Comac + Biden’s agenda + AutoX + G7 plans + Diess + BBC + WHO + Jakóbowksi
Comac: China’s attack on Boeing and Airbus
Biden’s tougher China policy
AutoX: first autonomous cabs in Shenzhen
G7: Britain wants plans D10 coalition against China
VW CEO Diess defends Xinjiang site
EU criticizes BBC broadcasting ban
Dispute over Covid raw data from Wuhan
Heads: Jakub Jakóbowksi
Dear reader,
Covid has dealt a hard blow to passenger aircraft manufacturers. Nevertheless, Airbus and Boeing expect a considerably growing sales market in China. Gregor Koppenburg and Joern Petring subject Comac, the Chinese competitor of the two major suppliers, to a stress test.
Xiao Jianxiong is known as “Professor X” in China. Xiao taught at Princeton University and founded the Computer Vision and Robotics Lab before founding the start-up AutoX in Shenzhen in 2016. Frank Sieren describes how Xiao’s first autonomous cabs now drive in the metropolis and collect important data for regular operation.
The G7 member states are planning a joint China strategy under British leadership. This Friday’s virtual kick-off meeting will also be about this issue, as Nico Beckert reports.
And finally, it’s all about football. As successful as the team is on the pitch. Bayern Munich seems to lack fortune in its international activities. First, the Bavarians complained loudly because they could not leave Berlin’s BER airport on time for the club’s match in Qatar. Now, they angered the Chinese with a New Year tweet that also featured the flag of Taiwan. So, for the second time, the federation had to apologize for the same diplomatic goal.
Your Antje Sirleschtov
Feature
Comac: China’s attack on Boeing and Airbus
The Covid crisis has clearly left its mark on the order books of the world’s two largest aircraft manufacturers. Due to the pandemic, Airbus delivered 566 aircraft last year. That is 34 percent less than in 2019. The deliveries of US competitor Boeing, which, in addition to the Covid crisis, is still struggling with the image damage caused by the series of crashes of its 737 Max series, even slumped by more than half to 157 aircraft.
The Chinese aircraft manufacturer Comac is not letting itself be put off by this depressing market environment. As the group recently announced, delivery of the first Chinese medium-haul C919 aircraft will begin this year as planned.
This would be a big step for the aviation industry of the People’s Republic. China can launch spaceships into space, is the market leader in EVs and has covered the country with a dense network of high-speed trains in record time. It isonly in the construction of passenger aircraft that the country, which is hungry for technological progress, has struggled so far.
But that is also changing. After Comac already has the small regional jet ARJ-21 on offer, the C919 is the first larger passenger aircraft from China. With 168 seats and a range of 4075 kilometers, the aircraft is intended to compete with Boeing’s 737 and the Airbus A320, two of the world’s best-selling aircraft.
Most aviation experts believe there is still a long way to go before Comac can really fly on par with its competitors because, technically, the C919 is nowhere near the latest models from Airbus and Boeing, which score points above all for their lower kerosene consumption.
Even China’s state media are cautious in their assessment. In the coming decades, Chinese aircraft would certainly become a “strong alternative”, China’s state news agency Xinhua wrote after the first test flight of the C919 three years ago. In the short term, however, it is “unrealistic” that the dominance of Airbus and Boeing will be broken by Comac.
The question, however, is not so much whether Comac will succeed in becoming a third major supplier but when.
C919 initially for China only
Finally, the C919 is part of China’s industrial plan to develop advanced industries and technologies. Beijing’s strategy is to close the technology gap with Western companies in many sectors and to produce world market leaders. Initially, production facilities will be modernized, and the country will later become an “industrial superpower”. The C919 still lacks certification for most international flights. But the manufacturer does not need it for the time being. The huge domestic market alone can pave the way for Comac to become a new aviation giant.
In January, the Japanese business newspaper Nikkei investigated how closely China’s state-owned airlines and the likewise state-owned aircraft manufacturer Comac actually work together. According to the research, the three leading airlines, Air China, China Southern and China Eastern, canceled more than 100 orders for new aircraft from Boeing and Airbus last year for the time being because of the coronavirus. Deliveries of the ARJ-21 regional jet from Comac, on the other hand, went ahead as planned. According to Comac, there are already about 800 orders for the new C919. But even if Comac will enjoy advantages in its home market, neither Airbus nor Boeing have much to worry about at the moment.
The demand for aircraft in China is so enormous that Comac alone could not cope with the demand. In a new market analysis, Boeing assumes that the Chinese aircraft market will grow even faster than previously thought, despite Covid. The Americans predict that China will need around 8600 new passenger aircraft by 2040. Boeing forecasts a need for 6450 new medium-haul aircraft like the C919 over the next 20 years. It assumes 1590 orders for wide-body, multi-aisle planes.
Wide-body aircraft planned for 2025
Here, Comac also wants to be involved soon. In cooperation with the Russian aviation company UAC, the Chinese are working on a plane that will seat 280 passengers and have a range of 12,000 kilometers. Construction of a first test aircraft is to begin this year. The market launch of the CR929 is planned for 2025.
The Chinese could face headwinds over their plans from Washington. Because alongside tech companies like Huawei and Xiaomi, Comac has already landed on the Americans’ blacklists. Under the rules now in place, US investors are not allowed to put money into Comac, but that is not relevant to the Chinese state-owned company anyway. However, if the US government were to tighten its crackdown, Comac could be cut off from international suppliers in a similar way to Huawei.Gregor Koppenburg/Joern Petring
The new US President, Joe Biden, wants to do just about everything differently from his predecessor. Biden wants to focus on understanding and involving allies in Europe and Asia more again. As one of his first acts in office, the US has joined the Paris Agreement on climate action, as well as the World Health Organization. But on one point, Biden seems to want to continue Donald Trump’s policy: in confrontational dealings with the Chinese leadership in Beijing.
