欢迎 at China.Table. Huānyíng to the first edition of our new professional briefing. If you want reliable, comprehensive and up-to-date information about China, we bid you welcome at China.Table.
Starting next year, we want to provide you with news, analysis and background from Beijing, Berlin and Brussels every morning. We will start with a team of eight, probably the largest independent China editorial team in the German language. Well over a hundred years of China and media experience have gone into the development of China.Table – and yet we are clear about this: This will not be enough to cover this vast country in its entirety, from technology to human rights.
Therefore, please understand our title China.Table as an invitation to take a seat and share your perspective. We want to enter into a conversation with you about business, science, government and society.
A heartfelt huānyíng,
It was a milestone – even if the world only got to see a picture of a beige control room: At the end of November, the first modern Chinese nuclear reactor went online at the Fuqing nuclear power plant on the East China Sea. Hualong One HPR-1000 is the name of the pressurized water reactor with a capacity of 1150 megawatts (MW). China has “broken the monopoly of foreign nuclear technology”, rejoiced the state-owned China National Nuclear Corp (CNNC), which operates the nuclear power plant.
Only two weeks earlier, the Hualong One had been certified for use in Europe by the European Utility Requirements (EUR) organization after testing many criteria such as safety, layout and system technology. China has thus entered the world nuclear power market – and is determined to establish itself there permanently.
Nuclear power is firmly in state hands as a strategic sector. CNNC is one of three state-owned nuclear giants, along with China General Nuclear Power (CGN) and the State Power Investment Corporation. As an emission-free form of energy, nuclear power plays a far greater role in the planned energy transition than in many Western countries. By 2060, China aims to become carbon-neutral, as President Xi Jinping recently announced. To achieve this, the country says it needs much more energy from nuclear fission – and possibly also from nuclear fusion.
A few days after the Hualong One, a new experimental nuclear fusion reactor called HL-2M Tokamak was launched in Chengdu. It uses a strong magnetic field to fuse hot plasma, which can reach a temperature of up to 150 million degrees Celsius. Called the “artificial sun” in China, the reactor is part of an international mega-project currently building the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in France for nuclear fusion testing. In addition to China, members of the project include the EU, the US, India, Japan, Russia and South Korea. The “artificial sun” will be an “important pillar” for ITER, stressed Yang Qingwei, chief engineer of the CNNC’s Nuclear Fusion Institute.
China will need to expand its nuclear power capacity to 554 gigawatts (GW) by 2050 if it is to help meet the Paris climate target of no more than 1.5 degrees of global warming, according to the state-affiliated National Energy Research Institute. That would correspond to a capacity share of 28 percent. Present-day figures show what a huge increase that would mean: According to the World Nuclear Association, by the end of 2019 China’s 10 nuclear power plants already had 49 nuclear reactors – with a total capacity of 47.5 GW. Nuclear power contributed only about five percent of electricity generation, Coal compared to 69 percent. Still, the rate of increase was 18 percent. As a result, the British data company GlobalData expects China to overtake France in nuclear power generation in 2022 and the United States in 2026. It would then be in the lead.
The Fukushima disaster in March 2011 hit China’s nuclear sector hard. The government ordered strict safety checks and put all projects on hold. Whether nuclear power was fundamentally questioned internally at the time did not leak out. But it was not until 2019 that China approved new reactors again – all of them of the Hualong One type. In the meantime, China had pressed ahead with development despite the halt in construction. Worldwide, reactors of the so-called Third Generation were being developed during that time. These were to build on the technology of their predecessors and, at the same time, become significantly safer. China also wanted its own reactor of this new generation. Until then, the country had relied heavily on technology from Russia, France and Canada. At that time, CGN and CNNC developed their own reactors separately: CGN based on the technology of the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) of the French company Areva, CNNC with the technology of the US company Westinghouse.
That was apparently too small-scale for Beijing. “In 2012, planners instructed CGN and CNNC to streamline their reactor programs,” recalls Narumi Shibata of the Asia Pacific Initiative think tank in Tokyo. The companies integrated their designs, Shibata says – and the Hualong One was born.
With this reactor, China will now not only be globally competitive but also more independent for its own nuclear energy. “The idea is that Hualong One is Chinese not only in design and intellectual property but also in equipment and the whole supply chain,” said François Morin, China director of the World Nuclear Association in Beijing. The share of foreign components in the Hualong One is a maximum of 15 percent – for pumps, valves or digital equipment, for example, he said. “There are still opportunities for European and American suppliers, but the window is getting smaller.” Thus, the Hualong One’s push into the global market could have negative consequences for international component manufacturers. A Hualong One in Pakistan is already under construction, and others are planned for the United Kingdom, Argentina and Iran, among others.
Incidentally, resistance to nuclear power policy is low; a nationwide protest movement wouldn’t stand a chance anyway. But once, protesters actually prevailed. In 2016, the construction of a repository in the coastal province of Jiangsu was halted due to protests. China is still looking for an alternative today.
The message was so important to Xi Jinping that he sent it over state media: After carefully calculating the economic development capabilities and conditions, the state and party leader announced that it was entirely possible to double the per capita income of Chinese people, and thus the country’s economic output, by 2035. The CP Central Committee would evaluate the experience of building a “moderate prosperity society” 小康社会（xiaokang shehui) by the middle of next year, “and then announce that we have achieved this goal,” Xi said.
