China installed over 350 gigawatts of new solar and wind capacity last year, once again breaking all records. The country is actually on the right track when it comes to climate action.
But what will become of the coal producers? To give them a second mainstay, the central government and provinces are promoting the use of coal as a raw material and energy source in the chemical industry. And so the state is counteracting its own successes. With the rapidly growing demand for coal, the chemical sector is now jeopardizing the country’s climate targets – Nico Beckert describes the connections in his Feature.
“Let’s go to the movies” – do you remember the campaign of the 70s? Back then, television was competing with cinemas, attendance figures fell sharply and some cinemas had to close. In today’s China, it is not television that is competing with cinemas, but streaming services that are causing attendance figures to fall. China’s box office is in crisis, but the Spring Festival now promises record sales. Fabian Peltsch takes a look at China’s film industry for you.
While we’re on the subject of culture, let us point out that Berlin has a real gem for China lovers and culture enthusiasts: Katja Hellkötter’s C*Space. For example, teahouse pop-ups are regularly organized there. Angela Köckritz introduces the business sinologist, who continues to focus on cultural exchange in times of de-risking and the like.
I wish you an exciting read.
Just a few years ago, China’s film industry was considered so important that Hollywood used Chinese actors in almost every new blockbuster. The US studios did not shy away from self-censorship in order to avoid risking losses on the Chinese market. At times, the Chinese market accounted for up to 30 percent of the global revenues of Hollywood blockbusters. This is despite the fact that only around 34 major foreign productions are allowed to be shown in China each year, which in turn are screened for “cultural and political compatibility”.
In 2019, China’s cinema revenues reached a record high of over 64 billion yuan, around EUR 8.4 billion. In 2020, the box office takings of the Chinese cinema market surpassed those of North America for the first time – a milestone that was celebrated not only in the state media as a triumph and the potential end of US soft power hegemony. The basic tenor: China no longer needs foreign countries, but sets the standards itself. Its own productions are at least as good, if not better, and they naturally appeal more to domestic moviegoers.
This euphoria has been severely dampened by 2024 at the latest. Last year’s box office results show that although China’s film industry is not in free fall, it has lost a lot of traction. Last year, cinema sales fell by almost 23% to 42.5 billion RMB (around EUR 5.6 billion). In the previous year, the figure was still around 55 billion RMB, according to figures from the China Film Administration. According to Comscore, revenues in North America only fell by three percent to USD 8.7 billion compared to the previous year. At Christmas, a popular time to watch films in China, cinemas were less crowded than they had been for at least 13 years. Some cinemas are already operating at a loss.
What has happened? For one thing, people are saving more in view of the weakening economy. A movie ticket costs the equivalent of between five and 15 euros. For young people, many of whom are already affected by unemployment or stagnating wages, this is particularly significant. At the same time, viewing habits have changed during the pandemic. Streaming series have become increasingly popular and of higher quality. In the face of competition from various providers such as Kuaishou, Douyin, iQiyi, and BiliBili, they are becoming cheaper and cheaper. Most recently, micro-dramas 微短剧 have recalibrated the attention span for film products among many Chinese. The often soap opera-like online series, whose episodes are on average two minutes long, can be consumed on the smartphone on the side. And they are no longer just the audiovisual equivalent of dime novels: Even established star directors such as Stephen Chow (“Kung Fu Hustle”) have delivered their own micro-drama productions.
Once passionate moviegoers who can follow a plot for more than 10 minutes at a time complain that the quality of feature-length films has declined. The most successful film in 2024 was “YOLO” (Chinese: 热辣滚烫), the story of a depressed woman who finds her way back into (love) life through hard boxing training. The film was shot by comedy director Jia Ling, who also played the lead role. The fact that she went through a strict fitness program during filming and lost 50 kilograms in the process was almost a bigger topic than the film itself, which in turn was an adaptation of a Japanese production from 2014. Apart from that, there was little that was spectacular and definitely not to be missed.
For the Spring Festival, the most important movie season of the year, which begins on Jan. 28, the industry is now beating the advertising drum more than ever. The Chinese Film Administration has launched a campaign that will grant ticket discounts worth the equivalent of almost EUR 80 million until the end of February. Several ticket and e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and JD.com have also launched campaigns to boost the sale of movie tickets. For example, the online ticket platform “Tao Piao Piao”, which belongs to Taobao, is offering discounts of between 15 and 60 yuan per ticket.