Biden’s presidency leads to tough negotiations
In his first phone call with China’s leader and Party Chief Xi Jinping last Thursday, Biden described the People’s Republic as the “most serious competitor” to the USA. He did not speak of an enemy, as the erratic Trump called the Chinese leader for some time. But at the same time, Biden made clear that there would also be tough negotiations under his leadership. “But we’re ready to work with Beijing when it’s in America’s interest to do so.”
In the two-hour phone call, Biden also outright named what he saw as the biggest points of conflict: “Beijing’s coercive and unfair economic practices, crackdown in Hong Kong, human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and increasingly assertive actions in the region, including toward Taiwan.”
China’s President Xi, for his part, apparently knew what he would face with Biden and warned against an overly confrontational stance, “which will definitely be disastrous for both countries and the world”. Cooperation was the only right choice, he said, while confrontation would harm both countries. At the same time, Xi made clear: Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Xinjiang are “China’s internal affairs”. The US must respect these core Chinese interests.
While Biden had already made clear before taking office in January that there would be no general change of course in his country’s China policy, his staff has now also specified what the People’s Republic will be facingsoon.
Militarily, the US President wants to reposition the US presence in East and Southeast Asia strategically – and does not rule out rearmament. Operational concepts, technologies and troop strengths are to be put to the test. This would involve 15 senior and renowned civilian and military experts to have recommendations for action on how to deal with China in four months. “China poses growing challenges that we need to meet to keep peace and defend our interest in the Indo-Pacific and globally,” Biden justified this prioritization in a speech at the Pentagon.
US forces already maintain a Pacific fleet and have military bases in Japan, South Korea and the US territory of Guam. But they had steadily reduced their presence in the Philippines in recent decades. Biden’s staff is now considering greater cooperation with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterteagain, whom the US administration under Barack Obama and Biden as Vice President had heavily criticized for human rights abuses related to Duterte’s hard-line drug policies. Duterte called Obama a “son of a bitch” at the time. But the US is also in talks with Vietnam, with which it was at war until 1975.
China claims large parts of the disputed South China Sea as far as the coasts of Vietnam, the Philippines, and other Southeast Asian countries. Moreover, the South China Sea is now one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world – and thus also of high strategic value to the US. In his speech to the Pentagon, Biden spoke of a “free and open Indo-Pacific” for which the US would campaign. That means: even more US Navy cruisers in these waters.
More than ‘pivot to Asia‘
Biden is also likely to direct the US focus on the region much more strongly than during Obama’s presidency. As early as 2011, Obama had declared “pivot to Asia” to be the US foreign policy guideline and, with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), also wanted to create an economic free trade area that would encompass all states in the Asia-Pacific region – except China. Trump, however, put an end to all free trade agreements. Beijing has since signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a free trade agreement with almost all countries in East and Southeast Asia. The US is not part of it.
Experts, however, had already criticized Obama for his China strategy, calling his “Pivot to Asia” a “major foreign policy failure.” Obama had proceeded half-heartedly, had achieved nothing in the interests of the USA, and had instead spurred the communist leadership in Beijing to become even more involved in the region. Now Biden wants to revise this mistake and has recently described China as an aggressive rival several times. “If we don’t get moving, they’re going to eat our lunch,” Biden said Thursday after his conversation with Xi. Biden announced massive government investment to equip the US to confront and compete with China.
Even if Biden officially criticizes the trade conflicts of his country with the rest of the world – the Biden administration wants to maintain the additional tariffs on goods from China enacted by the Trump administration. He does not want to deprive himself of his options, Biden had already declared in December in an interview with the New York Times.
And what’s more, Biden is even planning further restrictions on certain exports of technology to China. Unlike Trump, the new US administration wants to consultmuch more withallied states beforehand, US State Department spokesman Edward Price stressed: “The US Secretary of State and the US President only contacted China after a series of phone calls with our closest allies. This was because we wanted to make sure we had closely coordinated our policies with our partners in Europe and the Indo-Pacific region.”
For Europe, and especially for the Germans with their own business interests in the People’s Republic, this is likely to mean more complications.
It is a giant step in the development of autonomous driving. Since the end ofJanuary, customers in Shenzhen in southern Chinacan book autonomous cabs in everyday traffic for the first time. All they have to do is register in an app. There is no longer a safety passenger in the car. The 25 cabs are also not controlled remotely in a control center. They are fully autonomous on the road in a neighborhood of the city of 20 million, as you can see in a YouTube video. The cars belong to the Chinese start-up AutoX, founded by Xiao Jianxiong in Shenzhen. In China, he is nicknamed Professor X.
Stress test in densely populated cities
AutoX is now trying to overtake the Google company Waymo. Waymo cars are also already driverless, but much slower and in a suburb of Phoenix /Arizona. Phoenix has an average of 1200 residents per square kilometer. In Shenzhen, there are 8000. “The denser the traffic, the more reliable the stress tests, and the faster the technology becomes suitable for everyday use,” says AutoX boss Xiao confidently. “If the vehicles can drive safely on Chinese city streets, they can get through anywhere in the world.” His robot cabs are also the “first in the world to be allowed to drive at 80 kilometers per hour on normal roads and 100 kilometers per hour on highways,” Xiao says.
