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It goes without saying that the Media has a substantial role in shaping the perception of the People’s Republic of China in Germany. But are they really the driving force behind critical portrayal? Or do they merely reflect sentiments from the social spectrum? And to what extent does the state-concerted discrediting of foreign media in China influence the perception of German journalism? Sadly, these questions remain unanswered by the study published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, which accuses German newspapers of a “media-constructed enemy image of China.” Our analysis examines the study, its core statements, and some of its weak points.
Christiane Kuehl takes a look at new mobility concepts today. The occasion is the current IPO of Volvo. By using its parent company Geely as an example, she describes the transformation from a stuffy small car manufacturer into one of the most ambitious electric manufacturers in the world. Volvo as we know it will change dramatically because its Chinese owner has far-reaching plans for the brand.
The example shows that the rest of the world will have to get used to the fact that Chinese ideas and perceptions will drastically shape our future. Whether we like it or not. This makes it all the more important for the media to maintain a critical stance on current developments. Whether China’s players like it or not.
Have a pleasant day!
Things turned out well in the end. The shares of Swedish carmaker Volvo grew by about 22 percent on Friday at its stock market debut in Stockholm. That wasn’t necessarily certain after a few stumbling blocks paved the way to the stock exchange floor. Investors criticized that the share price was too high and that the Chinese parent company Geely had too much influence.
To avoid jeopardizing the initial listing, Geely had to agree to give up its expanded voting rights. These would have given the company of industrious car manager and Geely founder Li Shufu 98 percent of all shareholder votes. This is despite Geely’s shareholding falling to around 84 percent as a result of the IPO. Volvo also had to lower the issue price and thus the market capitalization and push the debut back by one day.
And yet, according to Reuters, it was enough to make it the largest new issue of the year in Europe. Volvo now wants to use the money primarily for the expansion of electromobility. From 2030, the Geely subsidiary wants to stop selling combustion engines vehicles. This conversion will be costly. But Volvo is at the forefront of Li’s plans to turn Geely into a modern automotive group – with electric cars, autonomous and intelligent vehicles, and entirely new mobility concepts.
It’s been a long path for Geely, which is now China’s largest privately held automaker. It wasn’t so long ago when it was only known as a maker of cheap small cars. The acquisition of Volvo in 2010 was the first in a series of deals that transformed the group’s image and underscored the ambition of its founder. Geely bought brands such as Lotus and Smart, as well as the London Electric Vehicle Company, and finally, just under ten percent of Daimler.
In one of his rare interviews, Li described this industry-wide network to Reuters as his “bigger circle of friends.” This, he said, is what he needs to ensure Geely’s success in a future where cars are not vehicles but “service providers.” “We are trying to create an automotive ecosystem similar to Android,” Li said in the interview. And Volvo plays a big role to play in that. The Swedes are still perceived internationally as a quality brand.
In China, Geely is currently structurally unbundling the brand from its parent company. By July 2021, Volvo gradually took full ownership of the brand’s production facilities in Chengdu in China’s southwestern province of Sichuan, and Daqing in the northeast, along with its development center in Shanghai and its national sales company for the Chinese market. Then in October, another plant in Luqiao in the coastal province of Zhejiang went to Volvo. The Polestar 2 and Volvo XC40 Recharge electric models, among others, are produced there.
Polestar, which was originally founded in Sweden in 1996 as a racing brand, had been acquired by Volvo in 2015. Two years later, Volvo and Geely re-established the company as a “Swedish manufacturer of premium electric performance vehicles.” According to the company, its Polestar 1 and 2 models are currently available in 14 global markets in Europe, North America, and China, with more markets being targeted. To that end, Polestar launched a global advertising campaign in time for the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow: In Polestar’s video, astronaut Karen Nyberg looks at Earth and wonders, “Can we continue our species and preserve our only home, while still enjoying the thrill of being human?”
