, called on the Europeans to pause the signing of the agreement – at least until they had a chance to discuss it with the new government. He has been ignored. Some commentators in the US had already demanded beforehand: Germany would have to decide which side they were on in future.
Sigmar Gabriel, chairman of the Atlantic Bridge and foreign minister until 2018, also sees the relationship with China as the “greatest challenge to the transatlantic relationship”. The dispute over NATO contributions is “a fly in the ointment compared to that”, he tells China.Table.
Gabriel nevertheless believes it is right that the EU has reached an agreement with China on the investment protection agreement.“It is in our interest to protect our investments,” says the former SPD leader. After all, he said, so do the Americans. “That doesn’t mean we can’t develop a joint China strategy.”
A large majority of Germans would go even further and insist on complete political neutrality. According to an Infratest poll commissioned by Welt am Sonntag, 77 percent of Germans are in favor of staying out of a conflict between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. This desire, on the other hand, closes one’s eyes to geopolitical realities, warns Norbert Roettgen, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Bundestag, who is running for the CDU presidency this weekend. “If you ignore realities, they will strike all the harder.”
Beijing’s leaders are themselves appealing to US President-elect Joe Biden for prudence: “Both countries should return to a path that restores mutual trust and benefits both,” China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said a week ago Monday. These are very different tones from the “wolf warrior diplomacy” of recent months, along the lines of: We won’t put up with anything now. Just three weeks ago, Chinese think tank South China Sea Probing Initiative (SCSPI) had poured oil on the fire, claiming to Newsweek that “the risk of conflict is growing.” Dangerous encounters between the two sides in the South China Sea were increasing, it said. And earlier this week, anger flared once again in the English-language edition of the party’s Global Times when Twitter deleted a comment on Xinjiang from the Chinese embassy in Washington. In view of the announced visit to Taiwan by the US ambassador to the UN, Beijing also said on Monday that Taiwan was “an inseparable part of Chinese territory” and that China reserved the right to “retaliate” in the event of further provocations.
But that is now rather an exception. Moderating voices now dominate the picture. Voices like those of Xu Xiaonian, the chief economist of CICC, one of China’s largest investment banks. In a text published in English in the business magazine Caixin last Sunday, he clearly warned the nationalists in the party not to overstate the case.
Despite China’s comparatively great economic success last year, he said Beijing should “not underestimate the consequences of the US policy of cutting China off from American technology. ” In this post-industrial era, it is “no longer enough for China to rely on the so-called troika of consumption, external demand and investment.” To those in Chinese politics who are already hoping that China can now limit itself to domestic consumption and trade with Asia, he speaks to their conscience. Thinking that way “could do profound damage to our economy.” A large part of China’s economy is still based on foreign technologies, “which cannot be replaced in a day with only large investments.
At the same time, Xu warned against too high expectations of a course correction by the new president Joe Biden. He considers it “wishful thinking” that Biden will pursue a “less hostile policy” towards China. American policy must be guided by public opinion, he said, and public opinion is not friendly toward China. “Until that changes, it’s difficult for the Biden administration to change course”.
That’s why hardly anyone in Beijing is surprised that Biden has already declared that he wants to keep the tariffs in place for the time being. For a good reason: The US trade deficit with China is still huge despite Trump’s tariff war.
On the other hand, in the Covid crisis, American companies need the Chinese market more than ever, and American citizens need cheap “made in China” products more than ever, the Trumpists object. The Global Times is already arguing that Trump only lost the election because he cut off farmers and factory workers in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania from global trade with his trade war.
What the commentators seem to forget: Covid’s economic impact has played a much bigger role.
Still, there’s no denying that some 23 million Americans were already on unemployment benefits at the beginning of October – up from just 1.4 million during the same period a year earlier. “Biden needs to help these people and that can only be done with China, not against it,” says a senior Chinese diplomat. This is where Beijing’s negotiations come in. The main question at the moment is how to help Biden solve his domestic problem and where he might be willing to give in to China because of it.
