The climate conference in Glasgow ends today. Just before its conclusion, the two largest CO2 emitters China and the US agreed to intensify cooperation on climate protection. Christiane Kuehl has kept track of the summit chaos and assesses the summit: China has agreed to participate in a few new global climate initiatives but stayed away from others, such as the phasing out of cars with internal combustion engines by 2035/40. And in its summit speeches, the People’s Republic insisted on the implementation of all the climate goals already agreed upon. Other countries, on the other hand, wanted to increase the targets, some of which lie far in the future. As exciting as the summit was, in the end, the realization of the climate promises counts. We will keep following the latest developments for you!
Another important summit came to an end yesterday in Beijing: the 6th Plenum of the Central Committee. The plenum passed Xi Jinping’s “historic resolution” – the third one ever to be passed. So far, little is known about its contents. However, first reports suggest that Xi was able to strengthen his power – as expected.
We don’t know whether the participants of both two summits popped the champagne corks afterward or still plan to do so. But our columnist Johnny Erling knows that Beijing also wants to toast internationally with Maotai in the future. So far, the Chinese liquor has not managed to gain a foothold outside of China. But that is about to change. The national liquor already has the status of a luxury good and collector’s item in the People’s Republic. And has become a synonym for corruption, as our columnist tells us.
The ailing real estate group Evergrande is currently shambling from one interest payment to the next. So far, bankruptcy has been averted. Speculators like Goldman Sachs have even stocked up on the company’s bonds in recent weeks, betting on a government bailout. Beijing appears to be slowly restructuring the company. But come spring 2022, the real estate giant will no longer just have to pay interest, it will have to repay its bonds. Just for how much longer will this hanging game drag on, wonder Joern Petring and Gregor Koppenburg.
Have a pleasant weekend!
The COP26 climate conference is heading towards the finishing line with a confusing struggle over climate targets, money, and guidelines. The conference is due to end this Friday, with a final declaration that still had several gaps on Thursday. Among other things, it will address the question of when the signatories to the Paris climate agreement will have to amend their climate targets. The fear of a letdown accompanied the conference from the very beginning. The positions of some countries are divided, and geopolitical tensions are casting a shadow over the conference.
All the more surprising was the news on Wednesday evening when it was announced that China and the US had agreed on a joint approach. Up until now, the two nations have found themselves on opposite poles of the debate in Glasgow. A joint statement now declares that China and the US want to use this “critical moment” to speed up the transition to a carbon-neutral global economy, both together and separately. To this end, more ambitious climate protection measures will be realized before the end of the decade, and a joint task force will be set up.
Concrete details are still lacking. This makes the political signal sent by the two chief negotiators, Xie Zhenhua and John Kerry, all the more important. “Both sides recognize that there is a gap between the current effort and the Paris Agreement goals, so we will jointly strengthen climate action,” said Xie. Kerry stressed that he had spoken with Xie more than 40 times. The agreement is a good sign, Byford Tsang of climate think tank E3G told China.Table: “It will take some heat off the negotiations and gives room for constructive meetings during the final hours.”
So far, it was easy to brand China as a climate offender and blocker at COP26. President Xi Jinping did not even attend the summit. According to a climate report published during the climate conference by research project Global Carbon Project 2021, the People’s Republic accounted for 31 percent of global CO2 emissions last year (China.Table reported). And China had only slightly tightened its climate goals of peaking emissions by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060 (30/60 targets) ahead of the COP26.
In Glasgow, China is also resisting all efforts by the High Ambition Coalition (HAC), an informal group of more than 40 member nations, to make the more ambitious goal of 1.5 °C binding. The Paris climate agreement stipulates limiting global warming to below 2 °C and, if possible, to 1.5 °C. Xie wants to keep both of those goals. This is also the plan of the agreement with the USA, according to Tsang.