The cars are also considered safe by international standards because AutoX already became the first Chinese company to get a US license for autonomous driving without a safety driver last fall. It is the third company after Waymo and Nuro. AutoX’s autonomous cars are now the only ones allowed driverless on a daily basis in both the US and China.
Xiao: autonomous driving soon fit for mass production
The complexity of this innovation tends to be underestimated, says John Krafcik, Waymo’s Chief Executive. Autonomous drivingis “a bigger challenge than launching a rocket and putting it in orbit around the Earth.” That is due to the almost unmanageable safety challenges, he says.
Nevertheless, Xiao Jianxiong believesautonomous cabs will alreadybe driving on Chinese roads as a mass product in two to four years. After two decades of intensive global research, he says, they are finally ready. However, he founded his start-up less than five years ago.
Even Bill Russo, Chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce’s auto committee in Shanghai, expresses his surprise at the product’s maturity after testing AutoX’s self-driving vehicles. “Companies in China are much more willing to take the experimental approach to solving problems in a live setting, not in a controlled setting,” Russo says. That remains a shortcoming for major US vendors like Google’s Waymo, he says.
Russo uses an image from skiing: The Chinese would go right down the black diamond, not practice on the bunny hill. “While AutoX in San Jose, California, is only allowed to test with one car in a certain area and only at a speed of 45 kilometers per hour, the cars in Shenzhen are on the road like normal cars,” Russo says. He adds that not only the companies but also the government is more open to experimentation.
Xiao Jianxiong also relies on its own, much cheaper technology than Google & Co. Their orientation system consists of five lidar sensors – a type of laser radar – and four radar systems and costs around €65,000, including cameras and a central computer. Lidar is the abbreviation for light detection and ranging, a method of optical distance and speed measurement using sensors.
Xiao Jianxiong considers the technology “expensive and unsatisfactory”, so he has been taking unusual approaches from the start. He relies on seven Logitech webcams that cost no more than $500 in total and are connected to 3-D deep learning software. The industry was perplexed by how well it works when Xiao unveiled the system at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital conference in 2017.
Xiao does not like the lidar sensors, which cannot see as far in the dark as cameras. And he thinks they are too susceptible to heat and cold. He shares his aversion to the lidar system with Tesla founder Elon Musk, who takes a different approach. He relies on a combination of cameras, GPS, and ultrasonic sensors. The AutoX system has a weakness, though. The lenses of the cameras must not get dirty. If they do, the software can go haywire.
Beijing promotes technology
Xiao, who grew up in a small town in southern China and studied in Hong Kong, first became a Professor at Princeton University and founder of the Computer Vision and Robotics Lab there until he founded AutoX in 2016. He has since raised over $160 million in two rounds of funding. His investors include Alibaba, Wuhan-based DongFeng Group and Shanghai automaker SAIC. The latter are among China’s top four automakers. By comparison, Waymo is funded with over $3 billion and was founded at the same time as AutoX.
From now on, AutoX is all about collecting as much data as possible in everyday operations as quickly as possible. Because the software becomes more reliable with growing “experience”. This works something like combining the individual experiences of many drivers in one brain, comparing them, and making them available at the same time.
In Shanghai, AutoX maintains the largest data center for self-driving cars in China and the largest robot cab test center in Asia, according to its own statement. According to a government plan published in the winter of 2020, 50 percent of all newly registered cars in China are to be equipped with autonomous driving functions by 2025. The Chinese Ministry of Transport supports autonomous driving technology as an essential part of building a nationwide intelligent transportation system and is encouraging cities and companies to launch pilot programs for robot cabs.
Car Industry
smart mobility
News
G7: Britain plans D10 coalition against China
Britain, which is chairingthe G7 this year, plans to hold its first virtual conference next Friday under the leadership of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The aim is to develop a “joint strategy on China”, as Bloomberg reports.Britainalso invited Australia, South Korea and India to the G7 summit in Cornwall from June 11 to 13. According to the report, Prime Minister Johnson wants to use it to form a so-called D10 coalition of democratic countries to contain China. Britain is proposing a joint declaration to promote open societies, democratic values and human rights, according to Bloomberg.
The UK, Australia and India are at odds with China in different ways. For example, a tightening of the Trade Act has been under negotiation in the British Parliament for several weeks. The British House of Lords has already demanded twice that a so-called “genocide amendment” be included in the law. If this succeeds in the third attempt despite the opposition by the ruling party in the House of Commons, a future trade agreement between the UK and China would be made more difficult because of the human rights violations in Xinjiang. The revocation of the British broadcasting license for Chinese state broadcaster CGTN and the subsequent banning of BBC World News from China also increased diplomatic tensions.
China is also waging a “trade war” with Australia. After repeated Australian criticism of human rights violations, China imposed high import tariffs, for instance, on winefrom Australia. Moreover, Australian coal freighterswere notallowed to dock in Chinese ports. In the past few months, there have been repeated violent military clashesbetween China and India at the border in the Himalayas, with numerous casualties. nib
G7
Geopolitics
Diess: no forced labor at VW
Volkswagen boss Herbert Diess has once again rejected accusations that the carmaker uses forced labor in the Chinese Uyghur region of Xinjiang. Diess told the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung” that Volkswagenstands by its commitment in China – also in Xinjiang. He added the German group’s presence in the region was more likely to help improve the situation for the people than to turn them away.
“Neither we nor our suppliers employ forced laborers. We have zero tolerance here. We also uphold our values in Xinjiang, which include employee representation, respect for minorities and social and labor standards,” said VW’s CEO.