When Joe Biden takes the oath of office before the Washington Capitol on Jan. 20, one Brussels institution, in particular, will take a deep breath: described as “obsolete” by Biden’s predecessor, NATO hopes for a relaxation of tensions in the transatlantic alliance.
For NATO it is important that according to Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, there is now once again a “strong supporter of transatlantic relations” in the White House. The alliance is fighting for international recognition – and for a common strategy vis-à-vis China, which in the long term could overtake Russia as its biggest military opponent.
In order to counter Beijing with one voice, the establishment of a separate advisory body with a China focus is now being considered. However, NATO sources told China.Table that it is not yet possible to predict when this body could begin its work.
Former US diplomat A. Wess Mitchell stresses that the rise of China will bring about the “biggest and most drastic change in Nato strategy” and that Nato must reckon with this rise. The foreign policy expert co-chairs the so-called Nato Reflection Group with former German interior and defense minister Thomas de Maizière, which aims to make the alliance fit for the coming decade.
“NATO must devote much more time, political resources, and action to the security challenges
posed by China,” the panel concluded in its November 2020 report, in which China was given its own chapter. NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg noted: “It’s not a matter of bringing NATO into the South China Sea, but of taking into account that China is getting closer to us.”
Through the Silk Road projects, China has acquired infrastructure across Europe, which could affect communications and information sharing among member states, the defense alliance warned. There are also concerns about the close relationship between China and Russia and their joint naval exercises in the Euro-Atlantic area.
The first major meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with representatives of the Biden administration will be the meeting of defense ministers in early February. The main item on the agenda will be NATO’s mission in Afghanistan – an important operation in China’s neighborhood.
“Meanwhile, the relatively new bilateral transatlantic China dialogue between the EU Commission and the US State Department, which was only introduced last year, is on standby. There is no date yet for a first meeting of this format between EU Foreign Affairs Commissioner Josep Borrell and US Secretary of State-designate Antony Blinken, the Commission said in response to a question from China.Table.
Borrell last spoke with Mike Pompeo at the end of October. They welcomed the dialogue format as a “special forum for EU and US experts to discuss the full range of issues related to China,” a joint statement said at the time. According to the statement, the bilateral talks will focus on topics such as human rights, security and multilateralism.
The next meeting will now wait for the Biden administration to take office, a Commission spokesman said. According to the Brussels-based authority, the dialogue format is supposed to become a “key mechanism” for joint positioning vis-à-vis Beijing. Close cooperation with the White House to align strategic goals and support democratic progress in Asia will be essential, the EU Commission stressed in December.
It is questionable which approach the EU and the US will take. Critics have recently described the CAI as a magical welcome gift for the Biden administration and a major concession to China, but this view is far too simplistic, according to EU-Asia analyst and Brussels insider Shada Islam. “The EU is not the junior partner of the US,” she tells China.Table, adding that anyone who thinks that way is underestimating the EU. Washington must realize that the world has also changed geopolitically, Islam says. “We need a strong and democratic US, but there are other partners who are just as committed.” The agreement is also a kind of reality check for the new administration in Washington, she says. Felix Lee/Amelie Richter/Frank Sieren
For decades, Jack Ma was always a few steps ahead of the Chinese state. His vision, entrepreneurial spirit and determination set the standard for internet commerce in the world and digital payments. With his online empire, Alibaba, Jack Ma eclipsed the achievements of Chinese technocrats. His success culminated in the largest new issue in history in 2014, when his digital trading platform raised $25 billion on the New York Stock Exchange, another $3 billion more than Agricultural Bank of China, a state-owned enterprise, had raised four years earlier.
It was something like the Chinese translation of the American Dream that Jack Ma realized in the nominally communist People’s Republic of China of all places: From a gaunt freak who lived on instant noodles to an Internet rock star who had an entire generation at his feet and who proved that it was possible to leave your mark on the country without the party behind you. The entrepreneur increasingly turned his triumph into political influence. Around the 2016 G20 summit in Hangzhou, Ma even hosted various heads of state at his company headquarters to brainstorm about a global trading system for the digital economy. Small and medium-sized enterprises around the world should benefit from this.
