Li Qiang is China’s second-in-command – the initiator of the Shanghai lockdown qualified for himself for higher office in Xi Jinping’s eyes through brutality and consistent repression of the population. That pretty much says it all about the new Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party. They are the seven men who steer the destiny of 1.4 billion people. But actually, only one man is steering here. The other six members are the most loyal followers of Xi found in the party leadership, analyzes Christiane Kuehl. China is completing the transition from complex one-party rule to the dictatorship of one ruler.
While the big Party Congress ends in Beijing, Germany discusses the Port of Hamburg. China.Table learned exclusively from negotiating circles that Cosco could settle for a 24.9 percent share instead of the originally planned 35 percent. This would potentially defuse the dispute, because, at this magic number, the Chinese side would no longer have a blocking minority and thus hardly any influence on the port’s business. The state-owned shipping company wants to acquire a stake in one of the terminals in the Port of Hamburg – a plan that is being met with considerable resistance from the Greens and the liberal FDP party. Chancellor Olaf Scholz could save both the port’s status and the coalition’s peace in this way, analyzes Frank Sieren. That would indeed be a considerable milestone.
However, this is still a long way from resolving the issue of how to deal with China; the tension between dependence and threat cannot be resolved. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz confirmed in Brussels that he would fly to China with a business delegation. Directly after the party congress, Germany now comes across as an economic supplicant, that is the concern of European partners, but also in parts of the German business community. The chancellor carries the Dax-CEOs in his baggage, whose companies are particularly dependent. Xi, for his part, will receive Scholz at the height of his power.
A disturbing incident involving Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao, who is not exactly considered a fan of the president, occurred on Saturday. You have probably seen the videos by now: The somewhat frail-looking Hu had just taken his seat when a party comrade and a steward escorted him out of the hall. A political show of force by Xi? I rather suspect a health emergency, even if that is also the explanation of the official news agency Xinhua.
It is the moment everyone has been waiting for. Led by Xi, the seven top cadres step into the Golden Hall of the Great Hall of the People on Sunday morning Beijing time to face the waiting journalists, who had quarantined themselves for two days for this sight. And it immediately becomes clear to the observers: Xi succeeded all the way.
The new Standing Committee is made up exclusively of loyal comrades-in-arms of the strong man. This has not happened since the Mao era: Xi’s immediate predecessors always had to tolerate members of rival CP factions. Therefore, many observers expected Xi to include, at least pro forma, one or two politicians on the committee not as close to him (China.Table reported).
But it turned out differently. Xi drove out all those who were not among his loyalists. Rejuvenation took place only by adding some of his own protégés to the inner circle. This was most evident in the 63-year-old Shanghai party leader Li Qiang. Li marched right after Xi. He will thus almost certainly be China’s next premier. And that despite the fact that he was responsible for the chaotic lockdown in Shanghai – and has never been vice premier. Until now, that was considered a key prerequisite for the post of head of government.
But political conventions and criteria only interfere with Xi’s establishment of a one-man rule. Professional qualifications are apparently secondary in his China; what matters is loyalty. The outcome of the Party Congress is not entirely surprising, “but Xi’s grab of power is still beyond our expectation. He is now a truly modern emperor,” tweeted Yang Zhang, a professor at American University in Washington. For decades, “Intra-party democracy” has been a firm goal of China’s communists – but Xi’s party congress work report was the first in 45 years where the slogan was absent, according to the China Media Project.
In the morning, the new Central Committee confirmed Xi as general secretary of the CP, as expected. He thus received the desired third term in office. The CC then selected the Politburo, which this time consists of only 24 instead of 25 people and, following the departure of Sun Chunlan, does not include a single woman for the first time in a quarter of a century. The actual power center, the Politburo Standing Committee, is recruited from the Politburo. As before, it has seven members. Four of them are new, and all of them are cadres from Xi’s inner circle: Li Qiang, Cai Qi, Dong Xuexiang and Li Xi. The most interesting person is Cai Qi, the party leader of the capital Beijing, who is considered to be ruthless.
Besides Xi, his chief ideologue Wang Huning and Zhao Leji, head of the party’s powerful Discipline Commission, are the only ones to retain their seats on the Standing Committee. Below, we take a closer look at the seven members, listed by rank:
Together, these seven men will “work diligently in the performance of our duties to prove worthy of the great trust of our party and our people,” Xi said in a brief speech in front of a bright red wall of CP flags.
In order to enforce his desired staff picks, the 69-year-old Xi took an extremely flexible approach to the informal retirement age of 68. It no longer applies to him anyway. Thus, two 67-year-old politicians, Li Keqiang and Wang Yang, retired early: Both do not belong to Xi’s faction. Until shortly before the CP Congress, Wang Yang had even been considered a possible prime ministerial candidate. With Li Xi and Cai Qi, two 66-year-olds moved up to the Committee. It is clear that it was not age but their close ties to Xi that played a role here. Moreover, all the new members of the Standing Committee are over 60, which means that a successor to Xi is still not in sight; at best, the 60-year-old Ding Xuexiang would be a suitable candidate according to the current standards.