The campaign film is a sign that Geely wants to join Volvo and Polestar at the forefront of a movement often associated exclusively with Tesla and other e-startups. Among traditional carmakers, Geely has a comparatively sophisticated view of the future of mobility, finds Bill Russo, founder of Automobility, a Shanghai-based consultancy specializing in new mobility. Geely understands that the mobility model is moving away from pure manufacturers, Russo says.
Li Shufu is currently positioning his company with many projects wherever there are new approaches to mobility. He doesn’t want to miss a trend. That is why being there is the name of the game for now.
Like the smart Concept #1, Zeekr’s models will be produced on Geely’s SEA electric platform, which was presented in September 2020. This will form the basis for Geely brands and contract manufacturing. The platform is “the foundation for a three-layered ecosystem around whole vehicles, automotive systems, and Internet of Vehicles,” Geely announced at the time.
That all sounds like future tech. So far, however, Geely has mainly sold cars with combustion engines or hybrids – primarily under its own brand, but also under Volvo or Lynk&Co. Only three percent of all Volvos sold are currently electric models. So Volvo still needs to put in a lot of work to reach its goal: And fresh capital should be a big help.
A study by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (RLS) accuses German leading media of “an agenda of Western values and a Eurocentric perspective” in their media coverage of China. After analyzing 747 articles in seven newspapers and magazines from January to August 2020, the three authors, led by sinologist Mechthild Leutner, came to the conclusion that “clichés and stereotypes” were increasingly being adopted, which “in part, still stem from colonial times.”
The study’s conclusion will hardly come as a surprise to anyone who read the preface. In it, Jan Turowski, head of the RSL office in Beijing, writes about his perception of things. He finds “German media reports, for all their accuracy and justified criticism, to be mostly under-complex” and insufficiently nuanced. In his opinion, political decisions are too rarely made understandable from Chinese logic. That’s why he decided to take a closer look at “China coverage by German media in the context of the Corona crisis.”
“We are aware that the question is politically charged and that the research results will be met with opposition and rejection,” says Turowski. This expectation results from several considerations. The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation is very close to the left. Its deputy chairman of the German-Chinese parliamentary group of the last Bundestag, Stefan Liebich, said in an interview with China.Table ahead of the German federal elections, that his party was divided over its positioning on China.
“We still have some older members who say, ‘How nice that at least one big country is left from the old socialist world.’ And it is also still so strong to surpass the West,” Liebich said at the time. Critics from other factions understood this as an overly uncritical assessment by the left of an increasingly totalitarian regime.
Study author Leutner herself also had to face severe backlash after she described the internment camps for Uyghurs in the Autonomous Province of Xinjiang as “vocational training centers” and “deradicalization centers” in her capacity as a summoned expert to the Human Rights Committee of the German Bundestag.
German newspaper Die Welt reproached her at the time: “The sinologist painted a picture of an acutely threatened Chinese state that has to defend itself in the northwest against an army of raging terrorists.” Present experts from other groups, on the other hand, accused the Chinese government in Xinjiang of “systematic human rights violations.”
The study defines five phases within the examined period: outbreak of the disease in Wuhan, criticism of information policy, containment of the pandemic, reception of the accusations made by former US President Donald Trump against China, and economic impact. She sorts the articles by German newspapers Welt, Zeit, Spiegel, taz, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Handelsblatt and Tagesspiegel according to whether they were written by correspondents or feature other authors. About a third of the articles examined were written by journalists on site.
The texts are categorized into eight fields, such as medicine and health, China’s domestic politics, or German-Chinese relations. The study attributes an overall tendency from “positive” to “very critical” to each article in four classes. Example: German-Chinese relations. Of 122 articles, more than half (54.9 percent) are rated neutral. On domestic policy, on the other hand, almost 90 percent of the publications are rated critical to very critical.
Lena Marie Hufnagel from the Institute of Journalism at University TU Dortmund has no objections to the study’s methodology. “It is a legitimate approach to analyzing German reporting on China,” says Hufnagel. However, whether other countries report even more critically on China remains unanswered. “The study lacks a theoretical superstructure. But without a point of reference, it is very difficult to draw further conclusions from the results,” says Hufnagel.
