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Germany is facing a sharp rise in electricity prices – with the cost for natural gases potentially quadrupling. First voices already pinpointed China’s enormous demand as one cause of the phenomenon. The People’s Republic is indeed already severely affected by the global energy crisis: Power outages will probably continue to plague the country throughout winter, writes Nico Beckert. But balancing supply, demand, and environmental targets has always been difficult for Beijing’s planners. Rapid growth causes imbalances, after all.
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping surprised the energy world with a spectacular announcement. China plans to set up new solar and wind power plants with a capacity of 100 gigawatts in remote areas within a short timeframe. That is already half the capacity of all German power plants – and yet it only marks the beginning. According to rumors, up to 400 gigawatts of electrical power could be produced in the desert. However, how exactly it will reach the consumer remains to be seen.
Standardization is power. Two hundred years before the birth of Christ, the first emperor of the Qin dynasty standardized the gauge of carts, currency, and units of measurement in his young empire. Cubit, weights, or grain measures were now unified throughout China. This laid the foundation for the central administration and productive trade between the formerly divided princedoms.
Because of its delayed development, China has been late for setting standards in modern times. During the 20th century, the US and Europe set all important standards. This also applies to the basics of digitalization, such as mobile phone protocols or internet addresses. But when it comes to new technologies of the 21st century, China does not want to be left behind again, reports Amelie Richter. China now wants to take the lead in setting standards for Industry 4.0, the Internet of Things, or autonomous driving. The EU is observing this endeavor with a keen eye.
China’s energy crisis sometimes produces the most curious news. According to media reports, some suppliers are currently running short of power generators. More and more factory owners are buying diesel generators. Due to the rationing of electricity in recent weeks, they are running out of options. Some European companies are also taking this route, according to Klaus Zenkel, chairman of the EU Chamber of Commerce in South China.
The purchase of diesel generators could turn out to be quite a reasonable investment. China’s energy crisis will likely drag on, after all. “In all provinces where German companies are active, power cuts are continuing. It is reaching the point wherein northern China, for example, individual companies are being mandated to save up to 85 percent power,” Jens Hildebrandt, executive board member of the German Chamber of Commerce in northern China, told China.Table. “In some regions, there can be two days of production and two days of power cuts. In northeastern China, companies are only able to produce until 2 p.m. in some places.”
China’s energy crisis could even last well into the winter, analysts, industry representatives, and even overseas chambers of commerce fear. True, authorities have ordered China’s coal mines to expand production as quickly as possible to overcome the supply shortage. But industry officials state that expansion of production may come too late to solve the energy problem quickly. That’s because power plant stocks have been running far too low for weeks. Usually, power plants stockpile large amounts of coal for the winter to ramp up production during the cold months. But that hasn’t happened in recent months.
Analysts at the bank BNP Paribas argue similarly. While it is true that China has been making efforts since August to improve the coal supply through imports and an expansion of production, the measures are taking too long. Analysts, therefore, believe that high-energy sectors such as chemicals, construction materials, and metals could face power rationing for up to six months, according to the South China Morning Post. Energy traders estimate a drop in industrial power consumption of 12 percent in the fourth quarter of this year, as coal supplies are expected to be tightened during the winter. Authorities in the industrial province of Liaoning accordingly issued a warning on Monday that the situation was worsening. They expect to not be able to cover 10 to 20 percent of power demand in the coming days.
Jens Hildebrandt expects that the causes of the power shortages cannot be resolved in due time. “The problem consists of various factors,” says the chamber head. “Ramping up coal production quickly will not be easy.” He confirms that many companies are now making do with their own generators. Meanwhile, the EU Chamber of Commerce in China warns that a sudden implementation of power rationing poses a “serious risk” for business operations in China. Companies fear the situation will further deteriorate during the winter months, the EU chamber stressed.
The weather has also further complicated the handling of the energy crisis in the meantime. The coal province of Shanxi recently was forced to halt production in 60 coal mines on short notice due to heavy rainfall and flooding (China.Table reported). All but four mines have since resumed operations. However, the storm also destroyed railway connections, potentially delaying coal transport.