On the power floor below, Xi allowed 69-year-old Foreign Minister Wang Yi to ascend to the Politburo. Wang is now likely to become the new foreign policy czar despite his age, succeeding Yang Jiechi, who resigned from the CC. Who will become the new foreign minister in March 2023 is still unclear. Interestingly, the new ambassador to the United States, Qin Gang, has been admitted to the Central Committee and would therefore be a possible candidate.
Vice Premier Hu Chunhua, who was considered the most important candidate for the post of prime minister until shortly before the Party Congress, was not only not promoted, he even lost his seat on the Politburo. Hu remains only on the Central Committee, a much larger body. The 59-year-old is one of ex-President Hu Jintao’s protégés and is popular among companies as a pragmatic doer (China.Table reported).
In this context, the incident surrounding 79-year-old Hu Jintao at the closing session of the Party Congress on Saturday was disturbing. Shortly after the start, two men – a steward and a senior party official – escorted Hu, who sat directly next to Xi, out of the hall. As they did so, Hu appeared as if this happened against his will. The frail-looking ex-president bowed once again toward Xi and Premier Li Keqiang. Xi nodded briefly. Li said a few words to Hu. Other Politburo members, as well as military officers in the row behind, watch the scene in surprise or concern.
Hu had not been feeling well, the official Xinhua news agency later reported, but was now better. Hu appeared confused and tried to hold onto one of Xi’s congressional documents while his own documents were handed to two men by a party colleague, the South China Morning Post observed.
Experts stressed that until now one can only speculate about the incident. Is Hu ill? Is he possibly suffering from dementia? Or are the alleged health problems reported by China’s state media only a pretext? In that case, would this be a warning signal to all of Xi’s rivals?
Meanwhile, a big bang on the Party constitution failed to materialize. Neither was Xi referred to as “chairman” in any form, nor were his previous theories shortened to “Xi Jinping Thought” – corresponding to “Mao Zedong Thought”. Thus, Xi apparently failed to place himself ideologically on Mao’s level.
However, as expected, the delegates on Saturday included several of Xi’s theoretical concepts in the CP Constitution. The most important are the “Two Establishments”/ 两个确立), which essentially establish Xi as the undisputed “core” of the CCP leadership, as well as Xi Jinping’s ideas as the foundation for the future (China.Table reported).
The party posts for the next five years have now been decided. Next spring, all government offices will be filled. Then Xi will in all likelihood secure a third term as president. It does not look as if anyone will stand in the way of his ambitions. Contributors: Felix Lee, Finn Mayer-Kuckuk
A compromise is emerging in the dispute over the sale of shares in a container terminal of the majority state-owned Port of Hamburg to China. The new deal envisages that the Chinese port operator Cosco, which is also state-owned, will receive only 24.9 percent of the shares instead of the 35 percent previously planned. This is what China.Table learned from negotiating circles. The remaining 10 percent in the terminal will be withheld for the time being. Their transfer is only possible after a cooldown period during which the Chinese partner must prove its reliability.
Sources in the German government say that this is one of the possible options being considered by the government. However, the decision is not yet final.
Proponents of the project hope that this compromise will defuse the two most important arguments against the takeover. Chinese influence would be contained, because shareholders only have a veto right above a stake of 25 percent. However, the veto right would only have applied to the smallest of the Port of Hamburg’s four container terminals. Now that is apparently off the table. This means that China would have virtually no influence on the actual port operations. At most, Cosco could influence the volume of containers handled at the Tollerort terminal, whose ships already call at the terminal frequently. So its position as an important customer is strong.
The stake is sold by the public-owned terminal company Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG (HHLA) – not to be confused with the port operator. At issue is Cosco Shipping Ports Limited’s (CSPL) stake in HHLA’s Container Terminal Tollerort (CTT) GmbH subsidiary. HHLA does not see any threat to the security of the country in this regard. It nevertheless felt compelled to reiterate its position on Thursday. “HHLA AG retains sole control over all major decisions,” it said in a press release. Tollerort-Gmbh is “ultimately an operating facility.” Cosco has no exclusive rights there, it said. “The terminal will remain open to container volumes from all customers.” Cosco will not gain access to strategic know-how: And, “The port infrastructure will remain the property of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. IT and sales data will remain the sole responsibility of HHLA AG.”
HHLA also stressed that it knew nothing of any opposition from six federal ministries and added: “The account that the EU is supposed to have objected to the cooperation is not correct. The antitrust permission was granted by relevant authorities.”
However, HHLA also made mistakes from the very beginning, which German Chancellor Olaf Scholz now has to pay for. The port company should never have promised such a large number of shares to the Chinese state-owned enterprise. But everyone involved, from HHLA itself to the port operators to the Hanseatic City Senate, saw above all a good deal: First, HHLA would profit from the sale of the shares, then from Cosco’s increasing container traffic. The world’s third-largest shipping company made $14 billion in profits in 2021 alone. Tollerort would become a “preferred hub” of Cosco as a result of the deal, HHLA announced in 2021. (China.Table reported)
The Port of Hamburg, in turn, expects the deal to increase its handling volume and strengthen its position toward rival ports along the North Sea: it already has been losing market share for years, especially to competitors such as Rotterdam and Antwerp.