In the interview, Diess generally justifies doing business in autocratically ruled states: Only 5.7 percent of the world’s population live in a democracy “as we know it”, according to the “Economist”, he said: “If we were only active in these countries, we and all other global companies would not last.” asi
Car Industry
Forced Labor
SAIC
EU condemns action against BBC
The EU has spoken out in the media battle between Beijing and London: In a statement, the European External Action Service (EEAS) condemnedChina’s decision to revoke the broadcasting license of the British television station BBC World News. This is the latest move by China to restrictfreedom of expression and access to information within its borders, the EEAS criticized. “The decision to ban the BBC should be reversed.”
The EU’s external affairs agency also condemned that the independent but state-funded broadcaster in Hong Kong (RTHK) had announced it would cease broadcasting BBC World Service Radio and BBC News Weekly. It said this further reinforces the “erosion of rights and freedoms” in Hong Kong. The move also showed the reduction of Hong Kong’s autonomy within the “one country, two systems” principle, EEAS said. The EU pointed out that China’s citizens must enjoy the freedom of speech and freedom of the press under the constitution, which is a human right.
On Thursday, China banned BBCfrom broadcasting in the country because of “content that violates the law”, accusing the broadcaster of spreading false news about Xinjiang and Hong Kong. In turn, the British media regulator Ofcom had previously withdrawn the broadcasting license forthe UKfrom the Chinese news channel CGTN, citing political influence. In Germany, too, CGTN is threatened with a broadcasting stop after losing its British broadcasting license. ari
BBC
Civil Society
EEAS
Freedom of speech
Dispute over raw coronavirus data from Wuhan
After the WHO mission in Wuhan, a discussionabout the coronavirus raw dataignited. The Chinese government does not want to make the data available to the experts. The experts expect these data to shed light on the early course of the Sars-Cov-2 disease. The focus includes serum samples from the first Covid patients in Wuhan.
Dominic Dwyer, a microbiologist who was part of the WHO delegation to China, had told Australian broadcaster Nine News that genetic analysis of the earliest Sars Cov-2 variants found indicated “that the virus was probably spreading as early as mid-November, early December”.
The case involves raw data from 72,000 cases of illness with fever, flu or pneumonia that occurred in Wuhan between October and December. The Chinese authorities had only investigated around 92 cases and subsequently carried out antibody tests on some of them, which, however, were completely inconclusive. WHO experts, however, doubt these results. “Antibodies do clear. The levels go down, but less so in cases of severe infections,” Marion Koopmans, a virologist on the WHO team, told The Wall Street Journal. “From what we know about serology, out of 92 cases, you would at least have some positives,” Koopmans added.
USA support request for coronavirus data
On Saturday, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan backed the WHO experts’ demand for the release of the raw data and criticized China in a statement. He said it was crucial that the WHO report would be independent, “free from interference or alteration by the Chinese government.” He said China must make its data on the first days of the outbreak available. The Chinese government then banned criticism from Washington on Sunday, saying that the US had discredited the WHO’s work in the past itself.
Apparently, there are differing views on the willingness of the Chinese to cooperate even within the WHO research team. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced a summary report on the mission for this week – with a full report to be publishedonly “in the coming weeks”. niw
Geopolitics
Health
Heads
Jakub Jakóbowski
Coordinator of the new Connectivity in Eurasia project
Since last year, Jakub Jakóbowski has been the coordinator of the new Connectivity in Eurasia project within the Polish government think tank OSW, the Center for Eastern Studies. Together with other researchers, Jakóbowksi is conducting research on transport, infrastructure and digital networking between China and Europe.
His interest in China was sparked ten years ago. At the time, Jakub Jakóbowski was studying for a semester at Soochow University in Taiwan. It quickly became clear to him: “China is the topic of the 21st century.” Several trips to China followed. Jakóbowksi began advising Polish companies about the Chinese market. China’s foreign policy has changed a lot under the head of government, Xi Jinping, he says: “The time of purely economic interests is over.”
Influencing political decisions in investment countries – that is Beijing’s new goal. China is using its economic power as leverage. Jakub Jakóbowski is currently finishing his doctoral thesis on Chinese policy in Latin America, Africa and Central Europe. He has taken a closer look at the way China is gradually shifting its production sites to African countries. While China used to see Africa primarily as a supplier of raw materials, the continent is now alsobecoming more interesting as a production location.
According to Jakub Jakóbowski, China sees Eastern Europe as part of the Global South
China tries to proceed in many countries according to the following blueprint, says Jakub Jakóbowski: build institutions, put a lot of money into them, and then establish the infrastructure and the flow of money with China at the center, as the decision-maker. But in countries like Jakóbowski’s native Poland, Chinese policy has failed, he said. “China sees Eastern European countries as part of the Global South.” But many of these countries have better alternatives, he said. EU funds often help in a more focused way and allow more independence.
Jakóbowski advises that while Poland and other Western countries should cooperate economically with China in the future, theyshould always control politics and infrastructure themselves. A balancing act. Especially because the decision-makers in China are certain: The West will fight back. According to Jakóbowski, that is why the country is going on the offensive. Stronger ties with the EU would protect Eastern European states from Chinese influence.
Jakóbowski is always drawn to the Far East. Most recently, in 2018, he lived and did research in Taiwan: “It’s one of the friendliest places. You can live in an open, transparent society and take a look at China at the same time.” Culturally, the countries are very similar, he said. “But in China, everything is more chaotic, although the society is more structured,” Jakóbowski says. He is waiting to finally make plans for the next trip to Taiwan. Only one thing is certain: a stop in Beijing is a must.