One of the most important hopes for ushering in the Year of the Snake with profits is the film “Ne Zha 2“. It is the sequel to a fantasy blockbuster loosely based on the myth of the eponymous Chinese tutelary deity and was the most successful Chinese animated film when it was released in 2019. Tsui Hark’s film adaptation of the wuxia classic “The Legend of the Condor Heroes” also ranks high among the potential Spring Festival box office hits, followed by the latest installment in the “Detective Chinatown” series, which travels to San Francisco in 1900 for a prequel. This shows a phenomenon that has been ailing the Western cinema market for some time: Franchises, remakes, and an endless milking of sequels and prequels. People play it safe, and this rarely triggers storms of enthusiasm among moviegoers.
So far, things are looking good. According to a report in the state-run Global Times, advance sales exceeded the 100 million yuan mark last Sunday afternoon, making it the fastest advance sale in the history of Chinese cinema, according to CCTV News. It’s clear that the already rare soft-power gain that Chinese cinema represents is something that no one wants to lose.
Over the past year, China has installed over 350 gigawatts of new solar and wind capacity, once again breaking all records. But while the energy sector is making progress, China’s chemical industry jeopardizes the country’s climate targets. The sector’s coal consumption has risen rapidly in recent years.
The government is promoting the use of coal as a raw material and energy source in the chemical industry to provide coal producers with a second mainstay, secure the country’s energy security and become less dependent on oil and gas imports. The sector’s emissions could thus continue to rise beyond 2030 – although China aims to have reached peak emissions by then. The coal-based chemical industry “poses a significant environmental challenge, as emission intensities are considerably higher than in natural gas-based production,” writes the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Due to the rapidly rising coal consumption, China’s chemical industry has become one of the main drivers of the country’s CO2 emissions:
The central government and the provinces have been actively promoting the use of coal in the chemical industry. China’s central government has designated the coal-based chemical industry as a strategic sector: The industry is one of the “new productive forces” introduced by President Xi Jinping in 2023 and is expected to help modernize China’s economy. Although the sector is not one of the high-tech industries, it is “too important to sacrifice,” China expert Cory Combs from the consulting agency Trivium China told Table.Briefings. As a “new productive force,” the industrial sector will receive “strong policy support,” especially to boost demand, according to Combs. “The industry’s short-term growth prospects are positive.”
Since its designation as a “new productive force,” several directives have been issued to promote the “clean and efficient use of coal” and “accelerate the development of strategic industrial clusters for the production of oil and gas from coal.”
China aims to achieve several goals by increasing the use of coal in the chemical industry:
China explicitly excludes the sector from certain climate targets: Coal emissions not used for electricity production but as a raw material for chemical processes are not included in China’s emission targets for reducing CO2 emissions and the CO2 intensity of growth. Analysts say this exception “aims to protect China’s chemical industry from the pressure of decarbonization.”
China’s coal provinces and coal industry consider the chemical industry an ideal supplementary customer alongside coal-fired power plants, which are expected to consume less coal in the medium term. Encouraged by the central government’s subsidies, the provinces and coal producers have invested tens of billions of euros in the chemical industry. According to analysts, 75 coal-based chemical projects are currently under construction or development in 15 of China’s 27 provinces and autonomous regions. Coal consumption in the chemical industry could therefore more than triple to over one billion tons.
However, this development is not guaranteed. The massive expansion of the coal-based chemical industry could also create overcapacity. In 2023, profits in the industrial sector already declined by 40 to 50 percent due to falling demand. Nevertheless, observers assume that the sector’s emissions will continue to rise in the medium term.
Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer Nio has put together a team of around 20 people to investigate the feasibility of developing its own four-legged robots. The project is being led by Xu Kang, an algorithm expert who joined Nio from Chinese autonomy start-up Momenta in 2020. This was reported by the online magazine Technode, citing the newspaper 21st Century Business Herald.
With this step, the company, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, is joining the group of Chinese car manufacturers that are targeting the growing market for AI-controlled robots. Companies such as BYD, Chery, and GAC are already active in this field, as is Tesla. BYD recently launched a recruitment campaign for its “embodied intelligence” research team, having already invested in Shanghai-based software and robotics startup Agibot last year.