At least the Port of Hamburg managed to gain market share in the first half of 2022. And this was primarily due to cooperation with China. While business with the USA slumped by 3.9 percent, business with China increased by 5.8 percent. Nevertheless, Rotterdam alone handles more containers than all German ports combined. In 2021, the Dutch location handled almost twice the volume of the Port of Hamburg.
Rotterdam’s success is due in no small part to Cosco. Cosco has held a 35 percent stake in Euromax Terminal in Rotterdam since 2016, without any political problems to date. This led HHLA to the false assumption that an equally high stake would not be a problem in Germany either – in an incorrect assessment of the political climate. Germany, an export nation, is much more dependent on China than the Netherlands. And the Germans have been very sensitive to these dependencies, especially since the start of the Ukraine war – even though the deal itself was signed just over a year ago, long before the Russian invasion.
On top of that, the situation is very complex. Shareholdings like Tollerort or Rotterdam are standard international practice. It would be Cosco’s 90th international stake in a port. Cosco also holds stakes in the US ports of Miami, Houston, Long Beach, Los Angeles and Seattle, without any political controversy over them. This has not stopped Washington from putting pressure on Germany behind the scenes against the deal.
Chinese investors are also already heavily involved in Europe. Cosco and its sister company China Merchants own terminals or even shares in entire port operating companies in 14 European ports – from Rotterdam and Antwerp to Le Havre, Bilbao, Valencia, Marseille and Malta. Cosco is one of the world’s largest port operators. The state-owned company even holds a majority stake in the Greek port of Piraeus (100 percent), and in the ports of Zeebrugge (85 percent) and Valencia (51 percent). In Antwerp, it holds less than 25 percent. In Wilhelmshaven, the China Logistic Group leased land for 99 years to build a logistics center in the Jade-Weser Port – and paid €100 million for it.
Cosco’s stake in Le Havre could also be the reason why France opposed the Hamburg deal. Above all, they fear that Cosco will draw business away from France to Germany. Of course, this is not what France’s President Emmanuel Macron said directly. He calls for “new rules of the game” for investments from China. The goal is to preserve strategic autonomy. We want to be able to continue to invest in China and have Chinese partners as long as it doesn’t touch the area of strategic autonomy, Macron said last Friday after the EU summit in Brussels.
As China.Table learned, Scholz now wants to initiate a “European port initiative”. It is intended to prevent China from successfully playing off one European port operator against the other. If the EU finally spoke with one voice on this issue, that would not be possible.
The chancellor’s office thus seeks a compromise on share reduction and, at the same time, an EU alliance. This dual strategy is somewhat reminiscent of the NATO Double-Track Decision devised by then-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in the 1980s: weaken the deal, but finalize it, and at the same time strive for disarmament. At that time, disarmament negotiations were started while new nuclear missiles were deployed. This strategy proved to be very successful.
With the initiative, Chancellor Olaf Scholz would address the concerns of his government coalition partners. The Greens, in particular, are ultimately opposed to an expansion of Chinese influence at this critical time. “The port of Hamburg is not just any port, after all,” said Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. It is one of the key ports not only for Germany as an export nation, but for Europe as a whole, she said. “We have to ask ourselves with every investment in German critical infrastructure what that could mean at that moment when China would turn against us as a democracy and community of values,” Baerbock said. Her party colleague, German Economy Minister Robert Habeck, also openly opposed the deal. He fears that “China will influence trade and the political direction of the port.”
The FDP also expresses concerns: The “enormous dependence” of the German economy on China is “depressing,” said Finance Minister Christian Lindner. His party colleague Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann said: “Selling critical infrastructure to China is a blatant mistake and should be stopped.”
And the opposition also argues against the deal, albeit with false arguments: “German ports do not belong in Chinese hands. Especially since Europeans cannot acquire stakes in ports in China,” says Jens Spahn, Deputy Chairman of the conservative CDU/CSU parliamentary group. In reality, however, there is no such restriction in China. According to China.Table information from Hainan’s capital Haikou, HHLA and other Western port operators are currently in talks about acquiring a stake in the new port there, which is under construction for $1.5 billion.
What is also important now is a public signal that Cosco agrees with the solution. The state-owned company already emphasized that it is not interested in the veto right, but above all in new business. This is the word from the company in Beijing.
Time is short, because next Wednesday is the last meeting of the German government where this issue can be put on the agenda. The Foreign Trade and Payments Act stipulates that the government must raise concerns about a foreign investor’s purchase offer within four months. The deadline expires on October 31.