The timing of the publication of Xi’s forecast was deliberate. In October, the party leadership deliberated on its goals for the next five years, which are also an important milestone in achieving the great promise to the Chinese people to build that same “society of moderate prosperity.” What it decided, the Party leadership’s “Proposals for Formulating the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) for National Economic and Social Development and Long-Term Goals to 2035,” the Party Congress of the Communist Party of China plans to adopt next spring.
Xi’s confidence in Chinese prosperity is based on what has been achieved so far. And his announcement to take stock in mid-2021 comes at a symbolically important date: 2021 will mark the 100th anniversary of the party’s founding.
Under the so-called xiaokang sehui, a society with “moderate prosperity”, one could perhaps understand, according to Western understanding, following the Confucian understanding of xiaokang, a society in which everyone strives for prosperity through work, has already come a long way, but has not yet reached heaven. Deng Xiaoping used the term xiaokang as early as 1979 while pushing economic reforms and set high goals for himself and the Chinese by the standards of the time: GDP was to quadruple by 2000, and this was also proclaimed as a goal for per capita income.
He was more than right, as China’s GDP quadrupled in 1995, and two years later, the GDP per person also quadrupled compared to 1980.
In 2012, the Chinese leadership finally promised its citizens that by the end of the decade, absolute poverty in the country would be “overcome” and everyone would live in a “moderately prosperous society”. The Chinese Communist Party could not have made a greater promise than this.
Even if absolute poverty is no longer visible in China’s cities, where even migrant workers earn between the equivalent of €500 and €1500 a month, relative poverty is the real problem, especially in the rural regions and counties in the interior of the country. But the party and state leadership does not talk about this too openly. In late November, local government officials from Guizhou province, one of China’s poorest regions, announced that the annual per capita income of residents in the region’s last nine poverty-stricken counties had risen to ¥11,487 (about €1447). The message was clear: If the income of all residents is now above the absolute poverty line of ¥4,000 (€504) set by the government, no region in China can be called poor anymore – at least according to the official reading.
Indeed, the results of reforms since Deng speak for themselves: According to the Economist’s calculations, from 1980 to 2018, the Chinese managed to reduce the number of people living below the applicable poverty line (which has since been raised further) from 775 million to 16.6 million. Most notably, of course, rapid economic growth has created employment opportunities in urban areas for countless rural migrants.
Even if China’s fight against poverty is praised internationally, people in the country itself are watching very closely how seriously the official figures from Beijing can be taken. Even the state-affiliated business magazine Caixin recently warned: “This does not mean that the (previously poorest) counties are now poverty-free. The policy mainly measures the increase in average income. Data smoothed in this way doesn’t capture the circumstances of individual families in need.”
Even the coronavirus pandemic did not slow down government action to implement poverty reduction for long. It is true that late last year before Covid-19 began to grip the world, criticism arose in China that the Chinese government would not be able to fully implement the goals of xiaokang sehui because of the poor economy. But popular approval of the government’s actions remains high: This summer, a survey by the Ash Center at Harvard University found that Chinese citizens’ satisfaction with their government has increased. Over the period of the study between 2003 and 2016, it increased from 86 percent to 93 percent.
But this means that “Xi’s dream of China”, as the top communist’s plans to fight poverty are called in the West, is by no means a reality. Because now, the next problem arises, one could call it the “prosperity problem”. And this is for the population in the cities. True, they have left behind the poverty of their ancestors. But their day-to-day concerns are no less great: How will they to pay for their and their children’s education and find affordable housing and health insurance? And those who are counted among the rising middle class – their number is estimated at around 400 million – are now also formulating demands that are familiar in the West: a clean climate, a healthy environment, and food and water security.
The World Bank calls the latest development a “middle-income trap“. Succinctly, the more often the Chinese Communist Party reports successes in poverty reduction to keep its own people happy, the more often international actors are called into action: The USA already wanted last February to no longer recognize China as a developing country that enjoys privileges in the international treaty system. A dilemma for China’s leadership, which is now also being overlaid by unpleasant debates within the country about the “social situation”. Because even within the country itself, the ever-widening social gap is becoming an issue that Beijing must address. After all, the income of an average family in China’s cities is between ¥20,000 (€2,500) and ¥40,000 (€5,000), while the wealth of the 400 richest Chinese grew by an average of 64 percent this year, as the New York-based China platform SupChina reported the other day.
It is therefore foreseeable that Beijing’s CP leadership will sooner or later have to come to terms with a completely new quality of xiaokang sehui, the “society with moderate prosperity”, in order to retain the goodwill of its population: The question of wealth redistribution.
It is a European that voices the warning shortly before Christmas. However, the sender is Beijing, which is why it can certainly also be understood as a message. Joerg Wuttke, President of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, has excellent connections to the Chinese government. It is very much in China’s interest to push ahead with the investment agreement during the German presidency, Wuttke tells China.Table. Especially because on the other side of the negotiating table, the German presidency, headed by Angela Merkel, is currently calling the shots. With her, Beijing has “a very trustworthy counterpart in Europe, the Chinese side knows exactly where it stands and it has 15 years of experience in working with her”.
When Germany took over the EU Council presidency on July 1 this year, expectations were high – the presidency of the European Union’s largest economy in the body of heads of state and government was seen as a make-or-break moment for the organization of states. High on the to-do list of foreign policy issues: China. The strategic relations with the Middle Kingdom. In her speech at the start of the Council Presidency in the EU Parliament, German Chancellor Angela Merkel devoted a separate paragraph to them.
Now, a few days before the end of the Council Presidency, almost certainly the last of the German Chancellor, the wires between Europe and Beijing are once again running hot. For nothing less than the joint investment protection agreement (CAI) is on the table. European entrepreneurs hope it will give them better access to the Chinese market and a level playing field. It is also intended to replace the 26 existing bilateral investment agreements between EU states and China.