Chinese technology companies are also increasingly entering the sector. Huawei opened a research center for “embodied intelligence” in Shenzhen in November last year. Xiaomi presented a prototype of its humanoid robot as early as 2022. In addition, some car manufacturers such as Audi and the Zeekr brand, which belongs to Geely, are testing robots developed jointly with Ubtech, which is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. fpe
In the middle of Berlin-Weißensee, in a side street with the beautiful name Langhansstraße, there is a magical place. You enter through a gate into a wide courtyard, at the end of which stands an old factory building with yellow bricks and red-edged windows. Climbing up to the second floor, you enter a spacious room reminiscent of a teahouse. The bookcases contain books on and from China, while the kitchen is stocked with the finest tea, also from China and Taiwan. You climb to the third floor and find yourself in a room that is covered from top to bottom on all four walls with Chinese calligraphy, quotes from the Book of a Thousand Characters – the most famous model of Chinese writing. Here, for a brief moment, you may feel as if you have woken up in the middle of a book like Alice in Wonderland.
This is C*Space, a creative space for culture, community, and co-working. At readings, discussion events, and tea house pop-ups, the Chinese-speaking creative community meets culture enthusiasts from Berlin and the rest of the world. Artists, film people, urban planners, dancers, writers, and people interested in culture in general. Right in the middle of the chatting, laughing, drinking hustle and bustle is host Katja Hellkötter, 53, her husband Jan, 57, and occasionally their 15-year-old daughter Lynn.
At a time when countless exchange programs have been discontinued, when long-standing German-Chinese networks are drying up, when discussions about German-Chinese relations are increasingly dominated by vocabulary such as “geopolitics” and “de-risking”, Katja Hellkötter “simply continues stoically with cultural exchange”.
Looking back with her on her work over the past decades, it suddenly becomes painfully clear how much the Germans and Chinese have lost since Xi Jinping initiated an ideological change of course. No document illustrates this better than a document called Document Number Nine from 2013, which speaks of an “intense” ideological battle with the West. It speaks of the dangers posed by ideas such as universal values and the separation of powers, of the specter of civil society being infiltrated by forces that seek to divide the unity of the people and the party.
Xi increasingly sealed off his country. Relations deteriorated, which not only resulted in falling sales for German companies and geopolitical uncertainty, but tragically much more: Two societies that had, on the whole, met with so much curiosity increasingly lost contact with each other. Katja Hellkötter’s life is a good example of the arc of this adventurous transformation.
When Katja Hellkötter was born in Essen in 1972, Mao Zedong was still alive, China was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution and, with the exception of a few Maoist students, hardly any Germans had traveled to the People’s Republic. When she began studying economics and Chinese language in Bremen in 1992, “because I was curious about the culture,” the Chinese government was just trying to work its way out of the international ostracism following the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen protests in 1989. In 1994, Hellkötter boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway and rattled towards China, where she began her studies abroad in Chengdu. She fell in love with the city’s teahouses, places where you can spend hours daydreaming, people-watching, talking, telling stories, and idling. She then went to Hohhot in Inner Mongolia for six months, where she did an internship in the renewable energy sector. After that, she worked for a while at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation office in Beijing.
Relations between the two countries were already intensifying when Hellkötter was hired in Shanghai in 1999 as an environmental project manager in the Delegate Office of German Business. From 2001 onwards, she headed the Hamburg liaison office in Shanghai and oversaw the flourishing city partnership between Hamburg and Shanghai. A dream job. “I was at the interface between politics, business, and culture, connecting very different people. It was about foreign trade relations, academic and cultural exchange, politics, and the future of the cities,” she recalls.
Those were the golden years of intercultural dialog. Years in which almost everyone seemed to be drawn to China. Professors, entrepreneurs, think tanks, publishers, architects, designers, lawyers, musicians, advertising experts, exchange students. In 2008, Hellkötter and a French business partner founded Constellations, a creative agency for Chinese-European cooperation developments.
“Back then, the exchange programs went through the roof. The variety of formats between Germany and China – especially in the areas of society and culture – was unique in Europe. It was an incredibly dense network.” One of their flagship programs at the time of the Shanghai Expo 2010 was the so-called Shanghai Flaneur. “We turned the city into a conference room and organized interactive seminars there. We called it a walking think tank,” says Hellkötter. “That went down very well.”