In addition to his education in economics, Jakóbowski also studied ethnology and cultural anthropology. “As an anthropologist, I talked a lot about politics with people from former Soviet states; now it’s more about economics,” Jakóbowksi says. “But what I do now continues to be based on what I learn from talking to people.“ Marita Wehlus
G7: Britain wants plans D10 coalition against China
VW CEO Diess defends Xinjiang site
EU criticizes BBC broadcasting ban
Dispute over Covid raw data from Wuhan
Heads: Jakub Jakóbowksi
Dear reader,
Covid has dealt a hard blow to passenger aircraft manufacturers. Nevertheless, Airbus and Boeing expect a considerably growing sales market in China. Gregor Koppenburg and Joern Petring subject Comac, the Chinese competitor of the two major suppliers, to a stress test.
Xiao Jianxiong is known as “Professor X” in China. Xiao taught at Princeton University and founded the Computer Vision and Robotics Lab before founding the start-up AutoX in Shenzhen in 2016. Frank Sieren describes how Xiao’s first autonomous cabs now drive in the metropolis and collect important data for regular operation.
The G7 member states are planning a joint China strategy under British leadership. This Friday’s virtual kick-off meeting will also be about this issue, as Nico Beckert reports.
And finally, it’s all about football. As successful as the team is on the pitch. Bayern Munich seems to lack fortune in its international activities. First, the Bavarians complained loudly because they could not leave Berlin’s BER airport on time for the club’s match in Qatar. Now, they angered the Chinese with a New Year tweet that also featured the flag of Taiwan. So, for the second time, the federation had to apologize for the same diplomatic goal.
Your Antje Sirleschtov
Feature
Comac: China’s attack on Boeing and Airbus
The Covid crisis has clearly left its mark on the order books of the world’s two largest aircraft manufacturers. Due to the pandemic, Airbus delivered 566 aircraft last year. That is 34 percent less than in 2019. The deliveries of US competitor Boeing, which, in addition to the Covid crisis, is still struggling with the image damage caused by the series of crashes of its 737 Max series, even slumped by more than half to 157 aircraft.
The Chinese aircraft manufacturer Comac is not letting itself be put off by this depressing market environment. As the group recently announced, delivery of the first Chinese medium-haul C919 aircraft will begin this year as planned.
This would be a big step for the aviation industry of the People’s Republic. China can launch spaceships into space, is the market leader in EVs and has covered the country with a dense network of high-speed trains in record time. It isonly in the construction of passenger aircraft that the country, which is hungry for technological progress, has struggled so far.
But that is also changing. After Comac already has the small regional jet ARJ-21 on offer, the C919 is the first larger passenger aircraft from China. With 168 seats and a range of 4075 kilometers, the aircraft is intended to compete with Boeing’s 737 and the Airbus A320, two of the world’s best-selling aircraft.
Most aviation experts believe there is still a long way to go before Comac can really fly on par with its competitors because, technically, the C919 is nowhere near the latest models from Airbus and Boeing, which score points above all for their lower kerosene consumption.
Even China’s state media are cautious in their assessment. In the coming decades, Chinese aircraft would certainly become a “strong alternative”, China’s state news agency Xinhua wrote after the first test flight of the C919 three years ago. In the short term, however, it is “unrealistic” that the dominance of Airbus and Boeing will be broken by Comac.
The question, however, is not so much whether Comac will succeed in becoming a third major supplier but when.
C919 initially for China only
Finally, the C919 is part of China’s industrial plan to develop advanced industries and technologies. Beijing’s strategy is to close the technology gap with Western companies in many sectors and to produce world market leaders. Initially, production facilities will be modernized, and the country will later become an “industrial superpower”. The C919 still lacks certification for most international flights. But the manufacturer does not need it for the time being. The huge domestic market alone can pave the way for Comac to become a new aviation giant.
In January, the Japanese business newspaper Nikkei investigated how closely China’s state-owned airlines and the likewise state-owned aircraft manufacturer Comac actually work together. According to the research, the three leading airlines, Air China, China Southern and China Eastern, canceled more than 100 orders for new aircraft from Boeing and Airbus last year for the time being because of the coronavirus. Deliveries of the ARJ-21 regional jet from Comac, on the other hand, went ahead as planned. According to Comac, there are already about 800 orders for the new C919. But even if Comac will enjoy advantages in its home market, neither Airbus nor Boeing have much to worry about at the moment.
The demand for aircraft in China is so enormous that Comac alone could not cope with the demand. In a new market analysis, Boeing assumes that the Chinese aircraft market will grow even faster than previously thought, despite Covid. The Americans predict that China will need around 8600 new passenger aircraft by 2040. Boeing forecasts a need for 6450 new medium-haul aircraft like the C919 over the next 20 years. It assumes 1590 orders for wide-body, multi-aisle planes.
Wide-body aircraft planned for 2025
Here, Comac also wants to be involved soon. In cooperation with the Russian aviation company UAC, the Chinese are working on a plane that will seat 280 passengers and have a range of 12,000 kilometers. Construction of a first test aircraft is to begin this year. The market launch of the CR929 is planned for 2025.
The Chinese could face headwinds over their plans from Washington. Because alongside tech companies like Huawei and Xiaomi, Comac has already landed on the Americans’ blacklists. Under the rules now in place, US investors are not allowed to put money into Comac, but that is not relevant to the Chinese state-owned company anyway. However, if the US government were to tighten its crackdown, Comac could be cut off from international suppliers in a similar way to Huawei.Gregor Koppenburg/Joern Petring
The new US President, Joe Biden, wants to do just about everything differently from his predecessor. Biden wants to focus on understanding and involving allies in Europe and Asia more again. As one of his first acts in office, the US has joined the Paris Agreement on climate action, as well as the World Health Organization. But on one point, Biden seems to want to continue Donald Trump’s policy: in confrontational dealings with the Chinese leadership in Beijing.
