The world is getting smaller and smaller. Thanks to modern Internet connections and advancing digitalization, information and data are sent around the world at breakneck speed. Whether it’s a Zoom meeting with colleagues in Asia, a Skype call with friends in Dubai, or streaming films directly from Bollywood in India – distances are becoming less important. Deep-sea fiber-optic cables are crucial to this. They are laid at the bottom of the oceans and form the backbone of our modern world. But as invisible as they may be, their importance is hard to overestimate because: The respective cable operators decide not only how much but also which data can be sent.
It is precisely the deep-sea fiber-optic cable with the peaceful name Peace that is now becoming a point of contention in Sino-American relations, as Ning Wang reports. She analyses the role that companies such as Google, Facebook, Huawei, and Hengtong play in the dispute over deep-sea cables and how the two superpowers might try to control global data traffic.
Clearly more visible than a deep-sea cable is the port of Piraeus on the Aegean Sea. It was during the financial crisis of 2008 that Europe – and especially Germany’s then Federal Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schäuble – urged the Greeks to sell the ailing port. Beijing immediately pounced – and so many European politicians wondered about the alleged bad investment by the Chinese. Frank Sieren shows how Beijing has, since then, expanded the port into one of Europe’s largest container handling locations. But it’s about more than just profit: The port of Piraeus has become a strategic hub for the Chinese in Europe – much to the displeasure of Europeans and Americans.
European and American politicians should also not like what Marcel Grzanna observes: The front against forced labor in the Xinjiang region is beginning to crumble. Apparently, the calls for a Chinese boycott have led to fears in Western company headquarters that one could make somewhat less profit in the important sales market. Not everyone may go as far as the Japanese fashion chain Muji, which explicitly advertises Xinjiang’s great cotton. But the trend is clear: China’s market power is playing an ever-greater role in a world that is becoming smaller.
It’s about communication, such as Zoom meetings, which are currently taking place more frequently due to the pandemic. But also e-mails, films, and video calls. Control over the data traffic that results from this is now threatening to become the next conflict between the US and China. The trigger is a deep-sea cable that bears the name “Peace” of all things – standing for “Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe”. Peace, when the project is completed at the end of the year, is a fiber-optic cable that will first run over land from China to Pakistan and then go underwater for 12,000 kilometers at the port of Gwadar. It splits before the Horn of Africa: Heading to the south, it reaches Kenya while heading north towards Europe in France, it comes ashore again near a popular beach in Marseille.
As with other deep-sea cable projects, the focus is on reliable connectivity so that companies operating around the world can communicate and transfer data smoothly. The speed of the Peace cable is so great that 90,000 hours of Netflix movies could be transported per second, according to calculations by the financial services provider Bloomberg.
“The Peace cable is primarily intended to provide reliable and fast internet connectivity to Chinese companies operating in Europe and Africa,” Bloomberg further reports. However, it also plays an important role as part of the “Digital Silk Road”. On the one hand, Beijing wants to use the Peace submarine cable project to bind the countries through which it runs more closely to itself by means of infrastructure measures; on the other hand, it can demonstrate its own technological sovereignty by expanding state-of-the-art data lines.
The expansion of the deep-sea cable is well underway in the country. Work is currently underway on the route between Rawalpindi and the cities of Karachi and Gwadar. Most recently, operators were waiting for permission to build a landing station for the cable in the Arabian Sea.
For Pakistan, it is a stroke of luck that the route of the Peace Cable runs through the country: The government wants to use it to modernize its telecommunications infrastructure.
Another side effect arises from Pakistan’s and India’s rivalry. Both countries have been in competition with each other since the partition of the former British colonial territory, making the Peace Project a diplomatic tool for China.
Peace is operated by Peace Cable International Network Co., a subsidiary of China-based power and fiber-optic cable manufacturer Hengtong Group, supported by Huawei Marine, which has laid fiber-optic cables mainly in the Pacific in recent years. Huawei Marine was sold to Hengtong for $85 million last summer. Huawei Technologies, the Shenzhen-based telecom equipment maker, is Hengtong’s third-largest shareholder with about three percent.