It felt like it could go on forever – even in the first years of Xi Jinping’s reign. “In fact, it was the beginning of the end of the reform and opening-up policy,” says Hellkötter. In 2016, China passed the so-called NGO law, which was intended to restrict the work of international non-governmental organizations. At the time, there were 7,000 foreign NGOs in China, including around 200 German ones. One organization after another withdrew from China. “That was extremely sobering,” says Hellkötter.
The dream was shattered. “On a personal level, however, my dialog with China is not over.” Hellkötter and her family had already moved to Berlin shortly beforehand. After all those years in China, they were longing for Europe, and their daughter Lynn was about to start school. Berlin seemed like a good place to continue the exchange with Asia. “There is a city partnership between Berlin and Beijing and there were already the first networks of Chinese people in Berlin at the beginning of the last century: the Chinese students at the Technical University, the restaurateurs in Kantstraße, the workers in Friedrichshain.” Hellkötter dreamed of a loft, a factory floor as a cultural venue. She found an old furniture factory from 1895 in Weißensee’s Gründerviertel, just a short bike ride from the Weißensee lido.
Here she created C*Space, a non-profit company specializing in further education and cultural exchange programs. C*Space rents out rooms to foundations, companies, and organizations and offers them suitable event concepts. And it provides a home for the ever-growing community of tea connoisseurs. Networking, curating, creating community, bringing together. Asia and Europe. Culture and business. Politics and education. “We are a workspace. A cultural space. A learning space. A place for personal and professional exchange.”
“Keep an open mind” is Katja Hellkötter’s motto. She kept it that way during the pandemic. That was also when the calligraphy room on the third floor was created. In 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, the two Chinese artists Qian Geng and Wang Ziheng, who work under the artist name The 8 Immortals, had actually only wanted to stop by for a few days. But then their flights home were canceled and they stayed for two months. During this time, they created the Gesamtkunstwerk, whose name is also emblematic of Hellkötter’s work. After all, what closes can also open up again at some point. The artwork is called “Common Space – Everything Flows. 一切皆流”. Angela Köckritz
Only one week to go until the Year of the Snake begins! With 元宵节, the Lantern Festival, the spring festival ends after 15 days. The lanterns symbolize the hope for a good start to the new year. In Hai’an, Jiangsu, production is therefore in full swing: here, a worker sets up red lanterns to dry.
China installed over 350 gigawatts of new solar and wind capacity last year, once again breaking all records. The country is actually on the right track when it comes to climate action.
But what will become of the coal producers? To give them a second mainstay, the central government and provinces are promoting the use of coal as a raw material and energy source in the chemical industry. And so the state is counteracting its own successes. With the rapidly growing demand for coal, the chemical sector is now jeopardizing the country’s climate targets – Nico Beckert describes the connections in his Feature.
“Let’s go to the movies” – do you remember the campaign of the 70s? Back then, television was competing with cinemas, attendance figures fell sharply and some cinemas had to close. In today’s China, it is not television that is competing with cinemas, but streaming services that are causing attendance figures to fall. China’s box office is in crisis, but the Spring Festival now promises record sales. Fabian Peltsch takes a look at China’s film industry for you.
While we’re on the subject of culture, let us point out that Berlin has a real gem for China lovers and culture enthusiasts: Katja Hellkötter’s C*Space. For example, teahouse pop-ups are regularly organized there. Angela Köckritz introduces the business sinologist, who continues to focus on cultural exchange in times of de-risking and the like.
I wish you an exciting read.
Just a few years ago, China’s film industry was considered so important that Hollywood used Chinese actors in almost every new blockbuster. The US studios did not shy away from self-censorship in order to avoid risking losses on the Chinese market. At times, the Chinese market accounted for up to 30 percent of the global revenues of Hollywood blockbusters. This is despite the fact that only around 34 major foreign productions are allowed to be shown in China each year, which in turn are screened for “cultural and political compatibility”.
In 2019, China’s cinema revenues reached a record high of over 64 billion yuan, around EUR 8.4 billion. In 2020, the box office takings of the Chinese cinema market surpassed those of North America for the first time – a milestone that was celebrated not only in the state media as a triumph and the potential end of US soft power hegemony. The basic tenor: China no longer needs foreign countries, but sets the standards itself. Its own productions are at least as good, if not better, and they naturally appeal more to domestic moviegoers.