Wuttke, BASF’s head in China, sees the investment deal as more than just an economic agreement: “In these times of trade and technology war, if two massive economies can agree on something with measurable milestones and timelines, it would send a really strong message around the world.”
The negotiations of the past week give rise to hope that the negotiating partners could possibly achieve a breakthrough shortly before New Year’s Eve. The talks had been intensive, the EU Commission said after the round of negotiations. Progress has been made with regard to sustainable development, market access offers and institutional provisions. The two sides want to talk again this week.
The Chancellor’s Office had “massively stepped on the gas” in the matter and wanted to reach a conclusion by the end of the year at almost any cost, recalls Reinhard Buetikofer (The Greens), chairman of the European Parliament’s China delegation, recalls the Germans’ performance. According to his observation, however, this could not really prevail on the European stage. “The position in Brussels is still substance over speed. We have to negotiate a result that is also worthy of becoming a treaty,” Buetikofer said.
For a long time, the number of problems still on the table was considerable. China had fallen short of the EU expected concessions, says the Green politician. For example, on the issue of free market access for European companies in the fields of telecommunications, new mobility, the health industry and biotechnology. In the so-called sustainability chapter, China had also long refused to ratify key core conventions of the International Labour Organization (ILO).
If one takes stock overall of the German Council Presidency and its China agenda, the result looks rather pale. The long-planned summit in September was canceled – and the EU continues to struggle with its joint stance vis-à-vis Beijing. And observers in Brussels are missing an even stricter tone in the face of human and civil rights violations in China.
“We have come much less far than originally envisaged and hoped,” says, for example, the vice-chair of the European Parliament’s China delegation, Evelyne Gebhardt (SPD). In the area of human rights issues concerning China, she said, not much progress had been made. She would have liked to see the German presidency put more emphasis on these issues, said Gebhardt. One reason for the moderate progress was the canceled summit meeting in Leipzig in September.
For the first time, the heads of state and government of the EU states would have sat together with the Chinese President Xi Jinping sitting at the same table and the Europeans could speak with one voice, according to the idea. Beijing looked forward to cooperation with Berlin: There was a “deep political trust” between the two sides, the Chinese news agency Xinhua wrote before the start of the German presidency. President Xi appreciated the “objective and rational attitude of the German government” in the Covid pandemic.
However, political breakthroughs were not expected from the meeting in advance. For Beijing, the focus was above all on stabilizing EU relations, which were not under the best of stars in view of the Covid crisis and its economic consequences, the police action in Hong Kong and Washington’s demand for a unified position against China. A video meeting in June had ended without a joint statement after a rather subdued exchange.
The fact that face-to-face talks on site cannot be replaced by an online summit is one thing, Gebhardt said. But the slow progress is also due to the way China has been behaving lately, the SPD politician said. She criticized the information behavior around the origin of the coronavirus and that there was no movement on human rights issues, such as the issue regarding the Uyghurs in the northwest of the People’s Republic. “There, too, I would have liked to see more pressure,” says the SPD politician. When asked about the situation of the Uyghurs, France’s head of state, Emmanuel Macron, also recently called for a strong joint response from the Europeans in an interview.
Hopes are now pinned on the newly adopted EU sanctions mechanism, which is intended to combat and punish human rights violations more quickly and more severely. Under German leadership, the EU states agreed on a corresponding instrument at the beginning of December. How effective this is will then be seen in practice, says David McAllister, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the European Parliament. “In any case, it is positive that the Council has finally agreed on globally applicable sanction mechanisms for serious human rights violations.” According to McAllister, this was an important concern for the German Council Presidency.
The EU’s response to China’s crackdown on protests directed against Hong Kong’s security law had still been criticized as too lax at the end of July. EU states had further restricted exports that could be used to quell protests or monitor communications. CDU politician McAllister stressed that the EU showed a clear attitude towards China. He added that the People’s Republic was indeed an important global partner. “However, we are also determined to counter China’s influence where it threatens democracy, freedom and the rule of law.”
Merkel’s presidency still has a few days to go – whether the investment protection agreement is signed or not. Portugal will take over the baton on New Year’s Day 2021. China and Portugal have a longer history together than other EU states because of the former Portuguese colony of Macau. Portugal is also one of the largest per capita recipients of Chinese investment in Europe, especially in the energy, banking and insurance sectors. China’s ambassador to Portugal, Cai Run, put Chinese investment at more than €9 billion at the end of 2018. From the Portuguese, MEPs generally expect a different tone towards China.
In future history books, 2020 will be known as the year of the great COVID-19 pandemic, and rightly so. But it will also be remembered as the year when US President Donald Trump‘s vile tenure was brought to an end. Both episodes are closely connected and will leave lasting traces, partly because they unfolded during a broader global transition from the US-dominated twentieth century to a Chinese-dominated twenty-first century.
Against this backdrop, 2020 proved to be a highly successful year for China. To be sure, things didn’t look that way at its start, when a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was rampaging through the metropolis of Wuhan. Serious failures by Chinese authorities permitted that outbreak to grow into a pandemic that has now killed almost 1.5 million people and brought the global economy to a standstill. Earlier in the year, it looked as though China’s central leadership was facing a deep crisis of confidence. Coming on the back of a trade war with the United States, COVID-19 momentarily brought the country to its knees.
Since then, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s forceful suppression of the democracy movement in Hong Kong has further increased Western distrust. The administrative clampdown under a draconian new national-security law ends the era of “one country, two systems,” and raises grave questions about the future of Taiwan.