The government had taken countermeasures relatively quickly. In addition to an expansion of coal production, these include a far-reaching reform of the power market. On Tuesday, the National Development and Reform Commission announced the liberalization of the power market. Starting October 15, all power produced by coal-fired power plants will be traded through market mechanisms. The regulation of electricity prices for industrial and commercial consumers by the government will be abolished. This means that all industrial and commercial consumers will have to obtain their electricity at market prices. Before the reform, only 44 percent of consumers had to do so. With the reform, authorities want to ensure that the price of electricity rises, assuring the continued operations of power plants when coal prices rise. However, whether this reform will help overcome the energy crisis in the short term is doubtful due to its structural causes.
As part of the long-term plan to overcome the crisis, President Xi Jinping also announced on Tuesday the construction of a gigantic network of solar and wind power plants in China’s deserts. In the medium term, it is supposed to provide a generation capacity of 100 gigawatts. Other reports speak of a capacity of 200 gigawatts as early as 2025. At full load, it could produce roughly the equivalent to the output of all the power plants in Germany put together.
Such drastic steps are urgently needed. After the Covid pandemic was overcome, China’s power demand increased rapidly. The economic recovery was dominated by the energy-intensive industrial and construction sectors. The government even promoted construction projects accompanied by their large power demand for cement and steel through stimulus programs to generate rapid growth. Power generation accordingly increased by 11.3 percent year-on-year from January to August 2021.
Coal production was unable to keep up. It grew by only 4.4 percent in the same period – resulting in a shortage in the supply of coal and rising prices for power carriers. Between March and September, the price of coal almost doubled, rising to a new record high.
Before the reform was passed yesterday, power plant operations could not simply pass on this price increase to power consumers. This is because power prices were largely fixed by the state. 70 percent of coal-fired power plants are currently making losses because of this. In turn, many power plants have throttled their production, which ultimately led to power shortages.
But the causes of the current energy crisis go back even further. Back in early 2016, China had already curbed its own coal production citing safety reasons (China.Table reported). In the past, more coal was often produced than authorized. As a result, frequent accidents had happened in mines – often with casualties. As a result of the curtailed production, coal stocks have been decreasing almost continuously ever since. In recent weeks, supplies in many regions even dropped to their lowest level ever, Caixin reports – even though the State Council had already ordered the expansion of coal production back in May.
Contrary to reports, the central government’s climate policy only plays a minor role in China’s energy crisis. In August, the government urged some provinces to reduce power demand and intensity. But even provinces that had not received a warning rationed power consumption – suggesting that a reduced coal supply coupled with rising power demand is the actual cause of the energy crisis.
China wants to become the global leader in key technologies such as biometric facial recognition, cloud computing, and autonomous driving – and has discovered standardization as an industrial and power-political instrument as a means to an end. After all, those who determine industry standards will call the shots in the markets of the future. Observers are therefore calling for the West to improve the coordination of its standardization bodies. This would enable it to play a greater role in setting standards in the People’s Republic. The draft of China’s standardization guidelines published earlier this week suggests the course the People’s Republic has set: standardization has never been more strategic for Beijing.
As can be seen from the draft, the People’s Republic wants to strengthen the role of the market in standardization while maintaining governmental control. It also envisions improved synchronization with international standards. But with a clear shift of ambitions: Standardization should not only support innovation in the domestic markets but explicitly strengthen China’s presence and role in supply chains and internationalize Chinese standards. According to the draft, the People’s Republic is aiming for 85 percent of its standards to be adopted internationally.
Beijing also wants to step on the gas of standardization: According to the paper, the timeframe for the development of standards is to be reduced to less than 18 months. Standards are also to be increasingly taken into account in regulations, certifications, and public procurement. While the draft does not explicitly state that China is to play a dominant role in standardization bodies, the goal of increasing international relevance is obvious. Especially in the core sectors of digital, mobility, energy, sustainability, and finance.
The draft directive is currently being closely reviewed by the People’s Republic, explains Betty Xu. She is the director of the Seconded European Standardization Expert in China (SESEC) project. But one thing is already certain, says Xu: “Standardization will take on a greater control function.” She made this statement at the launch event “Political Standardization Strategies – China, USA, EU – a comparison” of the German Institute for Standardization (DIN) and the German Commission for Electrotechnical Engineering (DKE) on Tuesday.