This euphoria has been severely dampened by 2024 at the latest. Last year’s box office results show that although China’s film industry is not in free fall, it has lost a lot of traction. Last year, cinema sales fell by almost 23% to 42.5 billion RMB (around EUR 5.6 billion). In the previous year, the figure was still around 55 billion RMB, according to figures from the China Film Administration. According to Comscore, revenues in North America only fell by three percent to USD 8.7 billion compared to the previous year. At Christmas, a popular time to watch films in China, cinemas were less crowded than they had been for at least 13 years. Some cinemas are already operating at a loss.
What has happened? For one thing, people are saving more in view of the weakening economy. A movie ticket costs the equivalent of between five and 15 euros. For young people, many of whom are already affected by unemployment or stagnating wages, this is particularly significant. At the same time, viewing habits have changed during the pandemic. Streaming series have become increasingly popular and of higher quality. In the face of competition from various providers such as Kuaishou, Douyin, iQiyi, and BiliBili, they are becoming cheaper and cheaper. Most recently, micro-dramas 微短剧 have recalibrated the attention span for film products among many Chinese. The often soap opera-like online series, whose episodes are on average two minutes long, can be consumed on the smartphone on the side. And they are no longer just the audiovisual equivalent of dime novels: Even established star directors such as Stephen Chow (“Kung Fu Hustle”) have delivered their own micro-drama productions.
Once passionate moviegoers who can follow a plot for more than 10 minutes at a time complain that the quality of feature-length films has declined. The most successful film in 2024 was “YOLO” (Chinese: 热辣滚烫), the story of a depressed woman who finds her way back into (love) life through hard boxing training. The film was shot by comedy director Jia Ling, who also played the lead role. The fact that she went through a strict fitness program during filming and lost 50 kilograms in the process was almost a bigger topic than the film itself, which in turn was an adaptation of a Japanese production from 2014. Apart from that, there was little that was spectacular and definitely not to be missed.
For the Spring Festival, the most important movie season of the year, which begins on Jan. 28, the industry is now beating the advertising drum more than ever. The Chinese Film Administration has launched a campaign that will grant ticket discounts worth the equivalent of almost EUR 80 million until the end of February. Several ticket and e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and JD.com have also launched campaigns to boost the sale of movie tickets. For example, the online ticket platform “Tao Piao Piao”, which belongs to Taobao, is offering discounts of between 15 and 60 yuan per ticket.
One of the most important hopes for ushering in the Year of the Snake with profits is the film “Ne Zha 2“. It is the sequel to a fantasy blockbuster loosely based on the myth of the eponymous Chinese tutelary deity and was the most successful Chinese animated film when it was released in 2019. Tsui Hark’s film adaptation of the wuxia classic “The Legend of the Condor Heroes” also ranks high among the potential Spring Festival box office hits, followed by the latest installment in the “Detective Chinatown” series, which travels to San Francisco in 1900 for a prequel. This shows a phenomenon that has been ailing the Western cinema market for some time: Franchises, remakes, and an endless milking of sequels and prequels. People play it safe, and this rarely triggers storms of enthusiasm among moviegoers.
So far, things are looking good. According to a report in the state-run Global Times, advance sales exceeded the 100 million yuan mark last Sunday afternoon, making it the fastest advance sale in the history of Chinese cinema, according to CCTV News. It’s clear that the already rare soft-power gain that Chinese cinema represents is something that no one wants to lose.
Over the past year, China has installed over 350 gigawatts of new solar and wind capacity, once again breaking all records. But while the energy sector is making progress, China’s chemical industry jeopardizes the country’s climate targets. The sector’s coal consumption has risen rapidly in recent years.
The government is promoting the use of coal as a raw material and energy source in the chemical industry to provide coal producers with a second mainstay, secure the country’s energy security and become less dependent on oil and gas imports. The sector’s emissions could thus continue to rise beyond 2030 – although China aims to have reached peak emissions by then. The coal-based chemical industry “poses a significant environmental challenge, as emission intensities are considerably higher than in natural gas-based production,” writes the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Due to the rapidly rising coal consumption, China’s chemical industry has become one of the main drivers of the country’s CO2 emissions:
The central government and the provinces have been actively promoting the use of coal in the chemical industry. China’s central government has designated the coal-based chemical industry as a strategic sector: The industry is one of the “new productive forces” introduced by President Xi Jinping in 2023 and is expected to help modernize China’s economy. Although the sector is not one of the high-tech industries, it is “too important to sacrifice,” China expert Cory Combs from the consulting agency Trivium China told Table.Briefings. As a “new productive force,” the industrial sector will receive “strong policy support,” especially to boost demand, according to Combs. “The industry’s short-term growth prospects are positive.”