What is included on the agenda, however, is ultimately decided by the Chancellor. This leaves Scholz with the option of approving the deal by simply not addressing it. However, that would put a lot of strain on the climate in the governing coalition. That is why Scholz is looking for a compromise here, too. After all, in the dispute over the extended use of nuclear power in Germany, Scholz already put his foot down as chancellor to push through an extension until April against Habeck’s will. He cannot afford such an approach as often as he likes.
The discussion about the Port of Hamburg also comes at a highly inconvenient time. Scholz will travel to Beijing on Nov. 4. In the Chinese capital, the sign-off of this port participation is seen as a gesture of goodwill for a successful visit. If things go well, a deal on the purchase of 350 Airbus aircraft is also on the cards, China.Table learned. China’s Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, placed the port deal in the context of the good economic relations of the past 50 years. So there is a lot at stake.
When Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, he was at first the “Man of Peng Liyuan” for many Chinese. After all, Peng was already a star in China when Xi was still climbing the provincial ladder. “Her singing is known in all the towns and villages of the motherland, her art deeply rooted in the masses,” the Xinhua news agency wrote in an ode to the 59-year-old female soprano. For many years, Peng’s specialty was so-called red folk songs – socialist lyrics with traditional melodies. Peng also enjoyed performing them at military events. After the suppression of the student movement on Tiananmen Square in 1989, she sang in uniform for the “victorious” soldiers. Politically, she always clearly stood by the Party.
However, the more power her husband gained, the less Peng was in the limelight as a singer. From then on, her destiny was to settle into the role of first lady. But this is also something novel: The wives of Xi’s predecessors practically never appeared in public. Only in Peng does China really have a first lady, who also accompanied her husband on many trips abroad.
Peng Liyuan was born into a simple family. She was born in 1962 in the eastern Chinese province of Shandong. Her parents, a theater actress and a museum curator, supported her artistic talent. At the age of 14, Peng already attended an art school. At 18, she became a soprano in the song and dance ensemble of the People’s Liberation Army, which she took over as director over the years. She became a nationwide star in the first edition of the CCTV-TV gala in the early 1980s, which is still popular today, where she performed the red folk song “在希望的田野上” (“On the Field of Hope”). From then on, she appeared almost every year at the gala, which became the world’s biggest TV event measured by an audience of more than a billion people.
Peng met her husband during this time. Xi supposedly once said that he knew she would become his wife after only 40 minutes of their first meeting. And Peng later recalled in an interview that she purposely wore a pair of tattered pants to one of their first dates to impress Xi with her intelligence and not her looks. In 1987, the couple married in Xiamen, Fujian Province, where Xi was vice mayor at the time. Mostly friends and colleagues were present during the small ceremony. It was Xi Jinping’s second marriage. The first one failed in 1982 after only three years – allegedly because Xi refused to move to the UK with his wife at the time, Ke Lingling.
Just four days after their wedding, Peng Liyuan embarked on a North America tour. Xi once said that he and his wife would work together even if they were physically separated. In 1992, their daughter Mingze was born, who is to this day strictly shielded from the public eye.
Peng made her last major appearance as a singer in the spring of 2008 at the Vienna State Opera, where she played the lead role in the world-touring musical Mulan. A few weeks earlier, Xi had been appointed Vice President of the People’s Republic of China, making him a potential successor to President Hu Jintao. From then on, Peng strictly adhered to protocol instead of her singing career. Since then, she has held official posts as ambassador for the fight against tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS for the World Health Organization and as a special Unesco ambassador for the right to education for girls and women.
As a representative of Chinese soft power, she regularly meets with first ladies from other countries to discuss joint aid projects. Her outfits often attract more attention in the media than her messages. Peng strictly wears “Made In China” by her in-house designer Ma Ke. Peng brilliantly lives up to what is expected of a first lady nowadays. In her home country, she embodies the strong wife who balances family and career and has her husband’s back.
The fact that Peng is popular in the army may have helped Xi’s rise to the central leadership of the armed forces from 2010 onward. Peng herself holds a civilian rank comparable to major general and was a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. However, she has no real political power beyond her marriage to China’s strongman.
In 2022, Peng’s fame no longer outshines Xi’s by far. Perhaps also because the Party fears overambitious wives of its grandees since Mao Zedong’s ostracized wife Jiang Qing, her ambitions remain limited to the protocol of a first lady. Jiang Qing, actress and director of the infamous “Red Operas,” was held responsible for the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution as a member of the radical “Gang of Four” after Mao’s death in 1976 and was sentenced to death on parole. In 1991, she committed suicide in prison. Incidentally, Peng and Xi both know how quickly the political weather can change: Peng’s father Peng Longkun ended up in a re-education camp during the Cultural Revolution for “counterrevolutionary activities,” as did Xi Jinping’s father Xi Zhongxun. Fabian Peltsch
Real music again at last! After two years, the Hong Kong government lifted the ban on live performances imposed during the Covid pandemic. Since last Thursday, bands have been allowed to play in bars and clubs again – like here the group Jordan Road in the long-established expat bar “The Wanch” in the Wanchai District.