The authors, who, aside from Leutner, also include Jia Changbao and Xiao Minxing, two sinologists at the Free University of Berlin who also work “intensively” on the perception and representation of China in Germany, instead define core terms of the texts and attribute a certain public impact to them. Thus, in the field of “China’s Domestic Policy”, the term “enemy” appears 20 times in 181 articles. The consequence, they say, is a “media-constructed enemy image of China.”
What also remains unanswered in this context, however, is the extent to which the media themselves have injected the “enemy” concept into their reporting. “It is certainly the case that the media also reflect what is brought into the debate from politics, business or civil society. The study does not capture this spectrum,” says Lena Marie Hufnagel. Nor is China portrayed as an enemy per se. The April 27 edition of Die Welt, for example, states: “The regime in Beijing is an enemy of democracy and free societies.”
Whether this term is possibly warranted, however, remains an open question. Journalism in democratic societies has to call a spade a spade in order to be able to act as a control authority. “The aim of the study is not to analyze actual developments in China or to verify the validity of its content,” the study’s introduction says. Sinologist Leutner comments: “The study can examine whether reports are neutral or biased. But it cannot compare every report in its entire context.” This would be already impossible timewise. However, the phenomenon of constructing enemy images is not new, she says, referring to older studies.
Another accusation raised by the study is “a quantitative and qualitative dominance of non-Chinese sources” and a linguistic style “that ascribes greater credibility and interpretive power to selected ‘Western’ representatives.” A Spiegel cover story from February 1st is cited as an example, in which seven Chinese and eleven non-Chinese sources are used.
However, correspondents in China complain about the limited research opportunities available to them. It is increasingly difficult to find interlocutors willing to talk to foreign reporters, according to a survey conducted by the Foreign Correspondent Club of China (FCCC) earlier this year.
“The working conditions in China are so severely restricted that it is impossible to meet the requirements set out in the study,” says Maximilian Kalkhof. The journalist from the daily Die Welt, who wanted to move to Beijing as a correspondent in 2019, had to wait for his accreditation by the Chinese authorities for about two years. Since then, Kalkhof has been trying to bring his experience and language skills to his reporting from a distance.
The working conditions are certainly a topic in their own right, says author Leutner. “Most of the articles in the media examined do not state the conditions under which they were produced. Rather, the impression is given that correspondents are on site and are able to get a full overview of their topics. It is impossible to draw any conclusions about the working conditions of journalists from mere text analysis alone, as we did in the study.” Perhaps the articles need to address this more so that readers can get a better idea of the conditions they were written in, says Leutner.
Perspective is one of the main lines of argument in the study. It states that China – concerning Covid – saw a heated debate about the relationship between privacy and the community’s right to information and transparency. “The German media that reported on it, however, presented the debate – in a completely different fashion – as a discussion about the relationship between government power and individual rights.” The accusation that arises from this is: the media fails to grasp the core of the issue.
But this conclusion presupposes that the authors have followed the entire debate in China. Leutner says: “As academics specializing in China, we continuously follow the main lines of public debate in China, especially during the Corona pandemic. This has led to these conclusions regarding the issues mentioned in the study, which we have exemplified.” However, public discourse is censored in China. Correspondents therefore try to obtain unfiltered opinions and positions and try to provide them as a counterweight to the official narrative.
This counterbalance is naturally provided by critical voices, such as “Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City” by author Fang Fang, in order to classify the government’s actions. The study states that the book provides (the media) with “a testimony of mismanagement and failure” of the Chinese government.
Leutner attributes great value to the book as a testament to those months, but “of course, diary entries are not scientific analysis but anecdotal impressions, no more and no less. Moreover, one must assume that Fang Fang, the author, was also giving her impressions in a literary sense and not primarily from a scientific distance.” The media, on the other hand, only grudgingly notes the successful containment of the virus in China, and at the same time, would devalue it by linking it to cover-ups, censorship, and unreliable figures, the study concludes.