Tangible action plans carry more weight for Xie than ever-new goals that lie far in the future and whose implementation remains completely uncertain. Beijing recently unveiled a framework plan (“1+N”) for achieving the 30/60 target (China.Table reported). This puts the People’s Republic further ahead than many other emerging economies. But it lacks critical data: “The key open questions about China’s targets are at what level emissions will peak and how fast will they come down after the peak,” commented Lauri Myllyvirta, a China expert at the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
A real breakthrough is China’s cooperation on methane. The gas, which is emitted in agriculture, among other things, has a much greater greenhouse effect than CO2. The USA and the EU had forged the alliance “Global Methane Pledge” in Glasgow, which aims to cut methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030. China initially stayed away from the proposal. China initially refused to participate. According to observers, this prompted Kerry to spend the night discussing the matter with Xie. He has now announced a national methane plan. In the first half of 2022, China and the USA also want to discuss how they can reduce methane emissions.
China is also participating in two other initiatives forged in Glasgow:
China did not join several other coalitions, including two on coal phase-out:
China is unable to join any coal phase-out agreements as long as it still increases domestic coal demand, says Byford Tsang. “They can’t until they change their own policies.” The same goes for financing oil and gas overseas.
In the meantime, the climate conference has reached the small print. All efforts of the final conference days focus on the finalization of the Paris Climate Agreement regulations and the final declaration of the climate conference. A critical issue is Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which is supposed to regulate market mechanisms for greenhouse gas reductions in the context of international projects on climate protection. The idea is that nations are to fund low-cost climate protection measures in developing countries, for example, in exchange for some sort of CO2 compensation.
But so far, there has been a dispute over accounting rules: Are such projects nearly fully or only partially compensated? It is also necessary to prevent two states from offsetting the same project. China also wishes to transfer older CO2 certificates from the Kyoto Protocol over to the new scheme. Xie Zhenhua had expressed optimism prior to the conference that an agreement would be reached in Glasgow.
As always, China is supporting poorer nations in their demand for more money in Glasgow. There is an urgent need for a plan for the annual provision of $100 billion to developing countries by the rich states, said Xie Zhenhua. A promise to this effect made at the 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen has still not been fulfilled twelve years later.
China also sees itself as a developing country that is entitled to more time on the path to climate neutrality. Ultimately, the People’s Republic must be compared with other large emerging economies. Their targets for achieving carbon neutrality vary: India is aiming for 2070, Saudi Arabia 2060, Brazil 2050, Russia 2060. None of these countries have presented a concrete plan yet.
What really matters, in the end, is what countries actually do to protect the climate. To this end, a working group convened by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, amongst others, is to become active. Many Western countries have repeatedly failed to meet their own climate targets.
Richard Brubaker of environmental consultancy Collective Responsibility believes China will be able to meet its 30/60 targets. “That’s partly because the targets are conservative. If China had set more aggressive targets and then failed to meet them, there would have been little leniency by the international community.” Brubaker sees climate progress at all levels of China’s administration, despite the short-term coal boom. The liberalization of energy rates, for example, is “a big step toward eliminating subsidies for energy consumption.”
Brubaker no longer sees much value in climate conferences since the problems and solutions are well known already. It is important to not politicize the challenges or the questions of guilt, Brubaker told China.Table. China needs to move faster on its climate measures. “But the West needs to do more to support that transition.” The new deal with the US could prove useful.
Maotai is a magic word that can open all doors in the People’s Republic. However, it has also made the 53-percent millet spirit a symbol of corruption. The name is now synonymous with China, just as vodka is for Russia, or cognac and whiskey are associated with France and Scotland. Beijing has so far failed to globalize its national drink and make it a brand to toast China’s rise to the world. Maotai, which belongs to the group of “white (clear) alcohols” (白酒), is not catching on overseas. Neither in taste nor from the exorbitant price. A label change is now supposed to help, according to the motto: A strong country needs a strong liquor.
Henry Kissinger, who masterminded the US-China reconciliation, had to toast Maotai (茅台酒) at the Beijing state banquet when his President Richard Nixon visited in 1972. He was not impressed. In his memoirs, he compared the millet liquor (干杯) to aviation fuel: “It is only drunk and not used as jet fuel because it is too flammable.”
Just how right he became apparent after the return of the Americans. As a gift, Nixon brought two bottles back to Washington. To prove to his daughter Tricia how much alcohol in the Maotai was, he poured it into a bowl and held a lighted match to it. The bowl shattered. Burning liquor spilled over the table and set off fire alarms in the White House.