Some China insiders believe Jack Ma’s confident appearance back then plays an important role in helping them better understand the events of the past few months. The 56-year-old has been out of the public eye since late October. Days earlier, he had accused financial regulators of using a pawnshop mentality to hinder innovation by private companies in China. He wasn’t even the first to say so. Senior Chinese politicians had done the same before him.
But as a self-confessed critic of a political system in which the players live on favors and support each other through mutual dependencies, Ma had probably overstepped the mark. Party leader Xi Jinping apparently broke the baton personally over Ma, whose independent activities he had suspiciously followed closely for years as an official in Zhejiang, where Alibaba’s headquarters are based. Xi put a short-term stop to the planned record IPO of Ant Group ($37 billion), Alibaba’s financial arm. Ant’s management had to answer to the authorities, and the company is under investigation for monopoly allegations. All this despite the fact that Jack Ma had already resigned from all official positions of the group in the fall of 2019.
But where is Jack Ma? The government recently announced via Beijing’s propaganda paper, the People’s Daily, that the disgraced man is under surveillance at an unnamed location and is not allowed to leave the country. In a dictatorship like China’s, this is not good news for those affected. Teng Biao, a Chinese dissident and lawyer who has lived in American exile for several years, has also been held against his will by Chinese security agencies in the past. “Prominent people of the rank of Jack Ma are certainly given concessions when they are barred from making any public appearances. They are treated better than ordinary citizens. Still, it’s becoming clear that really anyone can get caught in China,” Teng says.
China’s penal code contains an article abbreviated in English to RSDL, “Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location.” The article legalizes the domestic surveillance of criminals or those the state so designates. However, it is not yet clear whether Jack Ma will be monitored using the RSDL article.
“On the surface, the Alibaba case is about a lack of regulation of internet companies, but in reality, the state wants to demonstrate its power to remind Chinese entrepreneurs who they have to submit to,” says Teng.
Meanwhile, a Hangzhou-based Alibaba Group employee told China.Table Ma’s disappearance was not a big issue in China, but rather caused a stir abroad: “Jack Ma doesn’t even work for Alibaba anymore,” she said. Alibaba did not respond to an official inquiry.
Still, the news of “oversight” for the company’s founder is unlikely to miss its mark and will be a lasting reminder to all ambitious company owners should they consider criticizing the state and its institutions. Not coincidentally, state media stressed after Ma’s last public appearance that there was no Jack Ma era in China. No entrepreneur in the country would be able to build a billion-dollar business without the proper framework provided by state policies. The usually celebrated Ma also experienced savage abuse online. It is unclear whether this was part of a state campaign against the 56-year-old to denigrate him.
With its show of force, the Communist Party is consolidating its monopoly position in the short term. In the long term, it is taking a risk with such drastic actions against business leaders and important companies, because it could scare off entrepreneurs, their experience and their innovative strength. With looming consequences in sight, the willingness of private companies to critically engage with state policy will diminish. Those who want to play it safe prefer to remain silent instead of pointing out undesirable developments.
Chinese network equipment supplier Huawei accuses Sweden of breaching the investment agreement between Sweden and China by excluding the company from the Nordic country’s 5G network, according to a report by local media and trade portal Investment Arbitration Reporter (IAR). Sweden decided in October 2020 to exclude Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE from the rollout of its 5G network.
In a letter to Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Loefven, Huawei complains that the exclusion has severely affected the business prospects of its Swedish subsidiary. The principle of “fair and equitable treatment” of international investors in the Swedish-Chinese investment agreement has been violated, he says. Huawei calls on the Swedish government to negotiate. According to Investment Arbitration Reporter, Huawei keeps its options open for further steps under the investment agreement if the negotiations are not successful. After a three-month period, Huawei could take the dispute to either the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) or an “ad hoc tribunal” under the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules).