For Andreas Fulda, a German political scientist at the University of Nottingham, this creates another problem. “China is analyzed predominantly from the point of view of its rulers. The study pretends like there are hardly any critics of Xi’s crisis management in mainland China,” says Fulda. He says that he missed the political reality in the study.
An example: Head of State Xi Jinping, whom the study sees as having the “narrative of a communist dictator” attributed to him in the German media. According to Fulda, however, the media’s view does reflect reality. Xi created a personality cult, ended collective leadership in the Politburo Standing Committee, and, with Document Number Nine, clearly rejected any liberalization and democratization of the country, Fulda argues. “From the perspective of political science, the Xi regime can be characterized as a personalized dictatorship,” he concludes.
Sinolytics is a European consulting and analysis company that focuses entirely on China. It advises European companies on strategic orientation and specific business activities in China.
Be it the imprisonment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang or the umbrella protests in Hong Kong: Shanghai-born artist Badiucao transforms political events into brutally provocative pop art. The 35-year-old has already been called the “Banksy of China.” The comparison with the British street artist makes sense insofar as Badiucao’s messages are so distinct that they also make for good graffiti and demo posters.
On the other hand, Badiucao, like Banksy, kept his identity secret for a long time. The dissident only revealed his face, hidden behind a mask, two years ago in an Australian documentary. However, Badiucao still does not want to reveal his birth name. The artist, who now lives in Australia, has cut all ties with his family in China. “The Communist Party could use them to get to me. I don’t want to endanger them,” he says.
That Badiucao’s works are banned in Xi Jinping’s China is not surprising: His belligerent caricatures targeted no other politician as often as the Chinese State and Party Leader. One of his most recent illustrations depicts Xi as a necromancer. In front of the five Olympic rings, Xi levitates the body of the laid-out Mao Zedong. That was his comment on the two Chinese track cyclists who wore pins bearing the Great Chairman’s likeness during a medal ceremony in Tokyo in early August. “As a China-born citizen who lost members of his family during Mao’s reign of terror, it was traumatic to see those badges being worn during a medal ceremony. It also makes me angry to see young Chinese athletes fail to learn the brutal truth of China’s history,” Badiucao wrote on Instagram.
Badiucao was born in 1986 into a family of artists. His grandparents were among the first successful Chinese filmmakers between 1930 and 1957. “Then the campaign against intellectuals began. My grandfather was taken to a labor camp in the countryside. He died. How and when, we will never know.”
Badiucao had his final political “epiphany,” as he calls it, during a dorm movie night in the 2000s. “We had picked out movies like we did every weekend and thought we had gotten a Taiwanese comedy. Instead, it was a five-hour documentary about the Tiananmen Massacre. We knew something had happened in 1989, but not exactly what,” he says. He describes the images like a punch in the gut. “Suddenly, my family history was no longer ancient history. Things like that had happened again not so long ago.”
After dropping out of law school, Badiucao posted his first political illustration in 2011 about a train accident in the eastern Chinese coastal city of Wenzhou. At the time, the 40 people killed and more than 200 injured in the accident were also to be erased from the collective memory on highest order. “Ten years ago, the Party didn’t have total control over the Internet like it does today,” Badiucao says. “It was only when Xi Jinping came to power that the interventions became more massive and sophisticated.” No one dared to talk about controversial topics anymore. Beijing became untouchable again.
His work is now used by major Western media such as the BBC or organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. New pictures are published several times a month. When events boil up, like the protests in Hong Kong in 2019, Badiucao comments on the events almost on a daily basis. He waives copyright in the process. “Anyone can download, copy, share and distribute the images.” His concern is publicity, freedom of expression, and encouragement, says the artist.
On November 13th, Badiucao will present his first major solo exhibition in three years at the Museo di Santa Giulia in Brescia, Italy. Even the planning for the exhibition experienced disruptions. China’s ambassador stepped in to pressure the city’s mayor. But neither the mayor nor the museum management gave in.