Biden’s presidency leads to tough negotiations
In his first phone call with China’s leader and Party Chief Xi Jinping last Thursday, Biden described the People’s Republic as the “most serious competitor” to the USA. He did not speak of an enemy, as the erratic Trump called the Chinese leader for some time. But at the same time, Biden made clear that there would also be tough negotiations under his leadership. “But we’re ready to work with Beijing when it’s in America’s interest to do so.”
In the two-hour phone call, Biden also outright named what he saw as the biggest points of conflict: “Beijing’s coercive and unfair economic practices, crackdown in Hong Kong, human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and increasingly assertive actions in the region, including toward Taiwan.”
China’s President Xi, for his part, apparently knew what he would face with Biden and warned against an overly confrontational stance, “which will definitely be disastrous for both countries and the world”. Cooperation was the only right choice, he said, while confrontation would harm both countries. At the same time, Xi made clear: Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Xinjiang are “China’s internal affairs”. The US must respect these core Chinese interests.
While Biden had already made clear before taking office in January that there would be no general change of course in his country’s China policy, his staff has now also specified what the People’s Republic will be facingsoon.
Militarily, the US President wants to reposition the US presence in East and Southeast Asia strategically – and does not rule out rearmament. Operational concepts, technologies and troop strengths are to be put to the test. This would involve 15 senior and renowned civilian and military experts to have recommendations for action on how to deal with China in four months. “China poses growing challenges that we need to meet to keep peace and defend our interest in the Indo-Pacific and globally,” Biden justified this prioritization in a speech at the Pentagon.
US forces already maintain a Pacific fleet and have military bases in Japan, South Korea and the US territory of Guam. But they had steadily reduced their presence in the Philippines in recent decades. Biden’s staff is now considering greater cooperation with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterteagain, whom the US administration under Barack Obama and Biden as Vice President had heavily criticized for human rights abuses related to Duterte’s hard-line drug policies. Duterte called Obama a “son of a bitch” at the time. But the US is also in talks with Vietnam, with which it was at war until 1975.
China claims large parts of the disputed South China Sea as far as the coasts of Vietnam, the Philippines, and other Southeast Asian countries. Moreover, the South China Sea is now one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world – and thus also of high strategic value to the US. In his speech to the Pentagon, Biden spoke of a “free and open Indo-Pacific” for which the US would campaign. That means: even more US Navy cruisers in these waters.
More than ‘pivot to Asia‘
Biden is also likely to direct the US focus on the region much more strongly than during Obama’s presidency. As early as 2011, Obama had declared “pivot to Asia” to be the US foreign policy guideline and, with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), also wanted to create an economic free trade area that would encompass all states in the Asia-Pacific region – except China. Trump, however, put an end to all free trade agreements. Beijing has since signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a free trade agreement with almost all countries in East and Southeast Asia. The US is not part of it.
Experts, however, had already criticized Obama for his China strategy, calling his “Pivot to Asia” a “major foreign policy failure.” Obama had proceeded half-heartedly, had achieved nothing in the interests of the USA, and had instead spurred the communist leadership in Beijing to become even more involved in the region. Now Biden wants to revise this mistake and has recently described China as an aggressive rival several times. “If we don’t get moving, they’re going to eat our lunch,” Biden said Thursday after his conversation with Xi. Biden announced massive government investment to equip the US to confront and compete with China.
Even if Biden officially criticizes the trade conflicts of his country with the rest of the world – the Biden administration wants to maintain the additional tariffs on goods from China enacted by the Trump administration. He does not want to deprive himself of his options, Biden had already declared in December in an interview with the New York Times.
And what’s more, Biden is even planning further restrictions on certain exports of technology to China. Unlike Trump, the new US administration wants to consultmuch more withallied states beforehand, US State Department spokesman Edward Price stressed: “The US Secretary of State and the US President only contacted China after a series of phone calls with our closest allies. This was because we wanted to make sure we had closely coordinated our policies with our partners in Europe and the Indo-Pacific region.”
For Europe, and especially for the Germans with their own business interests in the People’s Republic, this is likely to mean more complications.
It is a giant step in the development of autonomous driving. Since the end ofJanuary, customers in Shenzhen in southern Chinacan book autonomous cabs in everyday traffic for the first time. All they have to do is register in an app. There is no longer a safety passenger in the car. The 25 cabs are also not controlled remotely in a control center. They are fully autonomous on the road in a neighborhood of the city of 20 million, as you can see in a YouTube video. The cars belong to the Chinese start-up AutoX, founded by Xiao Jianxiong in Shenzhen. In China, he is nicknamed Professor X.
Stress test in densely populated cities
AutoX is now trying to overtake the Google company Waymo. Waymo cars are also already driverless, but much slower and in a suburb of Phoenix /Arizona. Phoenix has an average of 1200 residents per square kilometer. In Shenzhen, there are 8000. “The denser the traffic, the more reliable the stress tests, and the faster the technology becomes suitable for everyday use,” says AutoX boss Xiao confidently. “If the vehicles can drive safely on Chinese city streets, they can get through anywhere in the world.” His robot cabs are also the “first in the world to be allowed to drive at 80 kilometers per hour on normal roads and 100 kilometers per hour on highways,” Xiao says.
The cars are also considered safe by international standards because AutoX already became the first Chinese company to get a US license for autonomous driving without a safety driver last fall. It is the third company after Waymo and Nuro. AutoX’s autonomous cars are now the only ones allowed driverless on a daily basis in both the US and China.