Why Huawei is involved becomes clear when one looks at the strategic importance of undersea cables: At present, almost 98 percent of international Internet data and telephone traffic runs through around 400 undersea cables. The majority of these cables are owned and operated by US companies.
The cost of submarine cable projects ranges from $300 million to $400 million and is increasingly being undertaken by technology companies instead of telecommunications companies.
“Some of the major investors in new cables now are Google and Facebook,” warned Alan Maudlin, research director at TeleGeography, a telecommunications research firm, last year. The danger: The technology giants increasingly control the entire underwater bandwidth.
Microsoft and Facebook own the two most important transatlantic deep-sea cables. The new Dunant cable, which has been completed since early February and is soon to be deployed, is also largely funded by Google. According to initial tests, the Dunant deep-sea cable can transmit up to 250 terabits per second. Google itself claims that three times the entire digitized US Library of Congress can be transmitted per second.
The crux of the matter, however, is not how much data is transmitted, but rather which data. This makes the tech companies important geopolitical players in the future. According to Daniel Voelsen of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin, the tech companies are pursuing two goals: “On the one hand, they want to offer their services and content to as many people worldwide as possible and keep growing. On the other hand, it’s about control and power, especially vis-à-vis those states and governments that the tech companies would prefer to regulate. But also vis-à-vis the classic telecom companies, which are becoming more and more dependent not only on the content, but also on the physical infrastructure,” Voelsen said in early March in a SWR 2Wissen feature on “The business with deep-sea cables”.
Facebook, for example, is in the process of laying a deep-sea cable network around Africa, which is to encircle the entire continent from the Mediterranean. Whether the company will then open access to this network to other companies remains questionable. Facebook and Google have already announced that they will not use the Peace submarine cable because they have sufficient capacity of their own.
At the same time, Facebook and Google pulled out of a project that had been underway for years to connect the west coast of the US to Hong Kong via deep-sea cable. They fear that data transmitted over the cable could be at the mercy of a security risk since Beijing massively expanded its control over Hong Kong through the so-called National Security Act.
Accordingly, the warning cries from the US are loud when it comes to Chinese espionage via deep-sea cables. Mike Pompeo, when he was US secretary of state, had called on the international community to “ensure that the deep-sea cables that connect our country to the global Internet are not being subverted for large-scale intelligence gathering by the People’s Republic of China “.
In Europe, on the other hand, people are more relaxed about the process. French President Emmanuel Macron, for example, does not want to isolate China from Internet infrastructure, in part so that France does not have to be “completely dependent on US decisions,” Macron said in an interview at the Atlantic Council in February. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a press conference with Macron on February 5th, also rejected efforts to isolate China, saying she did not think decoupling from China was “the right way to go, especially in this digital age”.
The Institute for Peace and Conflict Research and the Netherlands-based Leiden Asia Center estimate that China will become the landing point, owner or supplier of 11.4 percent of the world’s deep-sea cables by 2019. Between 2025 and 2030, the shares could even rise to 20 percent.
Chinese boycott calls against foreign companies have resulted in the first concessions. The Japanese fashion chain Muji has announced that it will not do without cotton from Xinjiang in its textile production in the future. Muji’s parent company Ryohin Keikaku announced in a statement to the state-run Chinese daily Global Times. A handful of other companies, such as Spanish manufacturer Zara, withdrew their critical statements on the allegations of forced labor in Xinjiang from their websites.
Last week, numerous manufacturers, including the German sporting goods manufacturer Adidas, but above all its US competitor Nike and the Swedish fast-fashion brand H&M, were caught up in a broad wave of outrage on social media in the People’s Republic. Some of the companies had already voiced their concerns about reports of forced labor in Xinjiang the previous year and announced that they would no longer use cotton from the region. It was only months later that a concerted outrage began in the People’s Republic as a reaction to this. It immediately followed the entry into force of sanctions by the European Union and the United States against Chinese officials from the Xinjiang region.
Among other things, the companies had cited assessments by the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), a non-governmental organization headquartered in Geneva that works to promote sustainable conditions in the textile industry worldwide. The BCI branch in China, meanwhile, justified the use of cotton from Xinjiang last week, while the head office’s statement from October 2020 disappeared from the website and has since only been accessible via the cache.