Top-quality Maotai, which foreigners could buy for just ten yuan a half-liter bottle at the Beijing Friendship Department Store (友谊商店) back in the early 1980s – today a bottle costs at least ¥1,499 (the equivalent of more than €190) – is not only suitable for Molotov cocktails. Rich Chinese stashed away decades-old original bottlings from the distillery, which was converted into a state-owned company in 1951.
When I moved back to Germany from China at the end of 2019, I wanted to take seven bottles of Maotai with me that had been gathering dust in my pantry for more than 20 years. The shipping agent warned me that German customs would charge 30 to 40 percent of the market price to import them. He suggested selling them. The bottles had once been given to me by friends. They were untouched.
On the current online address list on the search portal Baidu, I found that Beijing had 168 shops that bought old Maotai. I made an inquiry to one of them. The owner immediately sent for an inspector who used special measuring instruments to examine the porcelain bottles, check their authenticity, and weigh how much of the contents had evaporated due to improper storage. One bottle was forged, the other was missing a third of its content. The dealer bought the five remaining bottles for the equivalent of €6,000.
Maotai is a cult beverage. The state-owned company, “Kweichow-Moutai” (贵州茅台), has been causing a sensation since its IPO in 1999. Distilled after a secret recipe from millet (sorghum) and wheat and aged for five years, the noble variety owes its alcohol volume to multiple distillations and its status as a state liquor to the nationalization of its three original companies. Of all the “Baijiu” varieties, Maotai is the most expensive brand and a sought-after collector’s item. Auctions report record prices for old vintages. Maotai precursor brandies are often worth more than their weight in gold.
This has also made Maotai synonymous with corruption. One who knew his stuff was party official Yuan Renguo. He steered Maotai affairs from 1994 to 2018, serving as President and Chief Executive of the state-owned conglomerate from 2011. He resigned in 2019 and was arrested shortly after. At the end of September 2021, the Guizhou provincial court sentenced the now 65-year-old to life in prison. He allegedly took bribes of money and real estate worth ¥112.9 million ($17.48 million), sold Maotai sales licenses and representations. Yuan avoided the death penalty only because he confessed and revealed more than investigators knew. 180 employees of the group involved were punished, as were 514 Maotai concession dealers. The province’s Vice Governor, Wang Xiaogang, was also dragged down by yuan. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison and fined ¥174 million. He was said to have thousands of bottles of Maotai in his possession and was nicknamed the “Maotai Collector.” He gave Maotai dealerships to four relatives.
Even though China’s alcohol market has opened up with Beijing’s opening policy and the consumption of imported wines, cognac, liqueurs, or whiskey is booming, the People’s Republic loves its Baijiu more than anything. The classical drinking culture and the traditional custom of drinking beer and schnapps only with food, with toasts and ganbei rituals, is still reflected in the ratio of schnapps to wine consumption. It is at one to seven, according to the latest industry report by German Trade and Invest. In the rest of the world, both are drunk in equal proportions. The gigantic amounts in which a population of billions consumes alcohol daily make China’s market so appealing. By 2030, the per capita consumption of the adult population will exceed the annual ten-liter mark, and China will have overtaken the USA in alcohol consumption.
Young people behave differently. In 2019, more than 80 percent of China’s wine drinkers were between 18 and 35 years old. The new generation does not want to hear anything about the table manners of their parents or grandparents. They now drink socially in bars, clubs, salons, or at home.
The small town of Maotai in Guizhou, where China’s legendary liquor is brewed, remains a world apart. As a landmark for visitors from the provincial capital of Guiyang, located 230 kilometers away, the town has erected a 31 meters tall monument of its red-and-white porcelain bottle. It bears a title in Chinese calligraphy that China’s emperors only bestowed on extravagant structures along the Great Wall. They called it “First under Heaven.”
The “First Bottle Under Heaven” found its way into the “Guinness Book of Records” as the world’s tallest advertising sculpture. But all export initiatives to globalize Maotai and make it palatable not only to Chinese abroad but to the entire world failed. Now Beijing is trying a new name. Instead of the dry English label for Maotai as “Chinese distilled spirits,” as of January 1st, “China’s 2021 Import and Export Tariff Code” gave it a name with a bit more punch: “Chinese Baijiu” (中国白酒英文名改了). Patriotic bloggers praise the label change. It should convince foreign countries that “China’s favorite liquor deserves a place among the world’s famous alcoholic beverages.” A strong country needs strong liquor.