Badiucao hopes his works will help ensure that brave voices against Beijing do not fall silent. “The Covid pandemic has given China the opportunity to present itself on the world stage as a country of peace and unity. My works provide a counterweight to this.”Fabian Peltsch
For more than a year now, the Russian-Chinese border from Pogranichny to Heilongjiang in north-eastern China has repeatedly been beset by kilometer-long traffic jams. Russian truck drivers sometimes wait several days to enter the People’s Republic. On some days, China’s authorities do not allow more than 15 trucks to pass through each border crossing for fear of spreading the Coronavirus.
It goes without saying that the Media has a substantial role in shaping the perception of the People’s Republic of China in Germany. But are they really the driving force behind critical portrayal? Or do they merely reflect sentiments from the social spectrum? And to what extent does the state-concerted discrediting of foreign media in China influence the perception of German journalism? Sadly, these questions remain unanswered by the study published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, which accuses German newspapers of a “media-constructed enemy image of China.” Our analysis examines the study, its core statements, and some of its weak points.
Christiane Kuehl takes a look at new mobility concepts today. The occasion is the current IPO of Volvo. By using its parent company Geely as an example, she describes the transformation from a stuffy small car manufacturer into one of the most ambitious electric manufacturers in the world. Volvo as we know it will change dramatically because its Chinese owner has far-reaching plans for the brand.
The example shows that the rest of the world will have to get used to the fact that Chinese ideas and perceptions will drastically shape our future. Whether we like it or not. This makes it all the more important for the media to maintain a critical stance on current developments. Whether China’s players like it or not.
Have a pleasant day!
Things turned out well in the end. The shares of Swedish carmaker Volvo grew by about 22 percent on Friday at its stock market debut in Stockholm. That wasn’t necessarily certain after a few stumbling blocks paved the way to the stock exchange floor. Investors criticized that the share price was too high and that the Chinese parent company Geely had too much influence.
To avoid jeopardizing the initial listing, Geely had to agree to give up its expanded voting rights. These would have given the company of industrious car manager and Geely founder Li Shufu 98 percent of all shareholder votes. This is despite Geely’s shareholding falling to around 84 percent as a result of the IPO. Volvo also had to lower the issue price and thus the market capitalization and push the debut back by one day.
And yet, according to Reuters, it was enough to make it the largest new issue of the year in Europe. Volvo now wants to use the money primarily for the expansion of electromobility. From 2030, the Geely subsidiary wants to stop selling combustion engines vehicles. This conversion will be costly. But Volvo is at the forefront of Li’s plans to turn Geely into a modern automotive group – with electric cars, autonomous and intelligent vehicles, and entirely new mobility concepts.
It’s been a long path for Geely, which is now China’s largest privately held automaker. It wasn’t so long ago when it was only known as a maker of cheap small cars. The acquisition of Volvo in 2010 was the first in a series of deals that transformed the group’s image and underscored the ambition of its founder. Geely bought brands such as Lotus and Smart, as well as the London Electric Vehicle Company, and finally, just under ten percent of Daimler.
In one of his rare interviews, Li described this industry-wide network to Reuters as his “bigger circle of friends.” This, he said, is what he needs to ensure Geely’s success in a future where cars are not vehicles but “service providers.” “We are trying to create an automotive ecosystem similar to Android,” Li said in the interview. And Volvo plays a big role to play in that. The Swedes are still perceived internationally as a quality brand.
In China, Geely is currently structurally unbundling the brand from its parent company. By July 2021, Volvo gradually took full ownership of the brand’s production facilities in Chengdu in China’s southwestern province of Sichuan, and Daqing in the northeast, along with its development center in Shanghai and its national sales company for the Chinese market. Then in October, another plant in Luqiao in the coastal province of Zhejiang went to Volvo. The Polestar 2 and Volvo XC40 Recharge electric models, among others, are produced there.