In any case, China’s position looks much improved at the end of 2020. Its failures at the beginning of the pandemic seem to have been largely forgotten, particularly within China. There is no longer any trace of a loss of public confidence in the central leadership. Employing radical measures, China’s authoritarian one-party state quickly contained COVID-19 and put the economy back on track, enabling a near-complete return to normal life.
In the trade war with the US, China has given little ground (mainly a promise to buy $200 billion in US goods). The crackdown in Hong Kong seems to be working precisely as Xi had hoped it would. And in November, China mounted something of a geopolitical coup with the signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a new trade agreement that will put it at the center of the world’s largest free-trade area. The RCEP will connect China’s huge market to those of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations – from Indonesia and Singapore to Vietnam – and will include important US allies such as Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. For the time being, India is not participating, but it might join later. The only regional player to be left out of the RCEP is America.
The creation of a new, China-centered economic bloc illustrates the difference between reality and reality TV. When Trump arrived in the White House in January 2017, one of his first official acts was to withdraw the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an agreement negotiated by President Barack Obama that would have created something like the RCEP, only with America at the center and China left out. Witnessing this US act of self-harm, China’s leaders presumably couldn’t believe their luck, and Xi’s government has been working hard to exploit Trump’s generous gift ever since.
These efforts are now bearing fruit. With a new free-trade zone will come new geopolitical realities. A web of dependencies will arise around China, strengthening its position across the Indo-Pacific region.
While China emerges stronger from this year of crisis, America has come out weaker. Because of Trump, COVID-19 is running riot in the US, and the country remains focused on itself, seeming to others to be floundering in division, chaos, and weakness. This perception has far-reaching geopolitical consequences. Following a contentious election that Trump has tried to discredit, many around the world are wondering if President-elect Joe Biden’s incoming administration will be in any position to lead the US out of its downward spiral. The current post-election phase does not inspire confidence that the two warring political camps will find common ground.
In these turbulent times of pandemic and escalating economic and geopolitical rivalries, America needs its friends more than ever, and America’s friends need it. Without a restoration of US global leadership under Biden, China will be well on its way to becoming the dominant force in the world, and that is not a comforting prospect for US partners and allies in Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and elsewhere.
The world got a glimpse of what Chinese hegemony might look like this month when Xi’s regime issued a 14-point diktat to Australia demanding that it “correct mistakes” it has made in the bilateral relationship. Following Australia’s call for an international investigation of the origins of SARS-CoV-2, its exclusion of two Chinese companies (ZTE and Huawei) from its 5G network, and negative reporting about China in the Australian media, China has unashamedly singled out Australia with new trade barriers.
Europeans, in particular, should take note of this behavior. America’s allies will soon be rid of Trump and his nationalistic foreign policy. But if “America First” is simply replaced with “China First,” little will have been gained. Europeans and others will still be looking down the barrel of endless tributes and kowtowing. Europeans must wake up. This is the last chance to shore up the “benevolent” hegemon and the promise of liberty in the twenty-first century.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2020.
www.project-syndicate.org
Qu Dongyu is a potato enthusiast. And this despite the fact that the Secretary-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is actually the son of rice farmers. The agricultural scientist wrote his doctoral thesis on new techniques in the production of potato seeds, in 2004 he brought the International Potato Congress to China for the first time, and as vice governor of the autonomous region of Ningxia, he traveled from farm to farm to convince farmers in the mountains of western China of the benefits of new potato varieties.
When Qu was elected Secretary-General of the FAO in Rome in June 2019, for once, it was not about potatoes or even agriculture. Instead, Qu found himself at the center of a diplomatic power struggle. Rather than agreeing on a common candidate, the EU and US had each fielded their own favorites in the race for office. Meanwhile, Chinese diplomats were busy lobbying – reportedly including debt forgiveness, visits to luxury hotels for delegates and massive intimidation. The result was clear: 108 out of 191 votes went to Qu, and China had hijacked the fourth of the fifteen UN specialized agencies – at least, that was the perception of many European and US diplomats.
The hubbub surrounding his election seemed to make Qu uncomfortable. He asserted that he had not only an “Asian soul” but also a “global consciousness” and wanted to serve FAO impartially. Indeed, there is little doubt about his professional expertise. As a scientist and politician at a time when China was celebrating great successes in the fight against hunger and poverty and was fundamentally modernizing its agriculture, he has important experience for international cooperation. Before his election, Qu was Vice Minister of Agriculture of the People’s Republic, Vice Governor of the western Chinese autonomous region of Ningxia, and Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Agriculture.
Born in 1963, Qu belongs to the first Chinese generation that was allowed back into universities after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. He studied agricultural sciences at the age of sixteen and quickly climbed the academic ladder: He conducted research at the Agricultural Academy in Beijing and earned his doctorate at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Even after his political career began, he continued to see himself as a researcher and showed at every opportunity that, despite having a doctorate, he could still work in the field. Allegedly, his skin was so sun-tanned during his time as vice-governor of Ningxia that he could easily have passed for a potato farmer.
So far, it seems that, despite all fears, Qu is putting the FAO’s mission ahead of nation-state muscle games. He made food security and poverty reduction the focus of his tenure and launched an initiative for more FAO innovation and transparency. Jonas Borchers
“The Horse with Eye Blinders” is the title of the first solo exhibition by Chinese painter and photographer Xinyi Cheng (31) at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. She is the winner of the Baloise Art Prize 2019. Originally, the exhibition was to open at the beginning of December. Now a Covid alternative is online.