The government in Beijing is pursuing a multi-pronged strategy. It is unifying its national standardization system and begins to transfer Chinese experts into international forums. At the same time, it is trying to transfer its standards to other countries through the Belt and Road Initiative. China is particularly active in Africa, Asia, and the Balkans. SESEC expert Xu also notes that China is exporting its standards on a grand scale. Not only through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). China also directly uses its Belt and Road Initiative projects. “China’s standards are going global,” says Xu.
The increase in China’s standardization applications to ISO and IEC ranged at around 20 percent annually in the past few years. In 2019, the People’s Republic submitted a total of 238 proposals for international standards to standardization bodies. In parallel, the People’s Republic submitted 830 technical documents to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), more than the next three countries South Korea, the USA and Japan combined.
However, the system of the People’s Republic continues to be strongly subject to the will of the state leadership: China has already begun to reform its standardization system in the past ten years through new legislation, which is now more market-driven. However, it is still heavily dependent on the government, according to Xu. SESEC aims to strengthen cooperation between Chinese and European standardization bodies and is funded by the EU Commission, among others.
Xu advocates that German companies become more involved in standardization debates and research in China, and also observes China-specific standardization more closely. She predicts that China will strive for fewer different standards in the future, but higher quality ones.
Brussels and Berlin are also keeping an eye on Beijing’s efforts – because China holds key positions in technical standardization organizations, as is also emphasized in a background paper of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the German Bundestag: Shu Yinbiao is the current IEC President, and with Zhao Houlin, the ITU has a Secretary-General who is also from the People’s Republic. However, the secretariats of the technical committees and their subgroups within the standardization bodies are more important for the actual standardization work. According to the report, Germany and other countries are clearly ahead of China in this respect. However, China heads a disproportionately large number of committees entrusted with the standardization of new technologies.
The German Foreign Affairs Committee has identified several challenges in the area of standardization and China’s growing influence: Germany and the EU are at risk of losing influence. There could also be an increasing global politicization of standards and norms. The paper also warns of a split into two “standards spheres” – one Western and one led by China. And the clock is ticking: Industry experts observe a massive speedup of innovation cycles. Thus, the timeframe for setting standards is shortening and the race is on.
This competition for standards and norms is not merely about validity, but also about money. For in addition to influencing global industrial policy, royalties also play a role. Early standards of the industrial age were set primarily by European countries such as Germany. Standards for the Internet are primarily set by US bodies, including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) or the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Beijing now wants to lead the way in the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, and other future technologies such as electric mobility.
The EU and the US, therefore, want to focus on cooperation in return, for example with the new EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC). One of the central aims of the TTC is to “shape global norms and standards,” as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had put it. If two of the world’s three major economic blocs were to join forces, they would also have “the capacity” to do so, Blinken said. The TTC gathered for the first time in Pittsburgh at the end of September.
Both sides are now aiming for an initial test in the field of artificial intelligence, where they want to increase cooperation. In doing so, they also have their sights set on technical standards and general regulatory frameworks. The extent to which AI cooperation is simply intended to strengthen the two sides’ own capacities and enforce their own standards, or whether it will also include proactive steps against China, such as sanctions, is still open.
“I am an artist in between,” says Fan Shan (62). “I move both physically and mentally between German and Chinese culture.” Ambivalence is indeed a running theme in his life: He is an artist, but also a professor of intercultural art – and he is an entrepreneur. In 2010, he and his friends founded their own university in Hamburg: the Brand University of Applied Science. “The only university in the world that specializes in brands in applied science,” he says. He regularly commutes between Hamburg and Hangzhou.
Brand University cooperates with three Chinese universities where students have the opportunity to spend semesters abroad. Fan Shan projects are backed by both German and Chinese authorities. One reason for this: “Brands and the communication strategies that go with them have become very important for business, that goes for China and Europe.” Fan Shan first came to Germany in 1984, the result of a fortunate coincidence. Fan Shan grew up in Hangzhou – a “bamboo village”, as he calls it.