Xiao: autonomous driving soon fit for mass production
The complexity of this innovation tends to be underestimated, says John Krafcik, Waymo’s Chief Executive. Autonomous drivingis “a bigger challenge than launching a rocket and putting it in orbit around the Earth.” That is due to the almost unmanageable safety challenges, he says.
Nevertheless, Xiao Jianxiong believesautonomous cabs will alreadybe driving on Chinese roads as a mass product in two to four years. After two decades of intensive global research, he says, they are finally ready. However, he founded his start-up less than five years ago.
Even Bill Russo, Chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce’s auto committee in Shanghai, expresses his surprise at the product’s maturity after testing AutoX’s self-driving vehicles. “Companies in China are much more willing to take the experimental approach to solving problems in a live setting, not in a controlled setting,” Russo says. That remains a shortcoming for major US vendors like Google’s Waymo, he says.
Russo uses an image from skiing: The Chinese would go right down the black diamond, not practice on the bunny hill. “While AutoX in San Jose, California, is only allowed to test with one car in a certain area and only at a speed of 45 kilometers per hour, the cars in Shenzhen are on the road like normal cars,” Russo says. He adds that not only the companies but also the government is more open to experimentation.
Xiao Jianxiong also relies on its own, much cheaper technology than Google & Co. Their orientation system consists of five lidar sensors – a type of laser radar – and four radar systems and costs around €65,000, including cameras and a central computer. Lidar is the abbreviation for light detection and ranging, a method of optical distance and speed measurement using sensors.
Xiao Jianxiong considers the technology “expensive and unsatisfactory”, so he has been taking unusual approaches from the start. He relies on seven Logitech webcams that cost no more than $500 in total and are connected to 3-D deep learning software. The industry was perplexed by how well it works when Xiao unveiled the system at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital conference in 2017.
Xiao does not like the lidar sensors, which cannot see as far in the dark as cameras. And he thinks they are too susceptible to heat and cold. He shares his aversion to the lidar system with Tesla founder Elon Musk, who takes a different approach. He relies on a combination of cameras, GPS, and ultrasonic sensors. The AutoX system has a weakness, though. The lenses of the cameras must not get dirty. If they do, the software can go haywire.
Beijing promotes technology
Xiao, who grew up in a small town in southern China and studied in Hong Kong, first became a Professor at Princeton University and founder of the Computer Vision and Robotics Lab there until he founded AutoX in 2016. He has since raised over $160 million in two rounds of funding. His investors include Alibaba, Wuhan-based DongFeng Group and Shanghai automaker SAIC. The latter are among China’s top four automakers. By comparison, Waymo is funded with over $3 billion and was founded at the same time as AutoX.
From now on, AutoX is all about collecting as much data as possible in everyday operations as quickly as possible. Because the software becomes more reliable with growing “experience”. This works something like combining the individual experiences of many drivers in one brain, comparing them, and making them available at the same time.
In Shanghai, AutoX maintains the largest data center for self-driving cars in China and the largest robot cab test center in Asia, according to its own statement. According to a government plan published in the winter of 2020, 50 percent of all newly registered cars in China are to be equipped with autonomous driving functions by 2025. The Chinese Ministry of Transport supports autonomous driving technology as an essential part of building a nationwide intelligent transportation system and is encouraging cities and companies to launch pilot programs for robot cabs.
Car Industry
smart mobility
News
G7: Britain plans D10 coalition against China
Britain, which is chairingthe G7 this year, plans to hold its first virtual conference next Friday under the leadership of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The aim is to develop a “joint strategy on China”, as Bloomberg reports.Britainalso invited Australia, South Korea and India to the G7 summit in Cornwall from June 11 to 13. According to the report, Prime Minister Johnson wants to use it to form a so-called D10 coalition of democratic countries to contain China. Britain is proposing a joint declaration to promote open societies, democratic values and human rights, according to Bloomberg.
The UK, Australia and India are at odds with China in different ways. For example, a tightening of the Trade Act has been under negotiation in the British Parliament for several weeks. The British House of Lords has already demanded twice that a so-called “genocide amendment” be included in the law. If this succeeds in the third attempt despite the opposition by the ruling party in the House of Commons, a future trade agreement between the UK and China would be made more difficult because of the human rights violations in Xinjiang. The revocation of the British broadcasting license for Chinese state broadcaster CGTN and the subsequent banning of BBC World News from China also increased diplomatic tensions.
China is also waging a “trade war” with Australia. After repeated Australian criticism of human rights violations, China imposed high import tariffs, for instance, on winefrom Australia. Moreover, Australian coal freighterswere notallowed to dock in Chinese ports. In the past few months, there have been repeated violent military clashesbetween China and India at the border in the Himalayas, with numerous casualties. nib
G7
Geopolitics
Diess: no forced labor at VW
Volkswagen boss Herbert Diess has once again rejected accusations that the carmaker uses forced labor in the Chinese Uyghur region of Xinjiang. Diess told the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung” that Volkswagenstands by its commitment in China – also in Xinjiang. He added the German group’s presence in the region was more likely to help improve the situation for the people than to turn them away.
“Neither we nor our suppliers employ forced laborers. We have zero tolerance here. We also uphold our values in Xinjiang, which include employee representation, respect for minorities and social and labor standards,” said VW’s CEO.