欢迎 at China.Table. Huānyíng to the first edition of our new professional briefing. If you want reliable, comprehensive and up-to-date information about China, we bid you welcome at China.Table.
Starting next year, we want to provide you with news, analysis and background from Beijing, Berlin and Brussels every morning. We will start with a team of eight, probably the largest independent China editorial team in the German language. Well over a hundred years of China and media experience have gone into the development of China.Table – and yet we are clear about this: This will not be enough to cover this vast country in its entirety, from technology to human rights.
Therefore, please understand our title China.Table as an invitation to take a seat and share your perspective. We want to enter into a conversation with you about business, science, government and society.
A heartfelt huānyíng,
It was a milestone – even if the world only got to see a picture of a beige control room: At the end of November, the first modern Chinese nuclear reactor went online at the Fuqing nuclear power plant on the East China Sea. Hualong One HPR-1000 is the name of the pressurized water reactor with a capacity of 1150 megawatts (MW). China has “broken the monopoly of foreign nuclear technology”, rejoiced the state-owned China National Nuclear Corp (CNNC), which operates the nuclear power plant.
Only two weeks earlier, the Hualong One had been certified for use in Europe by the European Utility Requirements (EUR) organization after testing many criteria such as safety, layout and system technology. China has thus entered the world nuclear power market – and is determined to establish itself there permanently.
Nuclear power is firmly in state hands as a strategic sector. CNNC is one of three state-owned nuclear giants, along with China General Nuclear Power (CGN) and the State Power Investment Corporation. As an emission-free form of energy, nuclear power plays a far greater role in the planned energy transition than in many Western countries. By 2060, China aims to become carbon-neutral, as President Xi Jinping recently announced. To achieve this, the country says it needs much more energy from nuclear fission – and possibly also from nuclear fusion.
A few days after the Hualong One, a new experimental nuclear fusion reactor called HL-2M Tokamak was launched in Chengdu. It uses a strong magnetic field to fuse hot plasma, which can reach a temperature of up to 150 million degrees Celsius. Called the “artificial sun” in China, the reactor is part of an international mega-project currently building the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in France for nuclear fusion testing. In addition to China, members of the project include the EU, the US, India, Japan, Russia and South Korea. The “artificial sun” will be an “important pillar” for ITER, stressed Yang Qingwei, chief engineer of the CNNC’s Nuclear Fusion Institute.
China will need to expand its nuclear power capacity to 554 gigawatts (GW) by 2050 if it is to help meet the Paris climate target of no more than 1.5 degrees of global warming, according to the state-affiliated National Energy Research Institute. That would correspond to a capacity share of 28 percent. Present-day figures show what a huge increase that would mean: According to the World Nuclear Association, by the end of 2019 China’s 10 nuclear power plants already had 49 nuclear reactors – with a total capacity of 47.5 GW. Nuclear power contributed only about five percent of electricity generation, Coal compared to 69 percent. Still, the rate of increase was 18 percent. As a result, the British data company GlobalData expects China to overtake France in nuclear power generation in 2022 and the United States in 2026. It would then be in the lead.
The Fukushima disaster in March 2011 hit China’s nuclear sector hard. The government ordered strict safety checks and put all projects on hold. Whether nuclear power was fundamentally questioned internally at the time did not leak out. But it was not until 2019 that China approved new reactors again – all of them of the Hualong One type. In the meantime, China had pressed ahead with development despite the halt in construction. Worldwide, reactors of the so-called Third Generation were being developed during that time. These were to build on the technology of their predecessors and, at the same time, become significantly safer. China also wanted its own reactor of this new generation. Until then, the country had relied heavily on technology from Russia, France and Canada. At that time, CGN and CNNC developed their own reactors separately: CGN based on the technology of the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) of the French company Areva, CNNC with the technology of the US company Westinghouse.
That was apparently too small-scale for Beijing. “In 2012, planners instructed CGN and CNNC to streamline their reactor programs,” recalls Narumi Shibata of the Asia Pacific Initiative think tank in Tokyo. The companies integrated their designs, Shibata says – and the Hualong One was born.
With this reactor, China will now not only be globally competitive but also more independent for its own nuclear energy. “The idea is that Hualong One is Chinese not only in design and intellectual property but also in equipment and the whole supply chain,” said François Morin, China director of the World Nuclear Association in Beijing. The share of foreign components in the Hualong One is a maximum of 15 percent – for pumps, valves or digital equipment, for example, he said. “There are still opportunities for European and American suppliers, but the window is getting smaller.” Thus, the Hualong One’s push into the global market could have negative consequences for international component manufacturers. A Hualong One in Pakistan is already under construction, and others are planned for the United Kingdom, Argentina and Iran, among others.
Incidentally, resistance to nuclear power policy is low; a nationwide protest movement wouldn’t stand a chance anyway. But once, protesters actually prevailed. In 2016, the construction of a repository in the coastal province of Jiangsu was halted due to protests. China is still looking for an alternative today.
The message was so important to Xi Jinping that he sent it over state media: After carefully calculating the economic development capabilities and conditions, the state and party leader announced that it was entirely possible to double the per capita income of Chinese people, and thus the country’s economic output, by 2035. The CP Central Committee would evaluate the experience of building a “moderate prosperity society” 小康社会（xiaokang shehui) by the middle of next year, “and then announce that we have achieved this goal,” Xi said.
