Of course, we have also been dealing intensively with the consequences of the mutual sanctioning of the EU and China for more than a week. The editors of China.Table feel the same way you do. The exchange of blows between the two sides was too intense for us not to want to take stock of EU-China relations. A low point or even a turning point? Looking for answers, Felix Lee studied the latest Chinese publications and spoke in-depth with China expert Markus Taube.
From refrigerator manufacturer to major shareholder of Daimler: Li Shufu has had an undoubtedly impressive entrepreneurial career. Today he is 59 years old – and apparently wants to do it all over again. With his company Geely and the Zeekr brand, he is entering the premium market for EVs, developing new mobility models and technological platforms. Jörn Petring, Gregor Koppenburg, and Frank Sieren followed Li’s footsteps and sounded out his plans.
And of course, at the end of this pre-Easter work week, we wouldn’t want to leave you without a column from Johnny Erling, who takes us into the world of Chinese naming.
We hope that you have a relaxing and, above all, a safe Easter, and we are looking forward to welcoming you again on Tuesday morning at the China.Table.
Beijing no longer sounds quite as hostile as it did last week. The mutual sanctions are to be understood “rather symbolically” as the measures of both sides “were not aimed at economic and trade cooperation”, writes China’s official news agency Xinhua. It remains to be hoped “that no faction crosses this subtle line amid the fierce ideological competition, so that the conflict does not escalate in the economic sphere”.
And the Global Times, the Communist leadership’s party organ known for its nationalist tones, also strikes more conciliatory notes. “China does not want the world to become more and more divided,” it says in its editorial. It adds that exacerbating the conflict is not in the country’s interest. “The Chinese leadership steadily pleads for all countries to treat each other with respect despite their differences.”
After the turbulent previous week, the leadership in Beijing seems to be at least somewhat committed to easing tensions. Because of the ongoing human rights violations in Xinjiang, the European Union had imposed sanctions on four Chinese party cadres for the first time in over three decades. In response, the leadership in Beijing sanctioned ten European politicians and academics, as well as four institutions, including Merics, the Berlin-based China think tank. Their employees and family members will not be allowed to enter China or Hong Kong in the future. Beijing’s response was decidedly disproportionate. The EU sanctioned four people, China at least two dozen.
Numerous EU countries summoned the ambassadors of the People’s Republic to their capitals. At the end of last week, there were apparently state-orchestrated campaigns on Chinese social media against Western brands for making critical comments in one way or another about cotton production in Xinjiang in the past. Human rights organizations accuse the authorities of using members of the Muslim Uyghur minority as forced laborers.
There was then talk of a rupture in Sino-European relations. European politicians spoke of a dangerous escalation. Matthias Nass, a China expert and author for Die Zeit, also wrote of “ominous escalation”. The Chinese embassy in Berlin, for its part, spoke of “malicious lies” that the EU had spread about China. Was last week a turning point?
“No,” says noted China economist Markus Taube. “Caesura would mean that the dispute is persistent and continues to escalate.” Taube heads the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen and keeps a close eye on events surrounding the mutual sanctions. “This is a low point now, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t get out of it in the foreseeable future.” So he doesn’t expect a further intensification of hostilities.
Nor does he consider the boycott campaigns in Chinese social media against Western brands to be a fundamental change in China’s dealings with foreign companies. After all, this is not the first time they have occurred. Daimler came under fire in a similar way just two years ago when the Stuttgart-based company used a quote from the Dalai Lama in a commercial. Daimler had to apologize publicly. “This is a pattern we know from China,” says Taube.
Indeed, there are currently few signs that the German economy is suffering from the current political conflicts. On the contrary: Both trade and demand for German goods are booming in the Middle Kingdom. German exporters were able to deliver 31.1 percent more goods to China in January and February than in the same period last year. Chinese imports from Europe even increased by 32.5 percent. It is probably thanks to the high demand from China that Germany’s economy did not slide into the red in the first quarter despite the ongoing lockdown. The People’s Republic was the only major economy to record growth in the past year amidst COVID. For the first time, China overtook the US as the EU’s most important trading partner.
Nevertheless, Taube considers the rough sanctions that China has imposed on the EU to be a factor that will influence economic relations. The European and German economies could move away from their Chinese business partners – especially as Beijing is signaling that its own economy will soon no longer need the West. After all, the National People’s Congress has presented the concept of so-called “dual circulation” as part of its new five-year plan.