Li Qiang is China’s second-in-command – the initiator of the Shanghai lockdown qualified for himself for higher office in Xi Jinping’s eyes through brutality and consistent repression of the population. That pretty much says it all about the new Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party. They are the seven men who steer the destiny of 1.4 billion people. But actually, only one man is steering here. The other six members are the most loyal followers of Xi found in the party leadership, analyzes Christiane Kuehl. China is completing the transition from complex one-party rule to the dictatorship of one ruler.
While the big Party Congress ends in Beijing, Germany discusses the Port of Hamburg. China.Table learned exclusively from negotiating circles that Cosco could settle for a 24.9 percent share instead of the originally planned 35 percent. This would potentially defuse the dispute, because, at this magic number, the Chinese side would no longer have a blocking minority and thus hardly any influence on the port’s business. The state-owned shipping company wants to acquire a stake in one of the terminals in the Port of Hamburg – a plan that is being met with considerable resistance from the Greens and the liberal FDP party. Chancellor Olaf Scholz could save both the port’s status and the coalition’s peace in this way, analyzes Frank Sieren. That would indeed be a considerable milestone.
However, this is still a long way from resolving the issue of how to deal with China; the tension between dependence and threat cannot be resolved. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz confirmed in Brussels that he would fly to China with a business delegation. Directly after the party congress, Germany now comes across as an economic supplicant, that is the concern of European partners, but also in parts of the German business community. The chancellor carries the Dax-CEOs in his baggage, whose companies are particularly dependent. Xi, for his part, will receive Scholz at the height of his power.
A disturbing incident involving Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao, who is not exactly considered a fan of the president, occurred on Saturday. You have probably seen the videos by now: The somewhat frail-looking Hu had just taken his seat when a party comrade and a steward escorted him out of the hall. A political show of force by Xi? I rather suspect a health emergency, even if that is also the explanation of the official news agency Xinhua.
It is the moment everyone has been waiting for. Led by Xi, the seven top cadres step into the Golden Hall of the Great Hall of the People on Sunday morning Beijing time to face the waiting journalists, who had quarantined themselves for two days for this sight. And it immediately becomes clear to the observers: Xi succeeded all the way.
The new Standing Committee is made up exclusively of loyal comrades-in-arms of the strong man. This has not happened since the Mao era: Xi’s immediate predecessors always had to tolerate members of rival CP factions. Therefore, many observers expected Xi to include, at least pro forma, one or two politicians on the committee not as close to him (China.Table reported).
But it turned out differently. Xi drove out all those who were not among his loyalists. Rejuvenation took place only by adding some of his own protégés to the inner circle. This was most evident in the 63-year-old Shanghai party leader Li Qiang. Li marched right after Xi. He will thus almost certainly be China’s next premier. And that despite the fact that he was responsible for the chaotic lockdown in Shanghai – and has never been vice premier. Until now, that was considered a key prerequisite for the post of head of government.
But political conventions and criteria only interfere with Xi’s establishment of a one-man rule. Professional qualifications are apparently secondary in his China; what matters is loyalty. The outcome of the Party Congress is not entirely surprising, “but Xi’s grab of power is still beyond our expectation. He is now a truly modern emperor,” tweeted Yang Zhang, a professor at American University in Washington. For decades, “Intra-party democracy” has been a firm goal of China’s communists – but Xi’s party congress work report was the first in 45 years where the slogan was absent, according to the China Media Project.
In the morning, the new Central Committee confirmed Xi as general secretary of the CP, as expected. He thus received the desired third term in office. The CC then selected the Politburo, which this time consists of only 24 instead of 25 people and, following the departure of Sun Chunlan, does not include a single woman for the first time in a quarter of a century. The actual power center, the Politburo Standing Committee, is recruited from the Politburo. As before, it has seven members. Four of them are new, and all of them are cadres from Xi’s inner circle: Li Qiang, Cai Qi, Dong Xuexiang and Li Xi. The most interesting person is Cai Qi, the party leader of the capital Beijing, who is considered to be ruthless.
Besides Xi, his chief ideologue Wang Huning and Zhao Leji, head of the party’s powerful Discipline Commission, are the only ones to retain their seats on the Standing Committee. Below, we take a closer look at the seven members, listed by rank:
Together, these seven men will “work diligently in the performance of our duties to prove worthy of the great trust of our party and our people,” Xi said in a brief speech in front of a bright red wall of CP flags.
In order to enforce his desired staff picks, the 69-year-old Xi took an extremely flexible approach to the informal retirement age of 68. It no longer applies to him anyway. Thus, two 67-year-old politicians, Li Keqiang and Wang Yang, retired early: Both do not belong to Xi’s faction. Until shortly before the CP Congress, Wang Yang had even been considered a possible prime ministerial candidate. With Li Xi and Cai Qi, two 66-year-olds moved up to the Committee. It is clear that it was not age but their close ties to Xi that played a role here. Moreover, all the new members of the Standing Committee are over 60, which means that a successor to Xi is still not in sight; at best, the 60-year-old Ding Xuexiang would be a suitable candidate according to the current standards.