At the age of 13, he discovered his passion for art and practiced traditional Chinese painting with black ink. In the early 1980s, at a temple in Kunming in southern China, he met Siegfried Meyer, a representative of a Hamburg-based chemical company who was traveling to China for a trade fair. The two became friends, and Meyer arranged for Fan Shan to study art in Hamburg. When Fan Shan arrived in Hamburg, he did not yet speak any German. His first impression of Germany: “I only knew such beautiful landscapes from French painting.” At the same time, he was shocked when he witnessed homeless people at Hamburg’s main train station. The fact that there is poverty in rich Europe was unfathomable to him. He turned these impressions into art: his work “Gold in Ashes” is currently on display at the M+ Museum.
Fan Shan has been a member of the Freie Akademie der Künste in Hamburg since 2014. His works are on display in cultural institutions and private collections around the globe. “I no longer see any difference in methods and technique,” says Fan Shan about contemporary art in China and Europe. Nevertheless, his origins are vital to his creative work. His greatest personal artistic success was when he transferred Chinese bamboo painting into abstract art, “which has not been achieved in Chinese painting for 1,000 years.” To do this, he dipped a bamboo leaf in ink and enlarged it a thousandfold. He used the black structures he saw as a basic shape to paint the bamboo abstractly.
He also likes to play with tradition, modernity, and innovation: He remains true to the tradition of bamboo painting and modernizes it by transferring it into installations, film, photography, or performance art. As for the question of why the bamboo theme is so important to him: “The bamboo is like a spiritual home that I managed to take with me,” says Fan Shan. Paula Faul
The number of tigers living in the northeastern wilderness of China has increased. According to researchers, 55 of the big cats are home there. That amounts to a “dramatic recovery,” according to a recent study by Chinese scientists. The Amur tiger, known colloquially as the Siberian tiger, has benefited from increased anti-poaching efforts, the removal of thousands of snares, and improved protection of its habitat, according to the report. The Siberian tiger is found throughout eastern Russia and adjacent areas of North Korea and China.
Germany is facing a sharp rise in electricity prices – with the cost for natural gases potentially quadrupling. First voices already pinpointed China’s enormous demand as one cause of the phenomenon. The People’s Republic is indeed already severely affected by the global energy crisis: Power outages will probably continue to plague the country throughout winter, writes Nico Beckert. But balancing supply, demand, and environmental targets has always been difficult for Beijing’s planners. Rapid growth causes imbalances, after all.
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping surprised the energy world with a spectacular announcement. China plans to set up new solar and wind power plants with a capacity of 100 gigawatts in remote areas within a short timeframe. That is already half the capacity of all German power plants – and yet it only marks the beginning. According to rumors, up to 400 gigawatts of electrical power could be produced in the desert. However, how exactly it will reach the consumer remains to be seen.
Standardization is power. Two hundred years before the birth of Christ, the first emperor of the Qin dynasty standardized the gauge of carts, currency, and units of measurement in his young empire. Cubit, weights, or grain measures were now unified throughout China. This laid the foundation for the central administration and productive trade between the formerly divided princedoms.
Because of its delayed development, China has been late for setting standards in modern times. During the 20th century, the US and Europe set all important standards. This also applies to the basics of digitalization, such as mobile phone protocols or internet addresses. But when it comes to new technologies of the 21st century, China does not want to be left behind again, reports Amelie Richter. China now wants to take the lead in setting standards for Industry 4.0, the Internet of Things, or autonomous driving. The EU is observing this endeavor with a keen eye.
China’s energy crisis sometimes produces the most curious news. According to media reports, some suppliers are currently running short of power generators. More and more factory owners are buying diesel generators. Due to the rationing of electricity in recent weeks, they are running out of options. Some European companies are also taking this route, according to Klaus Zenkel, chairman of the EU Chamber of Commerce in South China.