The leadership’s goal: to make itself independent of imports from abroad in key sectors. Especially in semiconductors, China’s high-tech sector is still dependent on imports – above all on US technology. That dependence is a risk, given the ongoing economic warfare even under US President Joe Biden, that could threaten the very existence of entire companies. “Huawei will run into a wall if they don’t get new chips in China later this year,” says economist Taube.
China’s leadership has already invested billions in building up its own chip industry. But according to Taube, the People’s Republic needs at least three years to catch up, more likely five to ten. “That may not sound like much at first,” Taube says. “But a lot can break for companies like Huawei in those few years.”
There would actually have been opportunities for German companies. They could have filled the gap left by US companies because of the economic war in China. Without the US competition, Germany would have been the last major contact for China for reliable good technologies, Taube suspects.
But after the latest asymmetrical escalation, the Chinese have virtually driven the Europeans into the arms of the Americans. Even if China eases sanctions, mistrust will remain – even among German companies, Taube is convinced. “In the strategy departments and in the boardrooms, people will already be thinking carefully about how to assess the risk with China in the future.” This is not a fundamental break, but a growing mistrust.
India does not really engage in alliances. The decisions taken at the recent video summit of the four countries of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – Quad for short – were, therefore, already a special step for New Delhi. In mid-March, India, the US, Japan, and Australia agreed to jointly manufacture and distribute more than one billion doses of COVID-19 vaccine to countries in the Indo-Pacific region – with a special focus on ASEAN countries. So far, China has been the main supplier of vaccine doses to these countries. Quad also decided to build rare earth supply chains to break China’s near-monopoly. Then there is growing naval cooperation at sea – to prioritize, according to the final document of the video summit, “the role of international law in the maritime domain.” This, too, is clearly about China.
Quad is so far anything but a formal alliance – even if China’s foreign minister Wang Yi once called it the “Nato of the Indo-Pacific”. And India hastened to stress after the summit that it had by no means given up its strategic independence. China is nonetheless wary. On the sidelines of the National People’s Congress in March, Wang Yi had called on India to cooperate, saying, “China and India should be friends and partners, rather than threats and competitors. We should help each other build.”
Good words are needed because China and India have just come through a low point in their chequered relations: Months of skirmishes on the border, which claimed the lives of at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers in the Galwan Valley in June. It was not until February 2021 that a thaw began. India and China agreed to de-escalate on the Himalayan border. In a phone conversation in late February with his Indian counterpart Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Wang Yi stressed, according to the Chinese readout, that both countries must deal with the border issue appropriately “to prevent bilateral relations from sliding into a vicious circle.” At the same time, India returned to an old ceasefire agreement with Pakistan and agreed to participate in an anti-terror exercise with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which includes both China and Pakistan. The SCO is more of an antithesis to Quad.
But it is still unclear whether China and India will move towards cooperation or competition, or even conflict, in the longer term.
China and India are neighbors but in a geographically strange way. They share an approximately 3,500-kilometre-long, partly disputed, unmarked line of control in rough terrain in the middle of the Himalayas. Most Chinese and Indians live thousands of kilometers from this border, which therefore doesn’t really connect people. There are hardly any roads or other infrastructure up here – and no small border trade either.
In general, the exchange of goods between the two is unusually modest, with a volume of $87.6 billion in 2020. By comparison, EU-China trade in 2020 was around €600 billion, while India-EU trade was a good €65 billion. China exports the typical things to India: plastics, auto parts, pharmaceutical chemicals, or electronic items like smartphones. These exports accounted for good three-quarters of total trade in 2020 – so India’s trade deficit is large. The country mainly sends raw materials and intermediate products such as iron ore, steel, cotton, or fish to China.
In 1962, the two countries fought a brief border war. After that, there was radio silence – until 1998, when the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi traveled to Beijing. Both countries agreed then that relations should no longer be made dependent on a prior settlement of the border issue. Nevertheless, there was never any real breakthrough. Mistrust and misunderstanding on both sides remained high.