Polestar, which was originally founded in Sweden in 1996 as a racing brand, had been acquired by Volvo in 2015. Two years later, Volvo and Geely re-established the company as a “Swedish manufacturer of premium electric performance vehicles.” According to the company, its Polestar 1 and 2 models are currently available in 14 global markets in Europe, North America, and China, with more markets being targeted. To that end, Polestar launched a global advertising campaign in time for the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow: In Polestar’s video, astronaut Karen Nyberg looks at Earth and wonders, “Can we continue our species and preserve our only home, while still enjoying the thrill of being human?”
The campaign film is a sign that Geely wants to join Volvo and Polestar at the forefront of a movement often associated exclusively with Tesla and other e-startups. Among traditional carmakers, Geely has a comparatively sophisticated view of the future of mobility, finds Bill Russo, founder of Automobility, a Shanghai-based consultancy specializing in new mobility. Geely understands that the mobility model is moving away from pure manufacturers, Russo says.
Li Shufu is currently positioning his company with many projects wherever there are new approaches to mobility. He doesn’t want to miss a trend. That is why being there is the name of the game for now.
Like the smart Concept #1, Zeekr’s models will be produced on Geely’s SEA electric platform, which was presented in September 2020. This will form the basis for Geely brands and contract manufacturing. The platform is “the foundation for a three-layered ecosystem around whole vehicles, automotive systems, and Internet of Vehicles,” Geely announced at the time.
That all sounds like future tech. So far, however, Geely has mainly sold cars with combustion engines or hybrids – primarily under its own brand, but also under Volvo or Lynk&Co. Only three percent of all Volvos sold are currently electric models. So Volvo still needs to put in a lot of work to reach its goal: And fresh capital should be a big help.
A study by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (RLS) accuses German leading media of “an agenda of Western values and a Eurocentric perspective” in their media coverage of China. After analyzing 747 articles in seven newspapers and magazines from January to August 2020, the three authors, led by sinologist Mechthild Leutner, came to the conclusion that “clichés and stereotypes” were increasingly being adopted, which “in part, still stem from colonial times.”
The study’s conclusion will hardly come as a surprise to anyone who read the preface. In it, Jan Turowski, head of the RSL office in Beijing, writes about his perception of things. He finds “German media reports, for all their accuracy and justified criticism, to be mostly under-complex” and insufficiently nuanced. In his opinion, political decisions are too rarely made understandable from Chinese logic. That’s why he decided to take a closer look at “China coverage by German media in the context of the Corona crisis.”
“We are aware that the question is politically charged and that the research results will be met with opposition and rejection,” says Turowski. This expectation results from several considerations. The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation is very close to the left. Its deputy chairman of the German-Chinese parliamentary group of the last Bundestag, Stefan Liebich, said in an interview with China.Table ahead of the German federal elections, that his party was divided over its positioning on China.
“We still have some older members who say, ‘How nice that at least one big country is left from the old socialist world.’ And it is also still so strong to surpass the West,” Liebich said at the time. Critics from other factions understood this as an overly uncritical assessment by the left of an increasingly totalitarian regime.
Study author Leutner herself also had to face severe backlash after she described the internment camps for Uyghurs in the Autonomous Province of Xinjiang as “vocational training centers” and “deradicalization centers” in her capacity as a summoned expert to the Human Rights Committee of the German Bundestag.
German newspaper Die Welt reproached her at the time: “The sinologist painted a picture of an acutely threatened Chinese state that has to defend itself in the northwest against an army of raging terrorists.” Present experts from other groups, on the other hand, accused the Chinese government in Xinjiang of “systematic human rights violations.”
The study defines five phases within the examined period: outbreak of the disease in Wuhan, criticism of information policy, containment of the pandemic, reception of the accusations made by former US President Donald Trump against China, and economic impact. She sorts the articles by German newspapers Welt, Zeit, Spiegel, taz, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Handelsblatt and Tagesspiegel according to whether they were written by correspondents or feature other authors. About a third of the articles examined were written by journalists on site.