BCI’s financing partners include the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), an economically operating limited liability company that is active in global development aid on behalf of the German government. “There is no cooperation with the Better Cotton Initiative in China,” the organization informs China.Table in response to a query. In the past, it had only supported the BCI in India as a financing partner on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.
On Monday, a group of 16 United Nations human rights experts in Geneva put the number of companies that can be linked to forced labor in Xinjiang at more than 150. The UN experts did not name names but urged the companies to review their supply chains. The group also said it had reminded 13 governments of their responsibilities. It remained open whether the German government had also received one of the confidential letters.
Muji has now responded to the outcry from China, the momentum of which was accelerated by state media with sharp comments and threats, with a clearly visible reference to the use of the controversial cotton in its textiles on its Chinese-language website. To this end, the company posted a video online showing the production of the raw material from Xinjiang. In doing so, the company went significantly further than others concerned, having days earlier expressed concern about reports of forced labor. It argues that its decision was based on the findings of an independent investigation it commissioned. No evidence of forced labor had been found among indirect suppliers of cotton, it said. At the beginning of March, Japanese companies had announced a corresponding investigation of their supply chains and corresponding consequences.
The investigation had been guided by the Xinjiang Supply Chain Business Advisory, a guide to supply chain optimization for international corporations formulated by several US departments last summer. It remained unclear whether Muji continues to use Xinjiang cotton only in products for the Chinese market or also for goods destined for Europe or the US. The US had implemented an import ban on textiles containing cotton from Xinjiang a few weeks ago. Tomatoes from the region are also affected by the ban.
At a press conference on Monday, the People’s Republic once again increased the pressure on foreign companies. The main target was H&M, but the warning was allowed to be understood as universal. “I don’t think companies should politicize their economic actions. Can H&M continue to make money in the Chinese market?” a spokesman for the Xinjiang regional government asked and promptly answered, “Not anymore.” He said it was unreasonable of companies to get caught up in sanctions. “It’s like lifting a stone and dropping it on your own foot.”
Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch (HRW) described the dispute as a litmus test for companies that have pledged to uphold human rights. “The Chinese government is showing its true colors by pressuring companies to be complicit in abuses instead of working (with them) to end violence against Turkic Muslims,” said HRW China Officer Sophie Richardson. The organization called on companies to take a firm stand against forced labor. The Chinese authorities are once again arbitrarily punishing a particular group because their view of things contradicts the position of the People’s Republic, she said.
In addition to Muji, Inditex, the parent company of Zara, as well as the clothing company Philipps-Van Heusen (PVH) from New York, to which the Calvin Klein brand belongs, and the American VP Corporation, the market leader for workwear and backpacks, tried to smooth the waters by deleting or modifying their statements from their websites. Manufacturers Fila and Hugo Boss had previously announced their intention to continue using cotton from Xinjiang. The share prices of numerous textile companies had plummeted significantly last week. Meanwhile, Chinese network operator Huawei banned smartphone applications from Nike and Adidas from its app store.
The crumbling front of companies rejecting cotton from the Uighur-majority region in northwest China is another stumbling block in the fight against forced labor. A united industry renunciation would spread the burden of China’s countermeasures on many shoulders. However, the potential loss of market share by some firms could tempt their competitors to capitalize on each other’s dilemma. However, Muji, for example, did not yet feel any positive effect in the short term. Comments on the internet accused the company of “hypocrisy”. Especially since the Reuters news agency had reported on Muji’s concerns about using cotton from Xinjiang only a few days earlier.
Ferdinand Rudolph-Bartels could spend his free time playing golf or tennis. But instead, the 55-year-old has found another hobby. Together with non-profit companies, he helps start-ups from Germany gain a foothold in the Chinese market. “I myself gained my experience in West German big industries, which invested a lot in China. In the 2000s, I looked after a lot of investments in China – very classic export industry and business development there,” he recalls. “I came to Berlin to the start-up and founder environment and found that many technology start-ups have no idea what it means to expand internationally.”