China, according to former foreign minister Vijay Gokhale, always feared India’s ties with the West. Delhi, in turn, often perceived China’s behavior as insensitive. China “never perceived India as an important country in its own right, capable of independent responses to geopolitical contexts,” Gokhale, author of a recent study on the future of relations, said at a recent webinar hosted by think tank Carnegie India. “They always looked at India as sort of an adjunct to someone else, as someone’s lackey.” Gokhale cited three examples. China, he said, publicly declared the Pakistan Economic Corridor, strategically important to Beijing, as a flagship New Silk Road project in 2015 without informing India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi about it during a state visit that took place immediately beforehand. In 2016, Beijing blocked India’s inclusion in the global Nuclear Suppliers Group – at the time, Gokhale was ambassador to Beijing. In 2016, 2017, and 2019, China blocked the inclusion of Pakistani militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed’s leader Masood Azhar on a terror list in the UN Security Council. The group had last attacked a convoy in Indian-controlled Kashmir in 2019. “For China, these may have been minor issues; but for India, these were major issues,” Gokhale said. Conversely, for China, any rapprochement between India and the US – especially in the Indo-Pacific – is a thorn in its flesh.
Where do we go from here? “The events of 2020 were a turning point. Resetting the relationships is no longer possible. They have to be rebuilt,” Gokhale said. Public opinion in India had tilted. Before 2020, a benevolent view of China prevailed, as well as admiration for its economic prowess and lifting so many people out of poverty. “This is now overshadowed by a sense that China is an adversary, that it is hostile to us and does not want India to progress.” The words are strikingly similar to accusations made by China against the West.
It does not yet look like a comprehensive turnaround in 2021. Especially since India is expected to ban domestic telecom companies from using technology from Chinese equipment suppliers Huawei and ZTE later this year. Despite the strained relations, however, India and China are working together on a number of platforms, including the Russia-India-China Dialogue Forum. India is also part of the BRICS group with Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – and will host a BRICS summit this year. So for now, India remains unaligned, the situation open. But close, institutional cooperation between India and Quad against China would be a watershed moment. Delhi will think twice.
The family council met weeks before the birth of the daughter. Parents and grandparents looked for a suitable first name. It should make sense, sound good, be easy to write and pronounce. The prospective grandfather looked it up in the Book of Oracles (Yiqing) and Confucius; the father looked it up online. Their choice fell on the double character “YouYou” (有有). It means “to have something, or something is available”. The character is in the Yiqing as a symbol of luck and in the motto of the philosophy: Wu Zhong Sheng You – From nothing comes the You. The mother liked the melodic sound when the third tone swings by doubling when pronouncing You.
That was in 2006. The Beijing family described to me how they found the first name in the traditional way, which according to Chinese custom, comes after the father’s family name. The police department registered the daughter with an 18-digit number after she presented her birth certificate, proof of being an only child, and the registration confirmation (hukou) of her residence.
Today, things are simpler. Numerous inexpensive apps make it easier to find the right name. Most importantly, parents have a legal right to choose their child’s surname and first name (姓名权) themselves for the first time. The first Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China (民法典) has been in effect since January 1. It regulates in several articles that names of natural persons may be freely “decided, used and changed” as long as they do not violate general good taste. Or, if there are other justified reasons against it. Such as in mid-2017, when party authorities had words inciting Islamist thought banned as part of a name in the course of their suppression of the Uyghurs. They suspected incitement to “holy war” or separatism.
At least the new law guarantees more equality. Because of the “change in social norms” and the end of the “one child family” in 2016, newborns are allowed to take on their mother’s last name. This was already noticeable in the generation born in 2020 (10,035 million children). Nevertheless, for every 12 children who took their father’s last name, there was only one who took their mother’s name.
This is all according to the “National Report on Names in China 2020” published on the police website. In it, the Ministry of Public Security boasts that it has made the collection of names a building block of its “big data strategy”, which it has been pursuing since 2018. Digitalization is so advanced that “we have built the world’s largest information and management system on the population“. China’s now 1.4 billion people registered with their hukou (right to stay) could track them across “all stages of life and nationwide migration”. The problem: The vast wealth of names and data are the raw material for developing sophisticated surveillance techniques. China already leads the world in identifying faces using artificial intelligence.
According to the police report, China’s names are said to have existed for more than 5000 years. A major dictionary of surnames in China published in 2010 (中国姓氏大辞典) records 23,813 family names. Of these, 6150 are still in circulation today, he said. The names, which are borne by the majority of all Chinese (85 percent), fall under the “list of 100 surnames” (baijiaxing). In 2020, as many as one in three (30.8 percent) of the 1.4 billion people belonged to one of the top five surnames from the list: Wang, Li, Zhang, Liu or Chen (“王,李, 张, 刘, 陈”). Wang – this is the name of more than 100 million people in China alone.