The purchase of diesel generators could turn out to be quite a reasonable investment. China’s energy crisis will likely drag on, after all. “In all provinces where German companies are active, power cuts are continuing. It is reaching the point wherein northern China, for example, individual companies are being mandated to save up to 85 percent power,” Jens Hildebrandt, executive board member of the German Chamber of Commerce in northern China, told China.Table. “In some regions, there can be two days of production and two days of power cuts. In northeastern China, companies are only able to produce until 2 p.m. in some places.”
China’s energy crisis could even last well into the winter, analysts, industry representatives, and even overseas chambers of commerce fear. True, authorities have ordered China’s coal mines to expand production as quickly as possible to overcome the supply shortage. But industry officials state that expansion of production may come too late to solve the energy problem quickly. That’s because power plant stocks have been running far too low for weeks. Usually, power plants stockpile large amounts of coal for the winter to ramp up production during the cold months. But that hasn’t happened in recent months.
Analysts at the bank BNP Paribas argue similarly. While it is true that China has been making efforts since August to improve the coal supply through imports and an expansion of production, the measures are taking too long. Analysts, therefore, believe that high-energy sectors such as chemicals, construction materials, and metals could face power rationing for up to six months, according to the South China Morning Post. Energy traders estimate a drop in industrial power consumption of 12 percent in the fourth quarter of this year, as coal supplies are expected to be tightened during the winter. Authorities in the industrial province of Liaoning accordingly issued a warning on Monday that the situation was worsening. They expect to not be able to cover 10 to 20 percent of power demand in the coming days.
Jens Hildebrandt expects that the causes of the power shortages cannot be resolved in due time. “The problem consists of various factors,” says the chamber head. “Ramping up coal production quickly will not be easy.” He confirms that many companies are now making do with their own generators. Meanwhile, the EU Chamber of Commerce in China warns that a sudden implementation of power rationing poses a “serious risk” for business operations in China. Companies fear the situation will further deteriorate during the winter months, the EU chamber stressed.
The weather has also further complicated the handling of the energy crisis in the meantime. The coal province of Shanxi recently was forced to halt production in 60 coal mines on short notice due to heavy rainfall and flooding (China.Table reported). All but four mines have since resumed operations. However, the storm also destroyed railway connections, potentially delaying coal transport.
The government had taken countermeasures relatively quickly. In addition to an expansion of coal production, these include a far-reaching reform of the power market. On Tuesday, the National Development and Reform Commission announced the liberalization of the power market. Starting October 15, all power produced by coal-fired power plants will be traded through market mechanisms. The regulation of electricity prices for industrial and commercial consumers by the government will be abolished. This means that all industrial and commercial consumers will have to obtain their electricity at market prices. Before the reform, only 44 percent of consumers had to do so. With the reform, authorities want to ensure that the price of electricity rises, assuring the continued operations of power plants when coal prices rise. However, whether this reform will help overcome the energy crisis in the short term is doubtful due to its structural causes.
As part of the long-term plan to overcome the crisis, President Xi Jinping also announced on Tuesday the construction of a gigantic network of solar and wind power plants in China’s deserts. In the medium term, it is supposed to provide a generation capacity of 100 gigawatts. Other reports speak of a capacity of 200 gigawatts as early as 2025. At full load, it could produce roughly the equivalent to the output of all the power plants in Germany put together.
Such drastic steps are urgently needed. After the Covid pandemic was overcome, China’s power demand increased rapidly. The economic recovery was dominated by the energy-intensive industrial and construction sectors. The government even promoted construction projects accompanied by their large power demand for cement and steel through stimulus programs to generate rapid growth. Power generation accordingly increased by 11.3 percent year-on-year from January to August 2021.
Coal production was unable to keep up. It grew by only 4.4 percent in the same period – resulting in a shortage in the supply of coal and rising prices for power carriers. Between March and September, the price of coal almost doubled, rising to a new record high.
Before the reform was passed yesterday, power plant operations could not simply pass on this price increase to power consumers. This is because power prices were largely fixed by the state. 70 percent of coal-fired power plants are currently making losses because of this. In turn, many power plants have throttled their production, which ultimately led to power shortages.