In contrast, the Marxist reformer and polymath Yu Guangyuan once said that the Chinese should first learn from the drinking culture of the world and of Europe before they bestow their drinks on others. In 1987, he coined the term wine culture. For him, it meant “education for enlightenment” and was a tongue-in-cheek act of resistance, as he once told me in Beijing. A philosopher who could read Karl Marx in German, he was brutalized during the Cultural Revolution before being sent to the CCP’s May 7th cadre school in Ningxia in early 1971. There he was forced to spend another three years planting rice and herding pigs. But his illiterate tormentors allowed him to study the works of Mao, Marx, and Engels in the evenings for his re-education.
Yu lived with a simple functionary who liked wine. He suggested to him that they excerpt all the remarks about wine that were hidden in Marx and Engels’ correspondence. Then they could refer to them when they wanted to drink wine. Every evening, Yu wrote down what Marx and Engels wrote to each other about wine on more than 100 index cards and sewed the pages together into a manuscript with needle and thread. His ulterior motive was to hold up a mirror to China’s orthodox, humorless ideologues, who, along with Mao, shaped Marx and Engels into ideological supermen. Yu countered with his tract. Both, he said, were “normal people with human traits who drank wine and could be cheerful.”
The manuscript was lost. After Yu’s rehabilitation, he reconstructed it and published more than 150 pages of annotated remarks by Marx and Engels about wine. It was also a “reminder of desperate times” for him.
East and West have different opinions on Maotai. While the Chinese rave about the “liquid gold,” legendary CBS correspondent Dan Rather coined a Western bon mot. He accompanied President Nixon in 1972, poured the Maotai down, and bluntly described the taste as “liquid razor blades”.
The largest soccer team in the world? Almost! The picture shows cheerleaders performing at the opening of a sports festival at a school in Ji’an.
The climate conference in Glasgow ends today. Just before its conclusion, the two largest CO2 emitters China and the US agreed to intensify cooperation on climate protection. Christiane Kuehl has kept track of the summit chaos and assesses the summit: China has agreed to participate in a few new global climate initiatives but stayed away from others, such as the phasing out of cars with internal combustion engines by 2035/40. And in its summit speeches, the People’s Republic insisted on the implementation of all the climate goals already agreed upon. Other countries, on the other hand, wanted to increase the targets, some of which lie far in the future. As exciting as the summit was, in the end, the realization of the climate promises counts. We will keep following the latest developments for you!
Another important summit came to an end yesterday in Beijing: the 6th Plenum of the Central Committee. The plenum passed Xi Jinping’s “historic resolution” – the third one ever to be passed. So far, little is known about its contents. However, first reports suggest that Xi was able to strengthen his power – as expected.
We don’t know whether the participants of both two summits popped the champagne corks afterward or still plan to do so. But our columnist Johnny Erling knows that Beijing also wants to toast internationally with Maotai in the future. So far, the Chinese liquor has not managed to gain a foothold outside of China. But that is about to change. The national liquor already has the status of a luxury good and collector’s item in the People’s Republic. And has become a synonym for corruption, as our columnist tells us.
The ailing real estate group Evergrande is currently shambling from one interest payment to the next. So far, bankruptcy has been averted. Speculators like Goldman Sachs have even stocked up on the company’s bonds in recent weeks, betting on a government bailout. Beijing appears to be slowly restructuring the company. But come spring 2022, the real estate giant will no longer just have to pay interest, it will have to repay its bonds. Just for how much longer will this hanging game drag on, wonder Joern Petring and Gregor Koppenburg.
Have a pleasant weekend!
The COP26 climate conference is heading towards the finishing line with a confusing struggle over climate targets, money, and guidelines. The conference is due to end this Friday, with a final declaration that still had several gaps on Thursday. Among other things, it will address the question of when the signatories to the Paris climate agreement will have to amend their climate targets. The fear of a letdown accompanied the conference from the very beginning. The positions of some countries are divided, and geopolitical tensions are casting a shadow over the conference.