Since many parents then also choose the same first name for their children, everything is doubled. Masses of Chinese with the same name populate the People’s Republic. No wonder the police want to encourage their compatriots with an online service to check the names in all 31 provinces and city states to choose rarer or multi-syllabic first names. As many as hundreds of thousands of people are registered under only one name at a time, the current state of affairs is a nightmare for statistical surveys (including police investigations).
A table in the police report analyses how the choice of first names depended on the zeitgeist between 1949 and 2019, changing every ten years. It shows that some parents probably made their children’s first name a badge of their publicly demonstrated enthusiasm for the regime. Chinese with first names like “Jianguo” (building the state) or “Xinhua” (New China) were mostly born around 1950. Many first names were generated from abbreviations for absurd political campaigns. For example, those named “Zhaoying” (Outdated England) were born in the late 1950s. “Weidong” (Defends Mao Zedong) fell into the period of the Cultural Revolution, as did symbolic words like “Red Sun”, “Red Rock”, to “Sea Wave” that were readily used as first names. Only after Mao’s death in 1976 naming was gradually depoliticized to a large extent. First names reflected wishes for their children’s future, names from films, music and sport, love of the countryside and culture, or again the recourse to classical names.
China’s word for family name “Xing” (姓) is composed of the characters for woman and birth. It derives from the matriarchy in China’s primitive society, writes the police report. It was only 2,000 years ago, after the unification of the empire and unified administrative reforms, that the current father-influenced naming system emerged. Digitalization is now leading to a new standardization that is turning 1.4 billion Chinese into transparent people by recording their names.
On Wednesday, China opened the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope to scientists from other countries and will accept applications for observation time. The telescope replaced the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico as the world’s largest radio telescope several years ago. Arecibo has since collapsed due to wear and tear. In the movie GoldenEye James Bond did gymnastics on Arecibo. Whether the secret agent is also welcome on FAST is not known.
Of course, we have also been dealing intensively with the consequences of the mutual sanctioning of the EU and China for more than a week. The editors of China.Table feel the same way you do. The exchange of blows between the two sides was too intense for us not to want to take stock of EU-China relations. A low point or even a turning point? Looking for answers, Felix Lee studied the latest Chinese publications and spoke in-depth with China expert Markus Taube.
From refrigerator manufacturer to major shareholder of Daimler: Li Shufu has had an undoubtedly impressive entrepreneurial career. Today he is 59 years old – and apparently wants to do it all over again. With his company Geely and the Zeekr brand, he is entering the premium market for EVs, developing new mobility models and technological platforms. Jörn Petring, Gregor Koppenburg, and Frank Sieren followed Li’s footsteps and sounded out his plans.
And of course, at the end of this pre-Easter work week, we wouldn’t want to leave you without a column from Johnny Erling, who takes us into the world of Chinese naming.
We hope that you have a relaxing and, above all, a safe Easter, and we are looking forward to welcoming you again on Tuesday morning at the China.Table.
Beijing no longer sounds quite as hostile as it did last week. The mutual sanctions are to be understood “rather symbolically” as the measures of both sides “were not aimed at economic and trade cooperation”, writes China’s official news agency Xinhua. It remains to be hoped “that no faction crosses this subtle line amid the fierce ideological competition, so that the conflict does not escalate in the economic sphere”.
And the Global Times, the Communist leadership’s party organ known for its nationalist tones, also strikes more conciliatory notes. “China does not want the world to become more and more divided,” it says in its editorial. It adds that exacerbating the conflict is not in the country’s interest. “The Chinese leadership steadily pleads for all countries to treat each other with respect despite their differences.”
After the turbulent previous week, the leadership in Beijing seems to be at least somewhat committed to easing tensions. Because of the ongoing human rights violations in Xinjiang, the European Union had imposed sanctions on four Chinese party cadres for the first time in over three decades. In response, the leadership in Beijing sanctioned ten European politicians and academics, as well as four institutions, including Merics, the Berlin-based China think tank. Their employees and family members will not be allowed to enter China or Hong Kong in the future. Beijing’s response was decidedly disproportionate. The EU sanctioned four people, China at least two dozen.