Since its designation as a “new productive force,” several directives have been issued to promote the “clean and efficient use of coal” and “accelerate the development of strategic industrial clusters for the production of oil and gas from coal.”
China aims to achieve several goals by increasing the use of coal in the chemical industry:
China explicitly excludes the sector from certain climate targets: Coal emissions not used for electricity production but as a raw material for chemical processes are not included in China’s emission targets for reducing CO2 emissions and the CO2 intensity of growth. Analysts say this exception “aims to protect China’s chemical industry from the pressure of decarbonization.”
China’s coal provinces and coal industry consider the chemical industry an ideal supplementary customer alongside coal-fired power plants, which are expected to consume less coal in the medium term. Encouraged by the central government’s subsidies, the provinces and coal producers have invested tens of billions of euros in the chemical industry. According to analysts, 75 coal-based chemical projects are currently under construction or development in 15 of China’s 27 provinces and autonomous regions. Coal consumption in the chemical industry could therefore more than triple to over one billion tons.
However, this development is not guaranteed. The massive expansion of the coal-based chemical industry could also create overcapacity. In 2023, profits in the industrial sector already declined by 40 to 50 percent due to falling demand. Nevertheless, observers assume that the sector’s emissions will continue to rise in the medium term.
Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer Nio has put together a team of around 20 people to investigate the feasibility of developing its own four-legged robots. The project is being led by Xu Kang, an algorithm expert who joined Nio from Chinese autonomy start-up Momenta in 2020. This was reported by the online magazine Technode, citing the newspaper 21st Century Business Herald.
With this step, the company, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, is joining the group of Chinese car manufacturers that are targeting the growing market for AI-controlled robots. Companies such as BYD, Chery, and GAC are already active in this field, as is Tesla. BYD recently launched a recruitment campaign for its “embodied intelligence” research team, having already invested in Shanghai-based software and robotics startup Agibot last year.
Chinese technology companies are also increasingly entering the sector. Huawei opened a research center for “embodied intelligence” in Shenzhen in November last year. Xiaomi presented a prototype of its humanoid robot as early as 2022. In addition, some car manufacturers such as Audi and the Zeekr brand, which belongs to Geely, are testing robots developed jointly with Ubtech, which is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. fpe
In the middle of Berlin-Weißensee, in a side street with the beautiful name Langhansstraße, there is a magical place. You enter through a gate into a wide courtyard, at the end of which stands an old factory building with yellow bricks and red-edged windows. Climbing up to the second floor, you enter a spacious room reminiscent of a teahouse. The bookcases contain books on and from China, while the kitchen is stocked with the finest tea, also from China and Taiwan. You climb to the third floor and find yourself in a room that is covered from top to bottom on all four walls with Chinese calligraphy, quotes from the Book of a Thousand Characters – the most famous model of Chinese writing. Here, for a brief moment, you may feel as if you have woken up in the middle of a book like Alice in Wonderland.
This is C*Space, a creative space for culture, community, and co-working. At readings, discussion events, and tea house pop-ups, the Chinese-speaking creative community meets culture enthusiasts from Berlin and the rest of the world. Artists, film people, urban planners, dancers, writers, and people interested in culture in general. Right in the middle of the chatting, laughing, drinking hustle and bustle is host Katja Hellkötter, 53, her husband Jan, 57, and occasionally their 15-year-old daughter Lynn.
At a time when countless exchange programs have been discontinued, when long-standing German-Chinese networks are drying up, when discussions about German-Chinese relations are increasingly dominated by vocabulary such as “geopolitics” and “de-risking”, Katja Hellkötter “simply continues stoically with cultural exchange”.
Looking back with her on her work over the past decades, it suddenly becomes painfully clear how much the Germans and Chinese have lost since Xi Jinping initiated an ideological change of course. No document illustrates this better than a document called Document Number Nine from 2013, which speaks of an “intense” ideological battle with the West. It speaks of the dangers posed by ideas such as universal values and the separation of powers, of the specter of civil society being infiltrated by forces that seek to divide the unity of the people and the party.
Xi increasingly sealed off his country. Relations deteriorated, which not only resulted in falling sales for German companies and geopolitical uncertainty, but tragically much more: Two societies that had, on the whole, met with so much curiosity increasingly lost contact with each other. Katja Hellkötter’s life is a good example of the arc of this adventurous transformation.