All the more surprising was the news on Wednesday evening when it was announced that China and the US had agreed on a joint approach. Up until now, the two nations have found themselves on opposite poles of the debate in Glasgow. A joint statement now declares that China and the US want to use this “critical moment” to speed up the transition to a carbon-neutral global economy, both together and separately. To this end, more ambitious climate protection measures will be realized before the end of the decade, and a joint task force will be set up.
Concrete details are still lacking. This makes the political signal sent by the two chief negotiators, Xie Zhenhua and John Kerry, all the more important. “Both sides recognize that there is a gap between the current effort and the Paris Agreement goals, so we will jointly strengthen climate action,” said Xie. Kerry stressed that he had spoken with Xie more than 40 times. The agreement is a good sign, Byford Tsang of climate think tank E3G told China.Table: “It will take some heat off the negotiations and gives room for constructive meetings during the final hours.”
So far, it was easy to brand China as a climate offender and blocker at COP26. President Xi Jinping did not even attend the summit. According to a climate report published during the climate conference by research project Global Carbon Project 2021, the People’s Republic accounted for 31 percent of global CO2 emissions last year (China.Table reported). And China had only slightly tightened its climate goals of peaking emissions by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060 (30/60 targets) ahead of the COP26.
In Glasgow, China is also resisting all efforts by the High Ambition Coalition (HAC), an informal group of more than 40 member nations, to make the more ambitious goal of 1.5 °C binding. The Paris climate agreement stipulates limiting global warming to below 2 °C and, if possible, to 1.5 °C. Xie wants to keep both of those goals. This is also the plan of the agreement with the USA, according to Tsang.
Tangible action plans carry more weight for Xie than ever-new goals that lie far in the future and whose implementation remains completely uncertain. Beijing recently unveiled a framework plan (“1+N”) for achieving the 30/60 target (China.Table reported). This puts the People’s Republic further ahead than many other emerging economies. But it lacks critical data: “The key open questions about China’s targets are at what level emissions will peak and how fast will they come down after the peak,” commented Lauri Myllyvirta, a China expert at the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
A real breakthrough is China’s cooperation on methane. The gas, which is emitted in agriculture, among other things, has a much greater greenhouse effect than CO2. The USA and the EU had forged the alliance “Global Methane Pledge” in Glasgow, which aims to cut methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030. China initially stayed away from the proposal. China initially refused to participate. According to observers, this prompted Kerry to spend the night discussing the matter with Xie. He has now announced a national methane plan. In the first half of 2022, China and the USA also want to discuss how they can reduce methane emissions.
China is also participating in two other initiatives forged in Glasgow:
China did not join several other coalitions, including two on coal phase-out:
China is unable to join any coal phase-out agreements as long as it still increases domestic coal demand, says Byford Tsang. “They can’t until they change their own policies.” The same goes for financing oil and gas overseas.
In the meantime, the climate conference has reached the small print. All efforts of the final conference days focus on the finalization of the Paris Climate Agreement regulations and the final declaration of the climate conference. A critical issue is Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which is supposed to regulate market mechanisms for greenhouse gas reductions in the context of international projects on climate protection. The idea is that nations are to fund low-cost climate protection measures in developing countries, for example, in exchange for some sort of CO2 compensation.
But so far, there has been a dispute over accounting rules: Are such projects nearly fully or only partially compensated? It is also necessary to prevent two states from offsetting the same project. China also wishes to transfer older CO2 certificates from the Kyoto Protocol over to the new scheme. Xie Zhenhua had expressed optimism prior to the conference that an agreement would be reached in Glasgow.
As always, China is supporting poorer nations in their demand for more money in Glasgow. There is an urgent need for a plan for the annual provision of $100 billion to developing countries by the rich states, said Xie Zhenhua. A promise to this effect made at the 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen has still not been fulfilled twelve years later.
China also sees itself as a developing country that is entitled to more time on the path to climate neutrality. Ultimately, the People’s Republic must be compared with other large emerging economies. Their targets for achieving carbon neutrality vary: India is aiming for 2070, Saudi Arabia 2060, Brazil 2050, Russia 2060. None of these countries have presented a concrete plan yet.