The texts are categorized into eight fields, such as medicine and health, China’s domestic politics, or German-Chinese relations. The study attributes an overall tendency from “positive” to “very critical” to each article in four classes. Example: German-Chinese relations. Of 122 articles, more than half (54.9 percent) are rated neutral. On domestic policy, on the other hand, almost 90 percent of the publications are rated critical to very critical.
Lena Marie Hufnagel from the Institute of Journalism at University TU Dortmund has no objections to the study’s methodology. “It is a legitimate approach to analyzing German reporting on China,” says Hufnagel. However, whether other countries report even more critically on China remains unanswered. “The study lacks a theoretical superstructure. But without a point of reference, it is very difficult to draw further conclusions from the results,” says Hufnagel.
The authors, who, aside from Leutner, also include Jia Changbao and Xiao Minxing, two sinologists at the Free University of Berlin who also work “intensively” on the perception and representation of China in Germany, instead define core terms of the texts and attribute a certain public impact to them. Thus, in the field of “China’s Domestic Policy”, the term “enemy” appears 20 times in 181 articles. The consequence, they say, is a “media-constructed enemy image of China.”
What also remains unanswered in this context, however, is the extent to which the media themselves have injected the “enemy” concept into their reporting. “It is certainly the case that the media also reflect what is brought into the debate from politics, business or civil society. The study does not capture this spectrum,” says Lena Marie Hufnagel. Nor is China portrayed as an enemy per se. The April 27 edition of Die Welt, for example, states: “The regime in Beijing is an enemy of democracy and free societies.”
Whether this term is possibly warranted, however, remains an open question. Journalism in democratic societies has to call a spade a spade in order to be able to act as a control authority. “The aim of the study is not to analyze actual developments in China or to verify the validity of its content,” the study’s introduction says. Sinologist Leutner comments: “The study can examine whether reports are neutral or biased. But it cannot compare every report in its entire context.” This would be already impossible timewise. However, the phenomenon of constructing enemy images is not new, she says, referring to older studies.
Another accusation raised by the study is “a quantitative and qualitative dominance of non-Chinese sources” and a linguistic style “that ascribes greater credibility and interpretive power to selected ‘Western’ representatives.” A Spiegel cover story from February 1st is cited as an example, in which seven Chinese and eleven non-Chinese sources are used.
However, correspondents in China complain about the limited research opportunities available to them. It is increasingly difficult to find interlocutors willing to talk to foreign reporters, according to a survey conducted by the Foreign Correspondent Club of China (FCCC) earlier this year.
“The working conditions in China are so severely restricted that it is impossible to meet the requirements set out in the study,” says Maximilian Kalkhof. The journalist from the daily Die Welt, who wanted to move to Beijing as a correspondent in 2019, had to wait for his accreditation by the Chinese authorities for about two years. Since then, Kalkhof has been trying to bring his experience and language skills to his reporting from a distance.
The working conditions are certainly a topic in their own right, says author Leutner. “Most of the articles in the media examined do not state the conditions under which they were produced. Rather, the impression is given that correspondents are on site and are able to get a full overview of their topics. It is impossible to draw any conclusions about the working conditions of journalists from mere text analysis alone, as we did in the study.” Perhaps the articles need to address this more so that readers can get a better idea of the conditions they were written in, says Leutner.
Perspective is one of the main lines of argument in the study. It states that China – concerning Covid – saw a heated debate about the relationship between privacy and the community’s right to information and transparency. “The German media that reported on it, however, presented the debate – in a completely different fashion – as a discussion about the relationship between government power and individual rights.” The accusation that arises from this is: the media fails to grasp the core of the issue.
But this conclusion presupposes that the authors have followed the entire debate in China. Leutner says: “As academics specializing in China, we continuously follow the main lines of public debate in China, especially during the Corona pandemic. This has led to these conclusions regarding the issues mentioned in the study, which we have exemplified.” However, public discourse is censored in China. Correspondents therefore try to obtain unfiltered opinions and positions and try to provide them as a counterweight to the official narrative.