That’s why he founded the InnoEU Tech Bridge, with which he primarily helps young companies that already have a product on the market and are now looking to explore the opportunities in the Asian region. With his good acquaintance Volker Hofmann, who works for Humboldt University, the idea of also looking after early-stage founders was born. “We said a year and a half ago: The topic is so complex. You have to start there earlier. Entrepreneurs need to be sensitized to the topic of China when they are in the process of founding or even before that,” Rudolph-Bartels explains.
This is how the Humboldt Tech Bridge came into being, which, however, is not only concerned with spin-offs from Humboldt-Universität, but also works with start-ups throughout Germany. “With the Humboldt Tech Bridge, we are specifically addressing university spin-offs that are so technology-oriented that it is important for them to deal with research, development, and incubation in China,” explains the materials scientist.
The variety of supported start-ups and expansions on the Chinese market is immense. Many of them also fascinate Rudolph-Bartels personally. He cites the example of the company GrOwnValve. “It is a spin-off from the Charité with a team of young scientists who come from all over. They have developed a process to create heart valves for children and babies from their own tissue,” he says. As much time and energy as he invests together with the team at Humboldt Tech-Bridge, it remains a hobby for Rudolph-Bartels in the end. In his normal life, he is an entrepreneur himself and runs the company Specs Surface Nano Analysis in Berlin. He had intensive contact with China for the first time almost 21 years ago, when he worked for the technology group Heraeus. “At that time, I had the opportunity to set up a German-Chinese joint venture. That took me to China more or less every month from the early 2000s until 2016. But I never lived there,” he reports. There was also rarely time for tourist excursions, he says. “As they say, I was one of the sherpas of the German export industry. Everywhere in the world in the hotels, you find these people who are just there to set up production facilities.” Today, he is helping the next generation to gain a foothold in China as well. Constantin Eckner
A look at the China Fashion Week in Beijing shows: Masks of all kinds – like this one from designer Janet Chen’s collection – not only protect against COVID. They are apparently becoming a prominent fashion accessory.
The world is getting smaller and smaller. Thanks to modern Internet connections and advancing digitalization, information and data are sent around the world at breakneck speed. Whether it’s a Zoom meeting with colleagues in Asia, a Skype call with friends in Dubai, or streaming films directly from Bollywood in India – distances are becoming less important. Deep-sea fiber-optic cables are crucial to this. They are laid at the bottom of the oceans and form the backbone of our modern world. But as invisible as they may be, their importance is hard to overestimate because: The respective cable operators decide not only how much but also which data can be sent.
It is precisely the deep-sea fiber-optic cable with the peaceful name Peace that is now becoming a point of contention in Sino-American relations, as Ning Wang reports. She analyses the role that companies such as Google, Facebook, Huawei, and Hengtong play in the dispute over deep-sea cables and how the two superpowers might try to control global data traffic.
Clearly more visible than a deep-sea cable is the port of Piraeus on the Aegean Sea. It was during the financial crisis of 2008 that Europe – and especially Germany’s then Federal Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schäuble – urged the Greeks to sell the ailing port. Beijing immediately pounced – and so many European politicians wondered about the alleged bad investment by the Chinese. Frank Sieren shows how Beijing has, since then, expanded the port into one of Europe’s largest container handling locations. But it’s about more than just profit: The port of Piraeus has become a strategic hub for the Chinese in Europe – much to the displeasure of Europeans and Americans.
European and American politicians should also not like what Marcel Grzanna observes: The front against forced labor in the Xinjiang region is beginning to crumble. Apparently, the calls for a Chinese boycott have led to fears in Western company headquarters that one could make somewhat less profit in the important sales market. Not everyone may go as far as the Japanese fashion chain Muji, which explicitly advertises Xinjiang’s great cotton. But the trend is clear: China’s market power is playing an ever-greater role in a world that is becoming smaller.