But the causes of the current energy crisis go back even further. Back in early 2016, China had already curbed its own coal production citing safety reasons (China.Table reported). In the past, more coal was often produced than authorized. As a result, frequent accidents had happened in mines – often with casualties. As a result of the curtailed production, coal stocks have been decreasing almost continuously ever since. In recent weeks, supplies in many regions even dropped to their lowest level ever, Caixin reports – even though the State Council had already ordered the expansion of coal production back in May.
Contrary to reports, the central government’s climate policy only plays a minor role in China’s energy crisis. In August, the government urged some provinces to reduce power demand and intensity. But even provinces that had not received a warning rationed power consumption – suggesting that a reduced coal supply coupled with rising power demand is the actual cause of the energy crisis.
China wants to become the global leader in key technologies such as biometric facial recognition, cloud computing, and autonomous driving – and has discovered standardization as an industrial and power-political instrument as a means to an end. After all, those who determine industry standards will call the shots in the markets of the future. Observers are therefore calling for the West to improve the coordination of its standardization bodies. This would enable it to play a greater role in setting standards in the People’s Republic. The draft of China’s standardization guidelines published earlier this week suggests the course the People’s Republic has set: standardization has never been more strategic for Beijing.
As can be seen from the draft, the People’s Republic wants to strengthen the role of the market in standardization while maintaining governmental control. It also envisions improved synchronization with international standards. But with a clear shift of ambitions: Standardization should not only support innovation in the domestic markets but explicitly strengthen China’s presence and role in supply chains and internationalize Chinese standards. According to the draft, the People’s Republic is aiming for 85 percent of its standards to be adopted internationally.
Beijing also wants to step on the gas of standardization: According to the paper, the timeframe for the development of standards is to be reduced to less than 18 months. Standards are also to be increasingly taken into account in regulations, certifications, and public procurement. While the draft does not explicitly state that China is to play a dominant role in standardization bodies, the goal of increasing international relevance is obvious. Especially in the core sectors of digital, mobility, energy, sustainability, and finance.
The draft directive is currently being closely reviewed by the People’s Republic, explains Betty Xu. She is the director of the Seconded European Standardization Expert in China (SESEC) project. But one thing is already certain, says Xu: “Standardization will take on a greater control function.” She made this statement at the launch event “Political Standardization Strategies – China, USA, EU – a comparison” of the German Institute for Standardization (DIN) and the German Commission for Electrotechnical Engineering (DKE) on Tuesday.
The government in Beijing is pursuing a multi-pronged strategy. It is unifying its national standardization system and begins to transfer Chinese experts into international forums. At the same time, it is trying to transfer its standards to other countries through the Belt and Road Initiative. China is particularly active in Africa, Asia, and the Balkans. SESEC expert Xu also notes that China is exporting its standards on a grand scale. Not only through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). China also directly uses its Belt and Road Initiative projects. “China’s standards are going global,” says Xu.
The increase in China’s standardization applications to ISO and IEC ranged at around 20 percent annually in the past few years. In 2019, the People’s Republic submitted a total of 238 proposals for international standards to standardization bodies. In parallel, the People’s Republic submitted 830 technical documents to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), more than the next three countries South Korea, the USA and Japan combined.
However, the system of the People’s Republic continues to be strongly subject to the will of the state leadership: China has already begun to reform its standardization system in the past ten years through new legislation, which is now more market-driven. However, it is still heavily dependent on the government, according to Xu. SESEC aims to strengthen cooperation between Chinese and European standardization bodies and is funded by the EU Commission, among others.
Xu advocates that German companies become more involved in standardization debates and research in China, and also observes China-specific standardization more closely. She predicts that China will strive for fewer different standards in the future, but higher quality ones.
Brussels and Berlin are also keeping an eye on Beijing’s efforts – because China holds key positions in technical standardization organizations, as is also emphasized in a background paper of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the German Bundestag: Shu Yinbiao is the current IEC President, and with Zhao Houlin, the ITU has a Secretary-General who is also from the People’s Republic. However, the secretariats of the technical committees and their subgroups within the standardization bodies are more important for the actual standardization work. According to the report, Germany and other countries are clearly ahead of China in this respect. However, China heads a disproportionately large number of committees entrusted with the standardization of new technologies.