When Katja Hellkötter was born in Essen in 1972, Mao Zedong was still alive, China was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution and, with the exception of a few Maoist students, hardly any Germans had traveled to the People’s Republic. When she began studying economics and Chinese language in Bremen in 1992, “because I was curious about the culture,” the Chinese government was just trying to work its way out of the international ostracism following the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen protests in 1989. In 1994, Hellkötter boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway and rattled towards China, where she began her studies abroad in Chengdu. She fell in love with the city’s teahouses, places where you can spend hours daydreaming, people-watching, talking, telling stories, and idling. She then went to Hohhot in Inner Mongolia for six months, where she did an internship in the renewable energy sector. After that, she worked for a while at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation office in Beijing.
Relations between the two countries were already intensifying when Hellkötter was hired in Shanghai in 1999 as an environmental project manager in the Delegate Office of German Business. From 2001 onwards, she headed the Hamburg liaison office in Shanghai and oversaw the flourishing city partnership between Hamburg and Shanghai. A dream job. “I was at the interface between politics, business, and culture, connecting very different people. It was about foreign trade relations, academic and cultural exchange, politics, and the future of the cities,” she recalls.
Those were the golden years of intercultural dialog. Years in which almost everyone seemed to be drawn to China. Professors, entrepreneurs, think tanks, publishers, architects, designers, lawyers, musicians, advertising experts, exchange students. In 2008, Hellkötter and a French business partner founded Constellations, a creative agency for Chinese-European cooperation developments.
“Back then, the exchange programs went through the roof. The variety of formats between Germany and China – especially in the areas of society and culture – was unique in Europe. It was an incredibly dense network.” One of their flagship programs at the time of the Shanghai Expo 2010 was the so-called Shanghai Flaneur. “We turned the city into a conference room and organized interactive seminars there. We called it a walking think tank,” says Hellkötter. “That went down very well.”
It felt like it could go on forever – even in the first years of Xi Jinping’s reign. “In fact, it was the beginning of the end of the reform and opening-up policy,” says Hellkötter. In 2016, China passed the so-called NGO law, which was intended to restrict the work of international non-governmental organizations. At the time, there were 7,000 foreign NGOs in China, including around 200 German ones. One organization after another withdrew from China. “That was extremely sobering,” says Hellkötter.
The dream was shattered. “On a personal level, however, my dialog with China is not over.” Hellkötter and her family had already moved to Berlin shortly beforehand. After all those years in China, they were longing for Europe, and their daughter Lynn was about to start school. Berlin seemed like a good place to continue the exchange with Asia. “There is a city partnership between Berlin and Beijing and there were already the first networks of Chinese people in Berlin at the beginning of the last century: the Chinese students at the Technical University, the restaurateurs in Kantstraße, the workers in Friedrichshain.” Hellkötter dreamed of a loft, a factory floor as a cultural venue. She found an old furniture factory from 1895 in Weißensee’s Gründerviertel, just a short bike ride from the Weißensee lido.
Here she created C*Space, a non-profit company specializing in further education and cultural exchange programs. C*Space rents out rooms to foundations, companies, and organizations and offers them suitable event concepts. And it provides a home for the ever-growing community of tea connoisseurs. Networking, curating, creating community, bringing together. Asia and Europe. Culture and business. Politics and education. “We are a workspace. A cultural space. A learning space. A place for personal and professional exchange.”
“Keep an open mind” is Katja Hellkötter’s motto. She kept it that way during the pandemic. That was also when the calligraphy room on the third floor was created. In 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, the two Chinese artists Qian Geng and Wang Ziheng, who work under the artist name The 8 Immortals, had actually only wanted to stop by for a few days. But then their flights home were canceled and they stayed for two months. During this time, they created the Gesamtkunstwerk, whose name is also emblematic of Hellkötter’s work. After all, what closes can also open up again at some point. The artwork is called “Common Space – Everything Flows. 一切皆流”. Angela Köckritz
Only one week to go until the Year of the Snake begins! With 元宵节, the Lantern Festival, the spring festival ends after 15 days. The lanterns symbolize the hope for a good start to the new year. In Hai’an, Jiangsu, production is therefore in full swing: here, a worker sets up red lanterns to dry.