Numerous EU countries summoned the ambassadors of the People’s Republic to their capitals. At the end of last week, there were apparently state-orchestrated campaigns on Chinese social media against Western brands for making critical comments in one way or another about cotton production in Xinjiang in the past. Human rights organizations accuse the authorities of using members of the Muslim Uyghur minority as forced laborers.
There was then talk of a rupture in Sino-European relations. European politicians spoke of a dangerous escalation. Matthias Nass, a China expert and author for Die Zeit, also wrote of “ominous escalation”. The Chinese embassy in Berlin, for its part, spoke of “malicious lies” that the EU had spread about China. Was last week a turning point?
“No,” says noted China economist Markus Taube. “Caesura would mean that the dispute is persistent and continues to escalate.” Taube heads the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen and keeps a close eye on events surrounding the mutual sanctions. “This is a low point now, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t get out of it in the foreseeable future.” So he doesn’t expect a further intensification of hostilities.
Nor does he consider the boycott campaigns in Chinese social media against Western brands to be a fundamental change in China’s dealings with foreign companies. After all, this is not the first time they have occurred. Daimler came under fire in a similar way just two years ago when the Stuttgart-based company used a quote from the Dalai Lama in a commercial. Daimler had to apologize publicly. “This is a pattern we know from China,” says Taube.
Indeed, there are currently few signs that the German economy is suffering from the current political conflicts. On the contrary: Both trade and demand for German goods are booming in the Middle Kingdom. German exporters were able to deliver 31.1 percent more goods to China in January and February than in the same period last year. Chinese imports from Europe even increased by 32.5 percent. It is probably thanks to the high demand from China that Germany’s economy did not slide into the red in the first quarter despite the ongoing lockdown. The People’s Republic was the only major economy to record growth in the past year amidst COVID. For the first time, China overtook the US as the EU’s most important trading partner.
Nevertheless, Taube considers the rough sanctions that China has imposed on the EU to be a factor that will influence economic relations. The European and German economies could move away from their Chinese business partners – especially as Beijing is signaling that its own economy will soon no longer need the West. After all, the National People’s Congress has presented the concept of so-called “dual circulation” as part of its new five-year plan.
The leadership’s goal: to make itself independent of imports from abroad in key sectors. Especially in semiconductors, China’s high-tech sector is still dependent on imports – above all on US technology. That dependence is a risk, given the ongoing economic warfare even under US President Joe Biden, that could threaten the very existence of entire companies. “Huawei will run into a wall if they don’t get new chips in China later this year,” says economist Taube.
China’s leadership has already invested billions in building up its own chip industry. But according to Taube, the People’s Republic needs at least three years to catch up, more likely five to ten. “That may not sound like much at first,” Taube says. “But a lot can break for companies like Huawei in those few years.”
There would actually have been opportunities for German companies. They could have filled the gap left by US companies because of the economic war in China. Without the US competition, Germany would have been the last major contact for China for reliable good technologies, Taube suspects.
But after the latest asymmetrical escalation, the Chinese have virtually driven the Europeans into the arms of the Americans. Even if China eases sanctions, mistrust will remain – even among German companies, Taube is convinced. “In the strategy departments and in the boardrooms, people will already be thinking carefully about how to assess the risk with China in the future.” This is not a fundamental break, but a growing mistrust.
India does not really engage in alliances. The decisions taken at the recent video summit of the four countries of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – Quad for short – were, therefore, already a special step for New Delhi. In mid-March, India, the US, Japan, and Australia agreed to jointly manufacture and distribute more than one billion doses of COVID-19 vaccine to countries in the Indo-Pacific region – with a special focus on ASEAN countries. So far, China has been the main supplier of vaccine doses to these countries. Quad also decided to build rare earth supply chains to break China’s near-monopoly. Then there is growing naval cooperation at sea – to prioritize, according to the final document of the video summit, “the role of international law in the maritime domain.” This, too, is clearly about China.
Quad is so far anything but a formal alliance – even if China’s foreign minister Wang Yi once called it the “Nato of the Indo-Pacific”. And India hastened to stress after the summit that it had by no means given up its strategic independence. China is nonetheless wary. On the sidelines of the National People’s Congress in March, Wang Yi had called on India to cooperate, saying, “China and India should be friends and partners, rather than threats and competitors. We should help each other build.”