The timing of the publication of Xi’s forecast was deliberate. In October, the party leadership deliberated on its goals for the next five years, which are also an important milestone in achieving the great promise to the Chinese people to build that same “society of moderate prosperity.” What it decided, the Party leadership’s “Proposals for Formulating the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) for National Economic and Social Development and Long-Term Goals to 2035,” the Party Congress of the Communist Party of China plans to adopt next spring.
Xi’s confidence in Chinese prosperity is based on what has been achieved so far. And his announcement to take stock in mid-2021 comes at a symbolically important date: 2021 will mark the 100th anniversary of the party’s founding.
Under the so-called xiaokang sehui, a society with “moderate prosperity”, one could perhaps understand, according to Western understanding, following the Confucian understanding of xiaokang, a society in which everyone strives for prosperity through work, has already come a long way, but has not yet reached heaven. Deng Xiaoping used the term xiaokang as early as 1979 while pushing economic reforms and set high goals for himself and the Chinese by the standards of the time: GDP was to quadruple by 2000, and this was also proclaimed as a goal for per capita income.
He was more than right, as China’s GDP quadrupled in 1995, and two years later, the GDP per person also quadrupled compared to 1980.
In 2012, the Chinese leadership finally promised its citizens that by the end of the decade, absolute poverty in the country would be “overcome” and everyone would live in a “moderately prosperous society”. The Chinese Communist Party could not have made a greater promise than this.
Even if absolute poverty is no longer visible in China’s cities, where even migrant workers earn between the equivalent of €500 and €1500 a month, relative poverty is the real problem, especially in the rural regions and counties in the interior of the country. But the party and state leadership does not talk about this too openly. In late November, local government officials from Guizhou province, one of China’s poorest regions, announced that the annual per capita income of residents in the region’s last nine poverty-stricken counties had risen to ¥11,487 (about €1447). The message was clear: If the income of all residents is now above the absolute poverty line of ¥4,000 (€504) set by the government, no region in China can be called poor anymore – at least according to the official reading.
Indeed, the results of reforms since Deng speak for themselves: According to the Economist’s calculations, from 1980 to 2018, the Chinese managed to reduce the number of people living below the applicable poverty line (which has since been raised further) from 775 million to 16.6 million. Most notably, of course, rapid economic growth has created employment opportunities in urban areas for countless rural migrants.
Even if China’s fight against poverty is praised internationally, people in the country itself are watching very closely how seriously the official figures from Beijing can be taken. Even the state-affiliated business magazine Caixin recently warned: “This does not mean that the (previously poorest) counties are now poverty-free. The policy mainly measures the increase in average income. Data smoothed in this way doesn’t capture the circumstances of individual families in need.”
Even the coronavirus pandemic did not slow down government action to implement poverty reduction for long. It is true that late last year before Covid-19 began to grip the world, criticism arose in China that the Chinese government would not be able to fully implement the goals of xiaokang sehui because of the poor economy. But popular approval of the government’s actions remains high: This summer, a survey by the Ash Center at Harvard University found that Chinese citizens’ satisfaction with their government has increased. Over the period of the study between 2003 and 2016, it increased from 86 percent to 93 percent.
But this means that “Xi’s dream of China”, as the top communist’s plans to fight poverty are called in the West, is by no means a reality. Because now, the next problem arises, one could call it the “prosperity problem”. And this is for the population in the cities. True, they have left behind the poverty of their ancestors. But their day-to-day concerns are no less great: How will they to pay for their and their children’s education and find affordable housing and health insurance? And those who are counted among the rising middle class – their number is estimated at around 400 million – are now also formulating demands that are familiar in the West: a clean climate, a healthy environment, and food and water security.
The World Bank calls the latest development a “middle-income trap“. Succinctly, the more often the Chinese Communist Party reports successes in poverty reduction to keep its own people happy, the more often international actors are called into action: The USA already wanted last February to no longer recognize China as a developing country that enjoys privileges in the international treaty system. A dilemma for China’s leadership, which is now also being overlaid by unpleasant debates within the country about the “social situation”. Because even within the country itself, the ever-widening social gap is becoming an issue that Beijing must address. After all, the income of an average family in China’s cities is between ¥20,000 (€2,500) and ¥40,000 (€5,000), while the wealth of the 400 richest Chinese grew by an average of 64 percent this year, as the New York-based China platform SupChina reported the other day.
It is therefore foreseeable that Beijing’s CP leadership will sooner or later have to come to terms with a completely new quality of xiaokang sehui, the “society with moderate prosperity”, in order to retain the goodwill of its population: The question of wealth redistribution.
It is a European that voices the warning shortly before Christmas. However, the sender is Beijing, which is why it can certainly also be understood as a message. Joerg Wuttke, President of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, has excellent connections to the Chinese government. It is very much in China’s interest to push ahead with the investment agreement during the German presidency, Wuttke tells China.Table. Especially because on the other side of the negotiating table, the German presidency, headed by Angela Merkel, is currently calling the shots. With her, Beijing has “a very trustworthy counterpart in Europe, the Chinese side knows exactly where it stands and it has 15 years of experience in working with her”.
When Germany took over the EU Council presidency on July 1 this year, expectations were high – the presidency of the European Union’s largest economy in the body of heads of state and government was seen as a make-or-break moment for the organization of states. High on the to-do list of foreign policy issues: China. The strategic relations with the Middle Kingdom. In her speech at the start of the Council Presidency in the EU Parliament, German Chancellor Angela Merkel devoted a separate paragraph to them.
Now, a few days before the end of the Council Presidency, almost certainly the last of the German Chancellor, the wires between Europe and Beijing are once again running hot. For nothing less than the joint investment protection agreement (CAI) is on the table. European entrepreneurs hope it will give them better access to the Chinese market and a level playing field. It is also intended to replace the 26 existing bilateral investment agreements between EU states and China.