On the power floor below, Xi allowed 69-year-old Foreign Minister Wang Yi to ascend to the Politburo. Wang is now likely to become the new foreign policy czar despite his age, succeeding Yang Jiechi, who resigned from the CC. Who will become the new foreign minister in March 2023 is still unclear. Interestingly, the new ambassador to the United States, Qin Gang, has been admitted to the Central Committee and would therefore be a possible candidate.
Vice Premier Hu Chunhua, who was considered the most important candidate for the post of prime minister until shortly before the Party Congress, was not only not promoted, he even lost his seat on the Politburo. Hu remains only on the Central Committee, a much larger body. The 59-year-old is one of ex-President Hu Jintao’s protégés and is popular among companies as a pragmatic doer (China.Table reported).
In this context, the incident surrounding 79-year-old Hu Jintao at the closing session of the Party Congress on Saturday was disturbing. Shortly after the start, two men – a steward and a senior party official – escorted Hu, who sat directly next to Xi, out of the hall. As they did so, Hu appeared as if this happened against his will. The frail-looking ex-president bowed once again toward Xi and Premier Li Keqiang. Xi nodded briefly. Li said a few words to Hu. Other Politburo members, as well as military officers in the row behind, watch the scene in surprise or concern.
Hu had not been feeling well, the official Xinhua news agency later reported, but was now better. Hu appeared confused and tried to hold onto one of Xi’s congressional documents while his own documents were handed to two men by a party colleague, the South China Morning Post observed.
Experts stressed that until now one can only speculate about the incident. Is Hu ill? Is he possibly suffering from dementia? Or are the alleged health problems reported by China’s state media only a pretext? In that case, would this be a warning signal to all of Xi’s rivals?
Meanwhile, a big bang on the Party constitution failed to materialize. Neither was Xi referred to as “chairman” in any form, nor were his previous theories shortened to “Xi Jinping Thought” – corresponding to “Mao Zedong Thought”. Thus, Xi apparently failed to place himself ideologically on Mao’s level.
However, as expected, the delegates on Saturday included several of Xi’s theoretical concepts in the CP Constitution. The most important are the “Two Establishments”/ 两个确立), which essentially establish Xi as the undisputed “core” of the CCP leadership, as well as Xi Jinping’s ideas as the foundation for the future (China.Table reported).
The party posts for the next five years have now been decided. Next spring, all government offices will be filled. Then Xi will in all likelihood secure a third term as president. It does not look as if anyone will stand in the way of his ambitions. Contributors: Felix Lee, Finn Mayer-Kuckuk
A compromise is emerging in the dispute over the sale of shares in a container terminal of the majority state-owned Port of Hamburg to China. The new deal envisages that the Chinese port operator Cosco, which is also state-owned, will receive only 24.9 percent of the shares instead of the 35 percent previously planned. This is what China.Table learned from negotiating circles. The remaining 10 percent in the terminal will be withheld for the time being. Their transfer is only possible after a cooldown period during which the Chinese partner must prove its reliability.
Sources in the German government say that this is one of the possible options being considered by the government. However, the decision is not yet final.
Proponents of the project hope that this compromise will defuse the two most important arguments against the takeover. Chinese influence would be contained, because shareholders only have a veto right above a stake of 25 percent. However, the veto right would only have applied to the smallest of the Port of Hamburg’s four container terminals. Now that is apparently off the table. This means that China would have virtually no influence on the actual port operations. At most, Cosco could influence the volume of containers handled at the Tollerort terminal, whose ships already call at the terminal frequently. So its position as an important customer is strong.
The stake is sold by the public-owned terminal company Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG (HHLA) – not to be confused with the port operator. At issue is Cosco Shipping Ports Limited’s (CSPL) stake in HHLA’s Container Terminal Tollerort (CTT) GmbH subsidiary. HHLA does not see any threat to the security of the country in this regard. It nevertheless felt compelled to reiterate its position on Thursday. “HHLA AG retains sole control over all major decisions,” it said in a press release. Tollerort-Gmbh is “ultimately an operating facility.” Cosco has no exclusive rights there, it said. “The terminal will remain open to container volumes from all customers.” Cosco will not gain access to strategic know-how: And, “The port infrastructure will remain the property of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. IT and sales data will remain the sole responsibility of HHLA AG.”
HHLA also stressed that it knew nothing of any opposition from six federal ministries and added: “The account that the EU is supposed to have objected to the cooperation is not correct. The antitrust permission was granted by relevant authorities.”
However, HHLA also made mistakes from the very beginning, which German Chancellor Olaf Scholz now has to pay for. The port company should never have promised such a large number of shares to the Chinese state-owned enterprise. But everyone involved, from HHLA itself to the port operators to the Hanseatic City Senate, saw above all a good deal: First, HHLA would profit from the sale of the shares, then from Cosco’s increasing container traffic. The world’s third-largest shipping company made $14 billion in profits in 2021 alone. Tollerort would become a “preferred hub” of Cosco as a result of the deal, HHLA announced in 2021. (China.Table reported)
The Port of Hamburg, in turn, expects the deal to increase its handling volume and strengthen its position toward rival ports along the North Sea: it already has been losing market share for years, especially to competitors such as Rotterdam and Antwerp.