Good words are needed because China and India have just come through a low point in their chequered relations: Months of skirmishes on the border, which claimed the lives of at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers in the Galwan Valley in June. It was not until February 2021 that a thaw began. India and China agreed to de-escalate on the Himalayan border. In a phone conversation in late February with his Indian counterpart Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Wang Yi stressed, according to the Chinese readout, that both countries must deal with the border issue appropriately “to prevent bilateral relations from sliding into a vicious circle.” At the same time, India returned to an old ceasefire agreement with Pakistan and agreed to participate in an anti-terror exercise with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which includes both China and Pakistan. The SCO is more of an antithesis to Quad.
But it is still unclear whether China and India will move towards cooperation or competition, or even conflict, in the longer term.
China and India are neighbors but in a geographically strange way. They share an approximately 3,500-kilometre-long, partly disputed, unmarked line of control in rough terrain in the middle of the Himalayas. Most Chinese and Indians live thousands of kilometers from this border, which therefore doesn’t really connect people. There are hardly any roads or other infrastructure up here – and no small border trade either.
In general, the exchange of goods between the two is unusually modest, with a volume of $87.6 billion in 2020. By comparison, EU-China trade in 2020 was around €600 billion, while India-EU trade was a good €65 billion. China exports the typical things to India: plastics, auto parts, pharmaceutical chemicals, or electronic items like smartphones. These exports accounted for good three-quarters of total trade in 2020 – so India’s trade deficit is large. The country mainly sends raw materials and intermediate products such as iron ore, steel, cotton, or fish to China.
In 1962, the two countries fought a brief border war. After that, there was radio silence – until 1998, when the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi traveled to Beijing. Both countries agreed then that relations should no longer be made dependent on a prior settlement of the border issue. Nevertheless, there was never any real breakthrough. Mistrust and misunderstanding on both sides remained high.
China, according to former foreign minister Vijay Gokhale, always feared India’s ties with the West. Delhi, in turn, often perceived China’s behavior as insensitive. China “never perceived India as an important country in its own right, capable of independent responses to geopolitical contexts,” Gokhale, author of a recent study on the future of relations, said at a recent webinar hosted by think tank Carnegie India. “They always looked at India as sort of an adjunct to someone else, as someone’s lackey.” Gokhale cited three examples. China, he said, publicly declared the Pakistan Economic Corridor, strategically important to Beijing, as a flagship New Silk Road project in 2015 without informing India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi about it during a state visit that took place immediately beforehand. In 2016, Beijing blocked India’s inclusion in the global Nuclear Suppliers Group – at the time, Gokhale was ambassador to Beijing. In 2016, 2017, and 2019, China blocked the inclusion of Pakistani militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed’s leader Masood Azhar on a terror list in the UN Security Council. The group had last attacked a convoy in Indian-controlled Kashmir in 2019. “For China, these may have been minor issues; but for India, these were major issues,” Gokhale said. Conversely, for China, any rapprochement between India and the US – especially in the Indo-Pacific – is a thorn in its flesh.
Where do we go from here? “The events of 2020 were a turning point. Resetting the relationships is no longer possible. They have to be rebuilt,” Gokhale said. Public opinion in India had tilted. Before 2020, a benevolent view of China prevailed, as well as admiration for its economic prowess and lifting so many people out of poverty. “This is now overshadowed by a sense that China is an adversary, that it is hostile to us and does not want India to progress.” The words are strikingly similar to accusations made by China against the West.
It does not yet look like a comprehensive turnaround in 2021. Especially since India is expected to ban domestic telecom companies from using technology from Chinese equipment suppliers Huawei and ZTE later this year. Despite the strained relations, however, India and China are working together on a number of platforms, including the Russia-India-China Dialogue Forum. India is also part of the BRICS group with Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – and will host a BRICS summit this year. So for now, India remains unaligned, the situation open. But close, institutional cooperation between India and Quad against China would be a watershed moment. Delhi will think twice.
The family council met weeks before the birth of the daughter. Parents and grandparents looked for a suitable first name. It should make sense, sound good, be easy to write and pronounce. The prospective grandfather looked it up in the Book of Oracles (Yiqing) and Confucius; the father looked it up online. Their choice fell on the double character “YouYou” (有有). It means “to have something, or something is available”. The character is in the Yiqing as a symbol of luck and in the motto of the philosophy: Wu Zhong Sheng You – From nothing comes the You. The mother liked the melodic sound when the third tone swings by doubling when pronouncing You.