Wuttke, BASF’s head in China, sees the investment deal as more than just an economic agreement: “In these times of trade and technology war, if two massive economies can agree on something with measurable milestones and timelines, it would send a really strong message around the world.”
The negotiations of the past week give rise to hope that the negotiating partners could possibly achieve a breakthrough shortly before New Year’s Eve. The talks had been intensive, the EU Commission said after the round of negotiations. Progress has been made with regard to sustainable development, market access offers and institutional provisions. The two sides want to talk again this week.
The Chancellor’s Office had “massively stepped on the gas” in the matter and wanted to reach a conclusion by the end of the year at almost any cost, recalls Reinhard Buetikofer (The Greens), chairman of the European Parliament’s China delegation, recalls the Germans’ performance. According to his observation, however, this could not really prevail on the European stage. “The position in Brussels is still substance over speed. We have to negotiate a result that is also worthy of becoming a treaty,” Buetikofer said.
For a long time, the number of problems still on the table was considerable. China had fallen short of the EU expected concessions, says the Green politician. For example, on the issue of free market access for European companies in the fields of telecommunications, new mobility, the health industry and biotechnology. In the so-called sustainability chapter, China had also long refused to ratify key core conventions of the International Labour Organization (ILO).
If one takes stock overall of the German Council Presidency and its China agenda, the result looks rather pale. The long-planned summit in September was canceled – and the EU continues to struggle with its joint stance vis-à-vis Beijing. And observers in Brussels are missing an even stricter tone in the face of human and civil rights violations in China.
“We have come much less far than originally envisaged and hoped,” says, for example, the vice-chair of the European Parliament’s China delegation, Evelyne Gebhardt (SPD). In the area of human rights issues concerning China, she said, not much progress had been made. She would have liked to see the German presidency put more emphasis on these issues, said Gebhardt. One reason for the moderate progress was the canceled summit meeting in Leipzig in September.
For the first time, the heads of state and government of the EU states would have sat together with the Chinese President Xi Jinping sitting at the same table and the Europeans could speak with one voice, according to the idea. Beijing looked forward to cooperation with Berlin: There was a “deep political trust” between the two sides, the Chinese news agency Xinhua wrote before the start of the German presidency. President Xi appreciated the “objective and rational attitude of the German government” in the Covid pandemic.
However, political breakthroughs were not expected from the meeting in advance. For Beijing, the focus was above all on stabilizing EU relations, which were not under the best of stars in view of the Covid crisis and its economic consequences, the police action in Hong Kong and Washington’s demand for a unified position against China. A video meeting in June had ended without a joint statement after a rather subdued exchange.
The fact that face-to-face talks on site cannot be replaced by an online summit is one thing, Gebhardt said. But the slow progress is also due to the way China has been behaving lately, the SPD politician said. She criticized the information behavior around the origin of the coronavirus and that there was no movement on human rights issues, such as the issue regarding the Uyghurs in the northwest of the People’s Republic. “There, too, I would have liked to see more pressure,” says the SPD politician. When asked about the situation of the Uyghurs, France’s head of state, Emmanuel Macron, also recently called for a strong joint response from the Europeans in an interview.
Hopes are now pinned on the newly adopted EU sanctions mechanism, which is intended to combat and punish human rights violations more quickly and more severely. Under German leadership, the EU states agreed on a corresponding instrument at the beginning of December. How effective this is will then be seen in practice, says David McAllister, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the European Parliament. “In any case, it is positive that the Council has finally agreed on globally applicable sanction mechanisms for serious human rights violations.” According to McAllister, this was an important concern for the German Council Presidency.
The EU’s response to China’s crackdown on protests directed against Hong Kong’s security law had still been criticized as too lax at the end of July. EU states had further restricted exports that could be used to quell protests or monitor communications. CDU politician McAllister stressed that the EU showed a clear attitude towards China. He added that the People’s Republic was indeed an important global partner. “However, we are also determined to counter China’s influence where it threatens democracy, freedom and the rule of law.”
Merkel’s presidency still has a few days to go – whether the investment protection agreement is signed or not. Portugal will take over the baton on New Year’s Day 2021. China and Portugal have a longer history together than other EU states because of the former Portuguese colony of Macau. Portugal is also one of the largest per capita recipients of Chinese investment in Europe, especially in the energy, banking and insurance sectors. China’s ambassador to Portugal, Cai Run, put Chinese investment at more than €9 billion at the end of 2018. From the Portuguese, MEPs generally expect a different tone towards China.
In future history books, 2020 will be known as the year of the great COVID-19 pandemic, and rightly so. But it will also be remembered as the year when US President Donald Trump‘s vile tenure was brought to an end. Both episodes are closely connected and will leave lasting traces, partly because they unfolded during a broader global transition from the US-dominated twentieth century to a Chinese-dominated twenty-first century.
Against this backdrop, 2020 proved to be a highly successful year for China. To be sure, things didn’t look that way at its start, when a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was rampaging through the metropolis of Wuhan. Serious failures by Chinese authorities permitted that outbreak to grow into a pandemic that has now killed almost 1.5 million people and brought the global economy to a standstill. Earlier in the year, it looked as though China’s central leadership was facing a deep crisis of confidence. Coming on the back of a trade war with the United States, COVID-19 momentarily brought the country to its knees.
Since then, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s forceful suppression of the democracy movement in Hong Kong has further increased Western distrust. The administrative clampdown under a draconian new national-security law ends the era of “one country, two systems,” and raises grave questions about the future of Taiwan.