What really matters, in the end, is what countries actually do to protect the climate. To this end, a working group convened by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, amongst others, is to become active. Many Western countries have repeatedly failed to meet their own climate targets.
Richard Brubaker of environmental consultancy Collective Responsibility believes China will be able to meet its 30/60 targets. “That’s partly because the targets are conservative. If China had set more aggressive targets and then failed to meet them, there would have been little leniency by the international community.” Brubaker sees climate progress at all levels of China’s administration, despite the short-term coal boom. The liberalization of energy rates, for example, is “a big step toward eliminating subsidies for energy consumption.”
Brubaker no longer sees much value in climate conferences since the problems and solutions are well known already. It is important to not politicize the challenges or the questions of guilt, Brubaker told China.Table. China needs to move faster on its climate measures. “But the West needs to do more to support that transition.” The new deal with the US could prove useful.
Maotai is a magic word that can open all doors in the People’s Republic. However, it has also made the 53-percent millet spirit a symbol of corruption. The name is now synonymous with China, just as vodka is for Russia, or cognac and whiskey are associated with France and Scotland. Beijing has so far failed to globalize its national drink and make it a brand to toast China’s rise to the world. Maotai, which belongs to the group of “white (clear) alcohols” (白酒), is not catching on overseas. Neither in taste nor from the exorbitant price. A label change is now supposed to help, according to the motto: A strong country needs a strong liquor.
Henry Kissinger, who masterminded the US-China reconciliation, had to toast Maotai (茅台酒) at the Beijing state banquet when his President Richard Nixon visited in 1972. He was not impressed. In his memoirs, he compared the millet liquor (干杯) to aviation fuel: “It is only drunk and not used as jet fuel because it is too flammable.”
Just how right he became apparent after the return of the Americans. As a gift, Nixon brought two bottles back to Washington. To prove to his daughter Tricia how much alcohol in the Maotai was, he poured it into a bowl and held a lighted match to it. The bowl shattered. Burning liquor spilled over the table and set off fire alarms in the White House.
Top-quality Maotai, which foreigners could buy for just ten yuan a half-liter bottle at the Beijing Friendship Department Store (友谊商店) back in the early 1980s – today a bottle costs at least ¥1,499 (the equivalent of more than €190) – is not only suitable for Molotov cocktails. Rich Chinese stashed away decades-old original bottlings from the distillery, which was converted into a state-owned company in 1951.
When I moved back to Germany from China at the end of 2019, I wanted to take seven bottles of Maotai with me that had been gathering dust in my pantry for more than 20 years. The shipping agent warned me that German customs would charge 30 to 40 percent of the market price to import them. He suggested selling them. The bottles had once been given to me by friends. They were untouched.
On the current online address list on the search portal Baidu, I found that Beijing had 168 shops that bought old Maotai. I made an inquiry to one of them. The owner immediately sent for an inspector who used special measuring instruments to examine the porcelain bottles, check their authenticity, and weigh how much of the contents had evaporated due to improper storage. One bottle was forged, the other was missing a third of its content. The dealer bought the five remaining bottles for the equivalent of €6,000.
Maotai is a cult beverage. The state-owned company, “Kweichow-Moutai” (贵州茅台), has been causing a sensation since its IPO in 1999. Distilled after a secret recipe from millet (sorghum) and wheat and aged for five years, the noble variety owes its alcohol volume to multiple distillations and its status as a state liquor to the nationalization of its three original companies. Of all the “Baijiu” varieties, Maotai is the most expensive brand and a sought-after collector’s item. Auctions report record prices for old vintages. Maotai precursor brandies are often worth more than their weight in gold.
This has also made Maotai synonymous with corruption. One who knew his stuff was party official Yuan Renguo. He steered Maotai affairs from 1994 to 2018, serving as President and Chief Executive of the state-owned conglomerate from 2011. He resigned in 2019 and was arrested shortly after. At the end of September 2021, the Guizhou provincial court sentenced the now 65-year-old to life in prison. He allegedly took bribes of money and real estate worth ¥112.9 million ($17.48 million), sold Maotai sales licenses and representations. Yuan avoided the death penalty only because he confessed and revealed more than investigators knew. 180 employees of the group involved were punished, as were 514 Maotai concession dealers. The province’s Vice Governor, Wang Xiaogang, was also dragged down by yuan. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison and fined ¥174 million. He was said to have thousands of bottles of Maotai in his possession and was nicknamed the “Maotai Collector.” He gave Maotai dealerships to four relatives.