The German Foreign Affairs Committee has identified several challenges in the area of standardization and China’s growing influence: Germany and the EU are at risk of losing influence. There could also be an increasing global politicization of standards and norms. The paper also warns of a split into two “standards spheres” – one Western and one led by China. And the clock is ticking: Industry experts observe a massive speedup of innovation cycles. Thus, the timeframe for setting standards is shortening and the race is on.
This competition for standards and norms is not merely about validity, but also about money. For in addition to influencing global industrial policy, royalties also play a role. Early standards of the industrial age were set primarily by European countries such as Germany. Standards for the Internet are primarily set by US bodies, including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) or the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Beijing now wants to lead the way in the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, and other future technologies such as electric mobility.
The EU and the US, therefore, want to focus on cooperation in return, for example with the new EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC). One of the central aims of the TTC is to “shape global norms and standards,” as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had put it. If two of the world’s three major economic blocs were to join forces, they would also have “the capacity” to do so, Blinken said. The TTC gathered for the first time in Pittsburgh at the end of September.
Both sides are now aiming for an initial test in the field of artificial intelligence, where they want to increase cooperation. In doing so, they also have their sights set on technical standards and general regulatory frameworks. The extent to which AI cooperation is simply intended to strengthen the two sides’ own capacities and enforce their own standards, or whether it will also include proactive steps against China, such as sanctions, is still open.
“I am an artist in between,” says Fan Shan (62). “I move both physically and mentally between German and Chinese culture.” Ambivalence is indeed a running theme in his life: He is an artist, but also a professor of intercultural art – and he is an entrepreneur. In 2010, he and his friends founded their own university in Hamburg: the Brand University of Applied Science. “The only university in the world that specializes in brands in applied science,” he says. He regularly commutes between Hamburg and Hangzhou.
Brand University cooperates with three Chinese universities where students have the opportunity to spend semesters abroad. Fan Shan projects are backed by both German and Chinese authorities. One reason for this: “Brands and the communication strategies that go with them have become very important for business, that goes for China and Europe.” Fan Shan first came to Germany in 1984, the result of a fortunate coincidence. Fan Shan grew up in Hangzhou – a “bamboo village”, as he calls it.
At the age of 13, he discovered his passion for art and practiced traditional Chinese painting with black ink. In the early 1980s, at a temple in Kunming in southern China, he met Siegfried Meyer, a representative of a Hamburg-based chemical company who was traveling to China for a trade fair. The two became friends, and Meyer arranged for Fan Shan to study art in Hamburg. When Fan Shan arrived in Hamburg, he did not yet speak any German. His first impression of Germany: “I only knew such beautiful landscapes from French painting.” At the same time, he was shocked when he witnessed homeless people at Hamburg’s main train station. The fact that there is poverty in rich Europe was unfathomable to him. He turned these impressions into art: his work “Gold in Ashes” is currently on display at the M+ Museum.
Fan Shan has been a member of the Freie Akademie der Künste in Hamburg since 2014. His works are on display in cultural institutions and private collections around the globe. “I no longer see any difference in methods and technique,” says Fan Shan about contemporary art in China and Europe. Nevertheless, his origins are vital to his creative work. His greatest personal artistic success was when he transferred Chinese bamboo painting into abstract art, “which has not been achieved in Chinese painting for 1,000 years.” To do this, he dipped a bamboo leaf in ink and enlarged it a thousandfold. He used the black structures he saw as a basic shape to paint the bamboo abstractly.
He also likes to play with tradition, modernity, and innovation: He remains true to the tradition of bamboo painting and modernizes it by transferring it into installations, film, photography, or performance art. As for the question of why the bamboo theme is so important to him: “The bamboo is like a spiritual home that I managed to take with me,” says Fan Shan. Paula Faul
The number of tigers living in the northeastern wilderness of China has increased. According to researchers, 55 of the big cats are home there. That amounts to a “dramatic recovery,” according to a recent study by Chinese scientists. The Amur tiger, known colloquially as the Siberian tiger, has benefited from increased anti-poaching efforts, the removal of thousands of snares, and improved protection of its habitat, according to the report. The Siberian tiger is found throughout eastern Russia and adjacent areas of North Korea and China.