In the interview, Diess generally justifies doing business in autocratically ruled states: Only 5.7 percent of the world’s population live in a democracy “as we know it”, according to the “Economist”, he said: “If we were only active in these countries, we and all other global companies would not last.” asi
Car Industry
Forced Labor
SAIC
EU condemns action against BBC
The EU has spoken out in the media battle between Beijing and London: In a statement, the European External Action Service (EEAS) condemnedChina’s decision to revoke the broadcasting license of the British television station BBC World News. This is the latest move by China to restrictfreedom of expression and access to information within its borders, the EEAS criticized. “The decision to ban the BBC should be reversed.”
The EU’s external affairs agency also condemned that the independent but state-funded broadcaster in Hong Kong (RTHK) had announced it would cease broadcasting BBC World Service Radio and BBC News Weekly. It said this further reinforces the “erosion of rights and freedoms” in Hong Kong. The move also showed the reduction of Hong Kong’s autonomy within the “one country, two systems” principle, EEAS said. The EU pointed out that China’s citizens must enjoy the freedom of speech and freedom of the press under the constitution, which is a human right.
On Thursday, China banned BBCfrom broadcasting in the country because of “content that violates the law”, accusing the broadcaster of spreading false news about Xinjiang and Hong Kong. In turn, the British media regulator Ofcom had previously withdrawn the broadcasting license forthe UKfrom the Chinese news channel CGTN, citing political influence. In Germany, too, CGTN is threatened with a broadcasting stop after losing its British broadcasting license. ari
BBC
Civil Society
EEAS
Freedom of speech
Dispute over raw coronavirus data from Wuhan
After the WHO mission in Wuhan, a discussionabout the coronavirus raw dataignited. The Chinese government does not want to make the data available to the experts. The experts expect these data to shed light on the early course of the Sars-Cov-2 disease. The focus includes serum samples from the first Covid patients in Wuhan.
Dominic Dwyer, a microbiologist who was part of the WHO delegation to China, had told Australian broadcaster Nine News that genetic analysis of the earliest Sars Cov-2 variants found indicated “that the virus was probably spreading as early as mid-November, early December”.
The case involves raw data from 72,000 cases of illness with fever, flu or pneumonia that occurred in Wuhan between October and December. The Chinese authorities had only investigated around 92 cases and subsequently carried out antibody tests on some of them, which, however, were completely inconclusive. WHO experts, however, doubt these results. “Antibodies do clear. The levels go down, but less so in cases of severe infections,” Marion Koopmans, a virologist on the WHO team, told The Wall Street Journal. “From what we know about serology, out of 92 cases, you would at least have some positives,” Koopmans added.
USA support request for coronavirus data
On Saturday, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan backed the WHO experts’ demand for the release of the raw data and criticized China in a statement. He said it was crucial that the WHO report would be independent, “free from interference or alteration by the Chinese government.” He said China must make its data on the first days of the outbreak available. The Chinese government then banned criticism from Washington on Sunday, saying that the US had discredited the WHO’s work in the past itself.
Apparently, there are differing views on the willingness of the Chinese to cooperate even within the WHO research team. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced a summary report on the mission for this week – with a full report to be publishedonly “in the coming weeks”. niw
Geopolitics
Health
Heads
Jakub Jakóbowski
Coordinator of the new Connectivity in Eurasia project
Since last year, Jakub Jakóbowski has been the coordinator of the new Connectivity in Eurasia project within the Polish government think tank OSW, the Center for Eastern Studies. Together with other researchers, Jakóbowksi is conducting research on transport, infrastructure and digital networking between China and Europe.
His interest in China was sparked ten years ago. At the time, Jakub Jakóbowski was studying for a semester at Soochow University in Taiwan. It quickly became clear to him: “China is the topic of the 21st century.” Several trips to China followed. Jakóbowksi began advising Polish companies about the Chinese market. China’s foreign policy has changed a lot under the head of government, Xi Jinping, he says: “The time of purely economic interests is over.”
Influencing political decisions in investment countries – that is Beijing’s new goal. China is using its economic power as leverage. Jakub Jakóbowski is currently finishing his doctoral thesis on Chinese policy in Latin America, Africa and Central Europe. He has taken a closer look at the way China is gradually shifting its production sites to African countries. While China used to see Africa primarily as a supplier of raw materials, the continent is now alsobecoming more interesting as a production location.
According to Jakub Jakóbowski, China sees Eastern Europe as part of the Global South
China tries to proceed in many countries according to the following blueprint, says Jakub Jakóbowski: build institutions, put a lot of money into them, and then establish the infrastructure and the flow of money with China at the center, as the decision-maker. But in countries like Jakóbowski’s native Poland, Chinese policy has failed, he said. “China sees Eastern European countries as part of the Global South.” But many of these countries have better alternatives, he said. EU funds often help in a more focused way and allow more independence.
Jakóbowski advises that while Poland and other Western countries should cooperate economically with China in the future, theyshould always control politics and infrastructure themselves. A balancing act. Especially because the decision-makers in China are certain: The West will fight back. According to Jakóbowski, that is why the country is going on the offensive. Stronger ties with the EU would protect Eastern European states from Chinese influence.
Jakóbowski is always drawn to the Far East. Most recently, in 2018, he lived and did research in Taiwan: “It’s one of the friendliest places. You can live in an open, transparent society and take a look at China at the same time.” Culturally, the countries are very similar, he said. “But in China, everything is more chaotic, although the society is more structured,” Jakóbowski says. He is waiting to finally make plans for the next trip to Taiwan. Only one thing is certain: a stop in Beijing is a must.
In addition to his education in economics, Jakóbowski also studied ethnology and cultural anthropology. “As an anthropologist, I talked a lot about politics with people from former Soviet states; now it’s more about economics,” Jakóbowksi says. “But what I do now continues to be based on what I learn from talking to people.“ Marita Wehlus