Even though China’s alcohol market has opened up with Beijing’s opening policy and the consumption of imported wines, cognac, liqueurs, or whiskey is booming, the People’s Republic loves its Baijiu more than anything. The classical drinking culture and the traditional custom of drinking beer and schnapps only with food, with toasts and ganbei rituals, is still reflected in the ratio of schnapps to wine consumption. It is at one to seven, according to the latest industry report by German Trade and Invest. In the rest of the world, both are drunk in equal proportions. The gigantic amounts in which a population of billions consumes alcohol daily make China’s market so appealing. By 2030, the per capita consumption of the adult population will exceed the annual ten-liter mark, and China will have overtaken the USA in alcohol consumption.
Young people behave differently. In 2019, more than 80 percent of China’s wine drinkers were between 18 and 35 years old. The new generation does not want to hear anything about the table manners of their parents or grandparents. They now drink socially in bars, clubs, salons, or at home.
The small town of Maotai in Guizhou, where China’s legendary liquor is brewed, remains a world apart. As a landmark for visitors from the provincial capital of Guiyang, located 230 kilometers away, the town has erected a 31 meters tall monument of its red-and-white porcelain bottle. It bears a title in Chinese calligraphy that China’s emperors only bestowed on extravagant structures along the Great Wall. They called it “First under Heaven.”
The “First Bottle Under Heaven” found its way into the “Guinness Book of Records” as the world’s tallest advertising sculpture. But all export initiatives to globalize Maotai and make it palatable not only to Chinese abroad but to the entire world failed. Now Beijing is trying a new name. Instead of the dry English label for Maotai as “Chinese distilled spirits,” as of January 1st, “China’s 2021 Import and Export Tariff Code” gave it a name with a bit more punch: “Chinese Baijiu” (中国白酒英文名改了). Patriotic bloggers praise the label change. It should convince foreign countries that “China’s favorite liquor deserves a place among the world’s famous alcoholic beverages.” A strong country needs strong liquor.
In contrast, the Marxist reformer and polymath Yu Guangyuan once said that the Chinese should first learn from the drinking culture of the world and of Europe before they bestow their drinks on others. In 1987, he coined the term wine culture. For him, it meant “education for enlightenment” and was a tongue-in-cheek act of resistance, as he once told me in Beijing. A philosopher who could read Karl Marx in German, he was brutalized during the Cultural Revolution before being sent to the CCP’s May 7th cadre school in Ningxia in early 1971. There he was forced to spend another three years planting rice and herding pigs. But his illiterate tormentors allowed him to study the works of Mao, Marx, and Engels in the evenings for his re-education.
Yu lived with a simple functionary who liked wine. He suggested to him that they excerpt all the remarks about wine that were hidden in Marx and Engels’ correspondence. Then they could refer to them when they wanted to drink wine. Every evening, Yu wrote down what Marx and Engels wrote to each other about wine on more than 100 index cards and sewed the pages together into a manuscript with needle and thread. His ulterior motive was to hold up a mirror to China’s orthodox, humorless ideologues, who, along with Mao, shaped Marx and Engels into ideological supermen. Yu countered with his tract. Both, he said, were “normal people with human traits who drank wine and could be cheerful.”
The manuscript was lost. After Yu’s rehabilitation, he reconstructed it and published more than 150 pages of annotated remarks by Marx and Engels about wine. It was also a “reminder of desperate times” for him.
East and West have different opinions on Maotai. While the Chinese rave about the “liquid gold,” legendary CBS correspondent Dan Rather coined a Western bon mot. He accompanied President Nixon in 1972, poured the Maotai down, and bluntly described the taste as “liquid razor blades”.
The largest soccer team in the world? Almost! The picture shows cheerleaders performing at the opening of a sports festival at a school in Ji’an.