In any case, China’s position looks much improved at the end of 2020. Its failures at the beginning of the pandemic seem to have been largely forgotten, particularly within China. There is no longer any trace of a loss of public confidence in the central leadership. Employing radical measures, China’s authoritarian one-party state quickly contained COVID-19 and put the economy back on track, enabling a near-complete return to normal life.
In the trade war with the US, China has given little ground (mainly a promise to buy $200 billion in US goods). The crackdown in Hong Kong seems to be working precisely as Xi had hoped it would. And in November, China mounted something of a geopolitical coup with the signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a new trade agreement that will put it at the center of the world’s largest free-trade area. The RCEP will connect China’s huge market to those of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations – from Indonesia and Singapore to Vietnam – and will include important US allies such as Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. For the time being, India is not participating, but it might join later. The only regional player to be left out of the RCEP is America.
The creation of a new, China-centered economic bloc illustrates the difference between reality and reality TV. When Trump arrived in the White House in January 2017, one of his first official acts was to withdraw the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an agreement negotiated by President Barack Obama that would have created something like the RCEP, only with America at the center and China left out. Witnessing this US act of self-harm, China’s leaders presumably couldn’t believe their luck, and Xi’s government has been working hard to exploit Trump’s generous gift ever since.
These efforts are now bearing fruit. With a new free-trade zone will come new geopolitical realities. A web of dependencies will arise around China, strengthening its position across the Indo-Pacific region.
While China emerges stronger from this year of crisis, America has come out weaker. Because of Trump, COVID-19 is running riot in the US, and the country remains focused on itself, seeming to others to be floundering in division, chaos, and weakness. This perception has far-reaching geopolitical consequences. Following a contentious election that Trump has tried to discredit, many around the world are wondering if President-elect Joe Biden’s incoming administration will be in any position to lead the US out of its downward spiral. The current post-election phase does not inspire confidence that the two warring political camps will find common ground.
In these turbulent times of pandemic and escalating economic and geopolitical rivalries, America needs its friends more than ever, and America’s friends need it. Without a restoration of US global leadership under Biden, China will be well on its way to becoming the dominant force in the world, and that is not a comforting prospect for US partners and allies in Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and elsewhere.
The world got a glimpse of what Chinese hegemony might look like this month when Xi’s regime issued a 14-point diktat to Australia demanding that it “correct mistakes” it has made in the bilateral relationship. Following Australia’s call for an international investigation of the origins of SARS-CoV-2, its exclusion of two Chinese companies (ZTE and Huawei) from its 5G network, and negative reporting about China in the Australian media, China has unashamedly singled out Australia with new trade barriers.
Europeans, in particular, should take note of this behavior. America’s allies will soon be rid of Trump and his nationalistic foreign policy. But if “America First” is simply replaced with “China First,” little will have been gained. Europeans and others will still be looking down the barrel of endless tributes and kowtowing. Europeans must wake up. This is the last chance to shore up the “benevolent” hegemon and the promise of liberty in the twenty-first century.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2020.
www.project-syndicate.org
Qu Dongyu is a potato enthusiast. And this despite the fact that the Secretary-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is actually the son of rice farmers. The agricultural scientist wrote his doctoral thesis on new techniques in the production of potato seeds, in 2004 he brought the International Potato Congress to China for the first time, and as vice governor of the autonomous region of Ningxia, he traveled from farm to farm to convince farmers in the mountains of western China of the benefits of new potato varieties.
When Qu was elected Secretary-General of the FAO in Rome in June 2019, for once, it was not about potatoes or even agriculture. Instead, Qu found himself at the center of a diplomatic power struggle. Rather than agreeing on a common candidate, the EU and US had each fielded their own favorites in the race for office. Meanwhile, Chinese diplomats were busy lobbying – reportedly including debt forgiveness, visits to luxury hotels for delegates and massive intimidation. The result was clear: 108 out of 191 votes went to Qu, and China had hijacked the fourth of the fifteen UN specialized agencies – at least, that was the perception of many European and US diplomats.
The hubbub surrounding his election seemed to make Qu uncomfortable. He asserted that he had not only an “Asian soul” but also a “global consciousness” and wanted to serve FAO impartially. Indeed, there is little doubt about his professional expertise. As a scientist and politician at a time when China was celebrating great successes in the fight against hunger and poverty and was fundamentally modernizing its agriculture, he has important experience for international cooperation. Before his election, Qu was Vice Minister of Agriculture of the People’s Republic, Vice Governor of the western Chinese autonomous region of Ningxia, and Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Agriculture.
Born in 1963, Qu belongs to the first Chinese generation that was allowed back into universities after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. He studied agricultural sciences at the age of sixteen and quickly climbed the academic ladder: He conducted research at the Agricultural Academy in Beijing and earned his doctorate at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Even after his political career began, he continued to see himself as a researcher and showed at every opportunity that, despite having a doctorate, he could still work in the field. Allegedly, his skin was so sun-tanned during his time as vice-governor of Ningxia that he could easily have passed for a potato farmer.
So far, it seems that, despite all fears, Qu is putting the FAO’s mission ahead of nation-state muscle games. He made food security and poverty reduction the focus of his tenure and launched an initiative for more FAO innovation and transparency. Jonas Borchers
“The Horse with Eye Blinders” is the title of the first solo exhibition by Chinese painter and photographer Xinyi Cheng (31) at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. She is the winner of the Baloise Art Prize 2019. Originally, the exhibition was to open at the beginning of December. Now a Covid alternative is online.