It’s about communication, such as Zoom meetings, which are currently taking place more frequently due to the pandemic. But also e-mails, films, and video calls. Control over the data traffic that results from this is now threatening to become the next conflict between the US and China. The trigger is a deep-sea cable that bears the name “Peace” of all things – standing for “Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe”. Peace, when the project is completed at the end of the year, is a fiber-optic cable that will first run over land from China to Pakistan and then go underwater for 12,000 kilometers at the port of Gwadar. It splits before the Horn of Africa: Heading to the south, it reaches Kenya while heading north towards Europe in France, it comes ashore again near a popular beach in Marseille.
As with other deep-sea cable projects, the focus is on reliable connectivity so that companies operating around the world can communicate and transfer data smoothly. The speed of the Peace cable is so great that 90,000 hours of Netflix movies could be transported per second, according to calculations by the financial services provider Bloomberg.
“The Peace cable is primarily intended to provide reliable and fast internet connectivity to Chinese companies operating in Europe and Africa,” Bloomberg further reports. However, it also plays an important role as part of the “Digital Silk Road”. On the one hand, Beijing wants to use the Peace submarine cable project to bind the countries through which it runs more closely to itself by means of infrastructure measures; on the other hand, it can demonstrate its own technological sovereignty by expanding state-of-the-art data lines.
The expansion of the deep-sea cable is well underway in the country. Work is currently underway on the route between Rawalpindi and the cities of Karachi and Gwadar. Most recently, operators were waiting for permission to build a landing station for the cable in the Arabian Sea.
For Pakistan, it is a stroke of luck that the route of the Peace Cable runs through the country: The government wants to use it to modernize its telecommunications infrastructure.
Another side effect arises from Pakistan’s and India’s rivalry. Both countries have been in competition with each other since the partition of the former British colonial territory, making the Peace Project a diplomatic tool for China.
Peace is operated by Peace Cable International Network Co., a subsidiary of China-based power and fiber-optic cable manufacturer Hengtong Group, supported by Huawei Marine, which has laid fiber-optic cables mainly in the Pacific in recent years. Huawei Marine was sold to Hengtong for $85 million last summer. Huawei Technologies, the Shenzhen-based telecom equipment maker, is Hengtong’s third-largest shareholder with about three percent.
Why Huawei is involved becomes clear when one looks at the strategic importance of undersea cables: At present, almost 98 percent of international Internet data and telephone traffic runs through around 400 undersea cables. The majority of these cables are owned and operated by US companies.
The cost of submarine cable projects ranges from $300 million to $400 million and is increasingly being undertaken by technology companies instead of telecommunications companies.
“Some of the major investors in new cables now are Google and Facebook,” warned Alan Maudlin, research director at TeleGeography, a telecommunications research firm, last year. The danger: The technology giants increasingly control the entire underwater bandwidth.
Microsoft and Facebook own the two most important transatlantic deep-sea cables. The new Dunant cable, which has been completed since early February and is soon to be deployed, is also largely funded by Google. According to initial tests, the Dunant deep-sea cable can transmit up to 250 terabits per second. Google itself claims that three times the entire digitized US Library of Congress can be transmitted per second.
The crux of the matter, however, is not how much data is transmitted, but rather which data. This makes the tech companies important geopolitical players in the future. According to Daniel Voelsen of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin, the tech companies are pursuing two goals: “On the one hand, they want to offer their services and content to as many people worldwide as possible and keep growing. On the other hand, it’s about control and power, especially vis-à-vis those states and governments that the tech companies would prefer to regulate. But also vis-à-vis the classic telecom companies, which are becoming more and more dependent not only on the content, but also on the physical infrastructure,” Voelsen said in early March in a SWR 2Wissen feature on “The business with deep-sea cables”.
Facebook, for example, is in the process of laying a deep-sea cable network around Africa, which is to encircle the entire continent from the Mediterranean. Whether the company will then open access to this network to other companies remains questionable. Facebook and Google have already announced that they will not use the Peace submarine cable because they have sufficient capacity of their own.
At the same time, Facebook and Google pulled out of a project that had been underway for years to connect the west coast of the US to Hong Kong via deep-sea cable. They fear that data transmitted over the cable could be at the mercy of a security risk since Beijing massively expanded its control over Hong Kong through the so-called National Security Act.