At least the Port of Hamburg managed to gain market share in the first half of 2022. And this was primarily due to cooperation with China. While business with the USA slumped by 3.9 percent, business with China increased by 5.8 percent. Nevertheless, Rotterdam alone handles more containers than all German ports combined. In 2021, the Dutch location handled almost twice the volume of the Port of Hamburg.
Rotterdam’s success is due in no small part to Cosco. Cosco has held a 35 percent stake in Euromax Terminal in Rotterdam since 2016, without any political problems to date. This led HHLA to the false assumption that an equally high stake would not be a problem in Germany either – in an incorrect assessment of the political climate. Germany, an export nation, is much more dependent on China than the Netherlands. And the Germans have been very sensitive to these dependencies, especially since the start of the Ukraine war – even though the deal itself was signed just over a year ago, long before the Russian invasion.
On top of that, the situation is very complex. Shareholdings like Tollerort or Rotterdam are standard international practice. It would be Cosco’s 90th international stake in a port. Cosco also holds stakes in the US ports of Miami, Houston, Long Beach, Los Angeles and Seattle, without any political controversy over them. This has not stopped Washington from putting pressure on Germany behind the scenes against the deal.
Chinese investors are also already heavily involved in Europe. Cosco and its sister company China Merchants own terminals or even shares in entire port operating companies in 14 European ports – from Rotterdam and Antwerp to Le Havre, Bilbao, Valencia, Marseille and Malta. Cosco is one of the world’s largest port operators. The state-owned company even holds a majority stake in the Greek port of Piraeus (100 percent), and in the ports of Zeebrugge (85 percent) and Valencia (51 percent). In Antwerp, it holds less than 25 percent. In Wilhelmshaven, the China Logistic Group leased land for 99 years to build a logistics center in the Jade-Weser Port – and paid €100 million for it.
Cosco’s stake in Le Havre could also be the reason why France opposed the Hamburg deal. Above all, they fear that Cosco will draw business away from France to Germany. Of course, this is not what France’s President Emmanuel Macron said directly. He calls for “new rules of the game” for investments from China. The goal is to preserve strategic autonomy. We want to be able to continue to invest in China and have Chinese partners as long as it doesn’t touch the area of strategic autonomy, Macron said last Friday after the EU summit in Brussels.
As China.Table learned, Scholz now wants to initiate a “European port initiative”. It is intended to prevent China from successfully playing off one European port operator against the other. If the EU finally spoke with one voice on this issue, that would not be possible.
The chancellor’s office thus seeks a compromise on share reduction and, at the same time, an EU alliance. This dual strategy is somewhat reminiscent of the NATO Double-Track Decision devised by then-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in the 1980s: weaken the deal, but finalize it, and at the same time strive for disarmament. At that time, disarmament negotiations were started while new nuclear missiles were deployed. This strategy proved to be very successful.
With the initiative, Chancellor Olaf Scholz would address the concerns of his government coalition partners. The Greens, in particular, are ultimately opposed to an expansion of Chinese influence at this critical time. “The port of Hamburg is not just any port, after all,” said Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. It is one of the key ports not only for Germany as an export nation, but for Europe as a whole, she said. “We have to ask ourselves with every investment in German critical infrastructure what that could mean at that moment when China would turn against us as a democracy and community of values,” Baerbock said. Her party colleague, German Economy Minister Robert Habeck, also openly opposed the deal. He fears that “China will influence trade and the political direction of the port.”
The FDP also expresses concerns: The “enormous dependence” of the German economy on China is “depressing,” said Finance Minister Christian Lindner. His party colleague Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann said: “Selling critical infrastructure to China is a blatant mistake and should be stopped.”
And the opposition also argues against the deal, albeit with false arguments: “German ports do not belong in Chinese hands. Especially since Europeans cannot acquire stakes in ports in China,” says Jens Spahn, Deputy Chairman of the conservative CDU/CSU parliamentary group. In reality, however, there is no such restriction in China. According to China.Table information from Hainan’s capital Haikou, HHLA and other Western port operators are currently in talks about acquiring a stake in the new port there, which is under construction for $1.5 billion.
What is also important now is a public signal that Cosco agrees with the solution. The state-owned company already emphasized that it is not interested in the veto right, but above all in new business. This is the word from the company in Beijing.
Time is short, because next Wednesday is the last meeting of the German government where this issue can be put on the agenda. The Foreign Trade and Payments Act stipulates that the government must raise concerns about a foreign investor’s purchase offer within four months. The deadline expires on October 31.