That was in 2006. The Beijing family described to me how they found the first name in the traditional way, which according to Chinese custom, comes after the father’s family name. The police department registered the daughter with an 18-digit number after she presented her birth certificate, proof of being an only child, and the registration confirmation (hukou) of her residence.
Today, things are simpler. Numerous inexpensive apps make it easier to find the right name. Most importantly, parents have a legal right to choose their child’s surname and first name (姓名权) themselves for the first time. The first Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China (民法典) has been in effect since January 1. It regulates in several articles that names of natural persons may be freely “decided, used and changed” as long as they do not violate general good taste. Or, if there are other justified reasons against it. Such as in mid-2017, when party authorities had words inciting Islamist thought banned as part of a name in the course of their suppression of the Uyghurs. They suspected incitement to “holy war” or separatism.
At least the new law guarantees more equality. Because of the “change in social norms” and the end of the “one child family” in 2016, newborns are allowed to take on their mother’s last name. This was already noticeable in the generation born in 2020 (10,035 million children). Nevertheless, for every 12 children who took their father’s last name, there was only one who took their mother’s name.
This is all according to the “National Report on Names in China 2020” published on the police website. In it, the Ministry of Public Security boasts that it has made the collection of names a building block of its “big data strategy”, which it has been pursuing since 2018. Digitalization is so advanced that “we have built the world’s largest information and management system on the population“. China’s now 1.4 billion people registered with their hukou (right to stay) could track them across “all stages of life and nationwide migration”. The problem: The vast wealth of names and data are the raw material for developing sophisticated surveillance techniques. China already leads the world in identifying faces using artificial intelligence.
According to the police report, China’s names are said to have existed for more than 5000 years. A major dictionary of surnames in China published in 2010 (中国姓氏大辞典) records 23,813 family names. Of these, 6150 are still in circulation today, he said. The names, which are borne by the majority of all Chinese (85 percent), fall under the “list of 100 surnames” (baijiaxing). In 2020, as many as one in three (30.8 percent) of the 1.4 billion people belonged to one of the top five surnames from the list: Wang, Li, Zhang, Liu or Chen (“王,李, 张, 刘, 陈”). Wang – this is the name of more than 100 million people in China alone.
Since many parents then also choose the same first name for their children, everything is doubled. Masses of Chinese with the same name populate the People’s Republic. No wonder the police want to encourage their compatriots with an online service to check the names in all 31 provinces and city states to choose rarer or multi-syllabic first names. As many as hundreds of thousands of people are registered under only one name at a time, the current state of affairs is a nightmare for statistical surveys (including police investigations).
A table in the police report analyses how the choice of first names depended on the zeitgeist between 1949 and 2019, changing every ten years. It shows that some parents probably made their children’s first name a badge of their publicly demonstrated enthusiasm for the regime. Chinese with first names like “Jianguo” (building the state) or “Xinhua” (New China) were mostly born around 1950. Many first names were generated from abbreviations for absurd political campaigns. For example, those named “Zhaoying” (Outdated England) were born in the late 1950s. “Weidong” (Defends Mao Zedong) fell into the period of the Cultural Revolution, as did symbolic words like “Red Sun”, “Red Rock”, to “Sea Wave” that were readily used as first names. Only after Mao’s death in 1976 naming was gradually depoliticized to a large extent. First names reflected wishes for their children’s future, names from films, music and sport, love of the countryside and culture, or again the recourse to classical names.
China’s word for family name “Xing” (姓) is composed of the characters for woman and birth. It derives from the matriarchy in China’s primitive society, writes the police report. It was only 2,000 years ago, after the unification of the empire and unified administrative reforms, that the current father-influenced naming system emerged. Digitalization is now leading to a new standardization that is turning 1.4 billion Chinese into transparent people by recording their names.
On Wednesday, China opened the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope to scientists from other countries and will accept applications for observation time. The telescope replaced the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico as the world’s largest radio telescope several years ago. Arecibo has since collapsed due to wear and tear. In the movie GoldenEye James Bond did gymnastics on Arecibo. Whether the secret agent is also welcome on FAST is not known.