Accordingly, the warning cries from the US are loud when it comes to Chinese espionage via deep-sea cables. Mike Pompeo, when he was US secretary of state, had called on the international community to “ensure that the deep-sea cables that connect our country to the global Internet are not being subverted for large-scale intelligence gathering by the People’s Republic of China “.
In Europe, on the other hand, people are more relaxed about the process. French President Emmanuel Macron, for example, does not want to isolate China from Internet infrastructure, in part so that France does not have to be “completely dependent on US decisions,” Macron said in an interview at the Atlantic Council in February. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a press conference with Macron on February 5th, also rejected efforts to isolate China, saying she did not think decoupling from China was “the right way to go, especially in this digital age”.
The Institute for Peace and Conflict Research and the Netherlands-based Leiden Asia Center estimate that China will become the landing point, owner or supplier of 11.4 percent of the world’s deep-sea cables by 2019. Between 2025 and 2030, the shares could even rise to 20 percent.
Chinese boycott calls against foreign companies have resulted in the first concessions. The Japanese fashion chain Muji has announced that it will not do without cotton from Xinjiang in its textile production in the future. Muji’s parent company Ryohin Keikaku announced in a statement to the state-run Chinese daily Global Times. A handful of other companies, such as Spanish manufacturer Zara, withdrew their critical statements on the allegations of forced labor in Xinjiang from their websites.
Last week, numerous manufacturers, including the German sporting goods manufacturer Adidas, but above all its US competitor Nike and the Swedish fast-fashion brand H&M, were caught up in a broad wave of outrage on social media in the People’s Republic. Some of the companies had already voiced their concerns about reports of forced labor in Xinjiang the previous year and announced that they would no longer use cotton from the region. It was only months later that a concerted outrage began in the People’s Republic as a reaction to this. It immediately followed the entry into force of sanctions by the European Union and the United States against Chinese officials from the Xinjiang region.
Among other things, the companies had cited assessments by the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), a non-governmental organization headquartered in Geneva that works to promote sustainable conditions in the textile industry worldwide. The BCI branch in China, meanwhile, justified the use of cotton from Xinjiang last week, while the head office’s statement from October 2020 disappeared from the website and has since only been accessible via the cache.
BCI’s financing partners include the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), an economically operating limited liability company that is active in global development aid on behalf of the German government. “There is no cooperation with the Better Cotton Initiative in China,” the organization informs China.Table in response to a query. In the past, it had only supported the BCI in India as a financing partner on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.
On Monday, a group of 16 United Nations human rights experts in Geneva put the number of companies that can be linked to forced labor in Xinjiang at more than 150. The UN experts did not name names but urged the companies to review their supply chains. The group also said it had reminded 13 governments of their responsibilities. It remained open whether the German government had also received one of the confidential letters.
Muji has now responded to the outcry from China, the momentum of which was accelerated by state media with sharp comments and threats, with a clearly visible reference to the use of the controversial cotton in its textiles on its Chinese-language website. To this end, the company posted a video online showing the production of the raw material from Xinjiang. In doing so, the company went significantly further than others concerned, having days earlier expressed concern about reports of forced labor. It argues that its decision was based on the findings of an independent investigation it commissioned. No evidence of forced labor had been found among indirect suppliers of cotton, it said. At the beginning of March, Japanese companies had announced a corresponding investigation of their supply chains and corresponding consequences.
The investigation had been guided by the Xinjiang Supply Chain Business Advisory, a guide to supply chain optimization for international corporations formulated by several US departments last summer. It remained unclear whether Muji continues to use Xinjiang cotton only in products for the Chinese market or also for goods destined for Europe or the US. The US had implemented an import ban on textiles containing cotton from Xinjiang a few weeks ago. Tomatoes from the region are also affected by the ban.
At a press conference on Monday, the People’s Republic once again increased the pressure on foreign companies. The main target was H&M, but the warning was allowed to be understood as universal. “I don’t think companies should politicize their economic actions. Can H&M continue to make money in the Chinese market?” a spokesman for the Xinjiang regional government asked and promptly answered, “Not anymore.” He said it was unreasonable of companies to get caught up in sanctions. “It’s like lifting a stone and dropping it on your own foot.”
Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch (HRW) described the dispute as a litmus test for companies that have pledged to uphold human rights. “The Chinese government is showing its true colors by pressuring companies to be complicit in abuses instead of working (with them) to end violence against Turkic Muslims,” said HRW China Officer Sophie Richardson. The organization called on companies to take a firm stand against forced labor. The Chinese authorities are once again arbitrarily punishing a particular group because their view of things contradicts the position of the People’s Republic, she said.
In addition to Muji, Inditex, the parent company of Zara, as well as the clothing company Philipps-Van Heusen (PVH) from New York, to which the Calvin Klein brand belongs, and the American VP Corporation, the market leader for workwear and backpacks, tried to smooth the waters by deleting or modifying their statements from their websites. Manufacturers Fila and Hugo Boss had previously announced their intention to continue using cotton from Xinjiang. The share prices of numerous textile companies had plummeted significantly last week. Meanwhile, Chinese network operator Huawei banned smartphone applications from Nike and Adidas from its app store.
The crumbling front of companies rejecting cotton from the Uighur-majority region in northwest China is another stumbling block in the fight against forced labor. A united industry renunciation would spread the burden of China’s countermeasures on many shoulders. However, the potential loss of market share by some firms could tempt their competitors to capitalize on each other’s dilemma. However, Muji, for example, did not yet feel any positive effect in the short term. Comments on the internet accused the company of “hypocrisy”. Especially since the Reuters news agency had reported on Muji’s concerns about using cotton from Xinjiang only a few days earlier.
Ferdinand Rudolph-Bartels could spend his free time playing golf or tennis. But instead, the 55-year-old has found another hobby. Together with non-profit companies, he helps start-ups from Germany gain a foothold in the Chinese market. “I myself gained my experience in West German big industries, which invested a lot in China. In the 2000s, I looked after a lot of investments in China – very classic export industry and business development there,” he recalls. “I came to Berlin to the start-up and founder environment and found that many technology start-ups have no idea what it means to expand internationally.”
That’s why he founded the InnoEU Tech Bridge, with which he primarily helps young companies that already have a product on the market and are now looking to explore the opportunities in the Asian region. With his good acquaintance Volker Hofmann, who works for Humboldt University, the idea of also looking after early-stage founders was born. “We said a year and a half ago: The topic is so complex. You have to start there earlier. Entrepreneurs need to be sensitized to the topic of China when they are in the process of founding or even before that,” Rudolph-Bartels explains.
This is how the Humboldt Tech Bridge came into being, which, however, is not only concerned with spin-offs from Humboldt-Universität, but also works with start-ups throughout Germany. “With the Humboldt Tech Bridge, we are specifically addressing university spin-offs that are so technology-oriented that it is important for them to deal with research, development, and incubation in China,” explains the materials scientist.
The variety of supported start-ups and expansions on the Chinese market is immense. Many of them also fascinate Rudolph-Bartels personally. He cites the example of the company GrOwnValve. “It is a spin-off from the Charité with a team of young scientists who come from all over. They have developed a process to create heart valves for children and babies from their own tissue,” he says. As much time and energy as he invests together with the team at Humboldt Tech-Bridge, it remains a hobby for Rudolph-Bartels in the end. In his normal life, he is an entrepreneur himself and runs the company Specs Surface Nano Analysis in Berlin. He had intensive contact with China for the first time almost 21 years ago, when he worked for the technology group Heraeus. “At that time, I had the opportunity to set up a German-Chinese joint venture. That took me to China more or less every month from the early 2000s until 2016. But I never lived there,” he reports. There was also rarely time for tourist excursions, he says. “As they say, I was one of the sherpas of the German export industry. Everywhere in the world in the hotels, you find these people who are just there to set up production facilities.” Today, he is helping the next generation to gain a foothold in China as well. Constantin Eckner
A look at the China Fashion Week in Beijing shows: Masks of all kinds – like this one from designer Janet Chen’s collection – not only protect against COVID. They are apparently becoming a prominent fashion accessory.