According to IAR, a Huawei spokesperson said the letter was more of a “cry for help” than a threat of arbitration. After international investors file lawsuits in investor-state arbitration, states often have to pay hundreds of millions of euros in “damages” to the affected investor. Huawei had already written a similar letter to the Czech Republic at the beginning of 2019, threatening to take the country to an investment court. At the time, Huawei complained that a report by the Czech Cyber and Information Security Agency (NUKIB) portrayed the company as a security risk and damaged its investments in the Czech Republic and other countries. According to IAR, it is not known whether Huawei has filed a lawsuit, as there is no requirement for transparency in investment court disputes. However, a spokesperson for Huawei Germany said no formal legal action had been taken on an investment lawsuit against the Czech Republic. nib
Kudos to the European Commission for finalizing a new investment agreement with China. Europe’s active diplomacy also played a role in China’s recent commitment to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 – a decision that was quickly followed by Japan’s pledge to decarbonize by 2050. Now it has yielded yet another major success.
The new EU-China investment agreement will benefit Europe, China, the world, and even the United States, despite the latter’s warnings against it. In general terms, the agreement signifies the intention of the EU and China to continue to deepen economic relations, by granting each party more assured access for investments in the other’s economy. European industry will gain better access to China’s enormous domestic market just as China embarks on a decade of green and digital economic restructuring, and at a time when Europe is striving to stay at the technological forefront in these areas.
The agreement comes in the face of deeply misguided – indeed, dangerous – attempts by US President Donald Trump’s administration not only to cut economic ties with China in high-tech industries, but also to contain China’s growth by forging a US-led alliance that Trump hoped would be backed by the EU and Asia-Pacific countries, including Australia, India, Japan, and South Korea. It appears that the incoming Biden administration may well lean in the same direction, though certainly with more finesse and less bombast than Trump.
The ostensible aim of US policy is to constrain China’s belligerence and human-rights violations, or so the US says. But it is worth noting that the policy is favored by a bipartisan US foreign-policy establishment that maintains some 800 overseas military bases, and that has repeatedly launched illegal wars, imposed illegal unilateral sanctions, and otherwise refused to abide by the United Nations Charter, treaties, and Security Council decisions. It’s certainly hard to argue that China is the belligerent party here.
China, no doubt, should improve its human-rights record – particularly to address the issues raised by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights regarding the situation in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. But let’s be clear: the US, Europe, India, and many Western nations should make similar improvements. Over the past 20 years, in particular, Muslim populations in the Middle East and South and Central Asia have repeatedly suffered from brutal wars waged by Western powers, domestic crackdowns, unilateral US sanctions, and other abuses.
The fact is that few countries properly abide by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and the US, to its great shame, still has not even ratified the UN Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, while China and the EU’s 27 member states did so long ago. The correct response to genuine human-rights concerns is to raise them in a serious and constructive manner, without hypocritical finger-pointing, exaggeration, or disruptions to dialogue, diplomacy, and economic relations. Let the country without sin cast the first stone.
But America’s real intention in opposing China has nothing to do with human rights. Particularly under Trump’s lawless administration, US policies have been motivated by a hunger for dominance, plain and simple. The US is trying to stop China’s technological and economic rise in order to preserve its own predominance. The world economic system, however, cannot and should not operate for the benefit of US hegemony, especially considering that the US accounts for a mere 4 percent of the global population.
Following the tragedies of 2020, the world needs renewed global cooperation, not a new US-stoked cold war. It is time to get the pandemic under control and to chart a new course toward recovery and sustainable development. China can and should be involved as a full partner in tackling these challenges.
After all, China, unlike the US and Europe, successfully suppressed its COVID-19 epidemic in 2020 (as did most of its neighbors in the Asia-Pacific region). Now, China and its neighbors should help the rest of the world to implement the non-pharmaceutical interventions (testing, contact tracing, and quarantining) that have succeeded where US and European policies have failed. And provided that the new Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines are proven safe and effective with peer-reviewed data, China should start mass-producing and distributing these vaccines worldwide.
The EU, China, and US President-elect Joe Biden’s administration should also join forces to map out a green and digital global recovery. With leading emitters now pursuing carbon neutrality, and with Biden planning to return the US to the Paris climate agreement and to commit the US to decarbonization by 2050, we have the makings for a truly green broad-based recovery.