What is included on the agenda, however, is ultimately decided by the Chancellor. This leaves Scholz with the option of approving the deal by simply not addressing it. However, that would put a lot of strain on the climate in the governing coalition. That is why Scholz is looking for a compromise here, too. After all, in the dispute over the extended use of nuclear power in Germany, Scholz already put his foot down as chancellor to push through an extension until April against Habeck’s will. He cannot afford such an approach as often as he likes.
The discussion about the Port of Hamburg also comes at a highly inconvenient time. Scholz will travel to Beijing on Nov. 4. In the Chinese capital, the sign-off of this port participation is seen as a gesture of goodwill for a successful visit. If things go well, a deal on the purchase of 350 Airbus aircraft is also on the cards, China.Table learned. China’s Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, placed the port deal in the context of the good economic relations of the past 50 years. So there is a lot at stake.
When Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, he was at first the “Man of Peng Liyuan” for many Chinese. After all, Peng was already a star in China when Xi was still climbing the provincial ladder. “Her singing is known in all the towns and villages of the motherland, her art deeply rooted in the masses,” the Xinhua news agency wrote in an ode to the 59-year-old female soprano. For many years, Peng’s specialty was so-called red folk songs – socialist lyrics with traditional melodies. Peng also enjoyed performing them at military events. After the suppression of the student movement on Tiananmen Square in 1989, she sang in uniform for the “victorious” soldiers. Politically, she always clearly stood by the Party.
However, the more power her husband gained, the less Peng was in the limelight as a singer. From then on, her destiny was to settle into the role of first lady. But this is also something novel: The wives of Xi’s predecessors practically never appeared in public. Only in Peng does China really have a first lady, who also accompanied her husband on many trips abroad.
Peng Liyuan was born into a simple family. She was born in 1962 in the eastern Chinese province of Shandong. Her parents, a theater actress and a museum curator, supported her artistic talent. At the age of 14, Peng already attended an art school. At 18, she became a soprano in the song and dance ensemble of the People’s Liberation Army, which she took over as director over the years. She became a nationwide star in the first edition of the CCTV-TV gala in the early 1980s, which is still popular today, where she performed the red folk song “在希望的田野上” (“On the Field of Hope”). From then on, she appeared almost every year at the gala, which became the world’s biggest TV event measured by an audience of more than a billion people.
Peng met her husband during this time. Xi supposedly once said that he knew she would become his wife after only 40 minutes of their first meeting. And Peng later recalled in an interview that she purposely wore a pair of tattered pants to one of their first dates to impress Xi with her intelligence and not her looks. In 1987, the couple married in Xiamen, Fujian Province, where Xi was vice mayor at the time. Mostly friends and colleagues were present during the small ceremony. It was Xi Jinping’s second marriage. The first one failed in 1982 after only three years – allegedly because Xi refused to move to the UK with his wife at the time, Ke Lingling.
Just four days after their wedding, Peng Liyuan embarked on a North America tour. Xi once said that he and his wife would work together even if they were physically separated. In 1992, their daughter Mingze was born, who is to this day strictly shielded from the public eye.
Peng made her last major appearance as a singer in the spring of 2008 at the Vienna State Opera, where she played the lead role in the world-touring musical Mulan. A few weeks earlier, Xi had been appointed Vice President of the People’s Republic of China, making him a potential successor to President Hu Jintao. From then on, Peng strictly adhered to protocol instead of her singing career. Since then, she has held official posts as ambassador for the fight against tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS for the World Health Organization and as a special Unesco ambassador for the right to education for girls and women.
As a representative of Chinese soft power, she regularly meets with first ladies from other countries to discuss joint aid projects. Her outfits often attract more attention in the media than her messages. Peng strictly wears “Made In China” by her in-house designer Ma Ke. Peng brilliantly lives up to what is expected of a first lady nowadays. In her home country, she embodies the strong wife who balances family and career and has her husband’s back.
The fact that Peng is popular in the army may have helped Xi’s rise to the central leadership of the armed forces from 2010 onward. Peng herself holds a civilian rank comparable to major general and was a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. However, she has no real political power beyond her marriage to China’s strongman.
In 2022, Peng’s fame no longer outshines Xi’s by far. Perhaps also because the Party fears overambitious wives of its grandees since Mao Zedong’s ostracized wife Jiang Qing, her ambitions remain limited to the protocol of a first lady. Jiang Qing, actress and director of the infamous “Red Operas,” was held responsible for the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution as a member of the radical “Gang of Four” after Mao’s death in 1976 and was sentenced to death on parole. In 1991, she committed suicide in prison. Incidentally, Peng and Xi both know how quickly the political weather can change: Peng’s father Peng Longkun ended up in a re-education camp during the Cultural Revolution for “counterrevolutionary activities,” as did Xi Jinping’s father Xi Zhongxun. Fabian Peltsch
Real music again at last! After two years, the Hong Kong government lifted the ban on live performances imposed during the Covid pandemic. Since last Thursday, bands have been allowed to play in bars and clubs again – like here the group Jordan Road in the long-established expat bar “The Wanch” in the Wanchai District.