Moreover, development and deployment of new green technologies – renewable energy, electric vehicles (EV), and battery storage – will benefit immensely from global cooperation. For example, just this week, China’s Yahua Group, a major producer of lithium hydroxide, signed up to supply five years’ worth of inputs for battery production at Tesla, a US-based EV manufacturer.
Similar opportunities are available with digital technologies. In a world where digital access is crucial for economic participation, 5G-based technologies promise pathbreaking solutions to a host of challenges, from improving energy efficiency to scaling up e-commerce and e-health. Fortunately, the EU-China investment treaty will help drive digital cooperation, which could give a huge boost to sustainable development.
Still, it will be important for Europe to continue resisting US pressure against China. Trump’s main weapon against China has been to cut off the export of advanced technologies with the hope of bringing Huawei and other major Chinese tech firms to their knees. This move comes straight out of the US hegemony playbook, and was applied against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Trump’s administration justifies its approach vis-à-vis Huawei on the grounds that China might spy on others using Huawei’s 5G equipment. A more plausible reason is that Huawei equipment would make it more difficult for the US government to spy on others, including US citizens. An even more likely reason is that the US naively thinks it can maintain technological superiority indefinitely by cutting off advanced inputs to China. Yet China will probably be able to close the remaining technology gaps in advanced semiconductor production quickly.
Europe is right to engage actively, deeply, and constructively with China, while also attending to its abiding and admirable concerns about human rights around the world. Biden’s administration should resist the hegemonic impulse and instead restart constructive relations with China.
For now, the new EU-China investment agreement is a good way to end a dismal year. The EU is asserting its appropriate foreign-policy prerogatives independent of the US. But more challenges await us in 2021, when the world urgently needs to change course to end the pandemic and move onto a path toward sustainable development.
Jeffrey D. Sachs, University Professor at Columbia University, is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2020.
www.project-syndicate.org
More than 50 opposition activists have been arrested in Hong Kong, including Benny Tai. The 56-year-old former law professor is one of Hong Kong’s best-known democracy campaigners. Hundreds of police poured out last Monday in a coordinated effort to arrest 52 members of the democracy movement in the largest wave of arrests since the National Security Law was introduced. The security authorities were particularly targeting Tai, who they interpreted as the mastermind of an operation that allegedly threatened national security.
Tai and his fellow campaigners had organized unofficial primaries in the summer for the parliamentary elections that were due to be held at the time but were later postponed because of the Covid pandemic. Their goal was to find candidates who enjoyed the greatest possible support among the population.
Around 600,000 Hong Kong citizens took part in the primary elections. The Democrats wanted to appear in the Hong Kong parliament with a strong parliamentary group. Since this would have allowed them to systematically block important government decisions, both this idea and the primaries themselves initially met with sharp criticism from the government and were ultimately classified as a “malicious subversion plan”.
All 52 activists were released on bail after a night in custody. But for many of them, this will have been just the prelude to more trouble with Hong Kong law enforcement. The option of leaving Hong Kong has also been off the table since the arrest for Tai, a professing Christian who cites civil rights activist Martin Luther King as a role model, as the authorities confiscated his passport.
Local media estimates that more than 350 activists have sought asylum abroad for fear of persecution since 2018. Others, like the equally prominent activist Joshua Wong, have stayed and been sentenced to prison for relatively minor offenses. Whether Tai will also meet this fate is still unclear, but there is no question that he is in acute danger after the events of the past few days.
The constitutional lawyer has spent most of his career as an academic at Hong Kong University, where he has taught since 1990. However, probably due to pressure from Beijing, he lost his tenure as a law professor last year.
The extent to which Tai, who has dedicated his life to law and was one of the founders of the pro-democratic Hong Kong Umbrella Movement six years ago, is burdened by the developments in his hometown became clear when he was released after spending the night in jail. In a flurry of camera flashes from photographers, he gave only a terse statement: “Hong Kong,” Tai said with a bleak expression, “has entered a cold winter. There is an icy wind blowing.” Gregor Koppenburg/Joern Petring