This counterbalance is naturally provided by critical voices, such as “Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City” by author Fang Fang, in order to classify the government’s actions. The study states that the book provides (the media) with “a testimony of mismanagement and failure” of the Chinese government.
Leutner attributes great value to the book as a testament to those months, but “of course, diary entries are not scientific analysis but anecdotal impressions, no more and no less. Moreover, one must assume that Fang Fang, the author, was also giving her impressions in a literary sense and not primarily from a scientific distance.” The media, on the other hand, only grudgingly notes the successful containment of the virus in China, and at the same time, would devalue it by linking it to cover-ups, censorship, and unreliable figures, the study concludes.
For Andreas Fulda, a German political scientist at the University of Nottingham, this creates another problem. “China is analyzed predominantly from the point of view of its rulers. The study pretends like there are hardly any critics of Xi’s crisis management in mainland China,” says Fulda. He says that he missed the political reality in the study.
An example: Head of State Xi Jinping, whom the study sees as having the “narrative of a communist dictator” attributed to him in the German media. According to Fulda, however, the media’s view does reflect reality. Xi created a personality cult, ended collective leadership in the Politburo Standing Committee, and, with Document Number Nine, clearly rejected any liberalization and democratization of the country, Fulda argues. “From the perspective of political science, the Xi regime can be characterized as a personalized dictatorship,” he concludes.
Sinolytics is a European consulting and analysis company that focuses entirely on China. It advises European companies on strategic orientation and specific business activities in China.
Be it the imprisonment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang or the umbrella protests in Hong Kong: Shanghai-born artist Badiucao transforms political events into brutally provocative pop art. The 35-year-old has already been called the “Banksy of China.” The comparison with the British street artist makes sense insofar as Badiucao’s messages are so distinct that they also make for good graffiti and demo posters.
On the other hand, Badiucao, like Banksy, kept his identity secret for a long time. The dissident only revealed his face, hidden behind a mask, two years ago in an Australian documentary. However, Badiucao still does not want to reveal his birth name. The artist, who now lives in Australia, has cut all ties with his family in China. “The Communist Party could use them to get to me. I don’t want to endanger them,” he says.
That Badiucao’s works are banned in Xi Jinping’s China is not surprising: His belligerent caricatures targeted no other politician as often as the Chinese State and Party Leader. One of his most recent illustrations depicts Xi as a necromancer. In front of the five Olympic rings, Xi levitates the body of the laid-out Mao Zedong. That was his comment on the two Chinese track cyclists who wore pins bearing the Great Chairman’s likeness during a medal ceremony in Tokyo in early August. “As a China-born citizen who lost members of his family during Mao’s reign of terror, it was traumatic to see those badges being worn during a medal ceremony. It also makes me angry to see young Chinese athletes fail to learn the brutal truth of China’s history,” Badiucao wrote on Instagram.
Badiucao was born in 1986 into a family of artists. His grandparents were among the first successful Chinese filmmakers between 1930 and 1957. “Then the campaign against intellectuals began. My grandfather was taken to a labor camp in the countryside. He died. How and when, we will never know.”
Badiucao had his final political “epiphany,” as he calls it, during a dorm movie night in the 2000s. “We had picked out movies like we did every weekend and thought we had gotten a Taiwanese comedy. Instead, it was a five-hour documentary about the Tiananmen Massacre. We knew something had happened in 1989, but not exactly what,” he says. He describes the images like a punch in the gut. “Suddenly, my family history was no longer ancient history. Things like that had happened again not so long ago.”
After dropping out of law school, Badiucao posted his first political illustration in 2011 about a train accident in the eastern Chinese coastal city of Wenzhou. At the time, the 40 people killed and more than 200 injured in the accident were also to be erased from the collective memory on highest order. “Ten years ago, the Party didn’t have total control over the Internet like it does today,” Badiucao says. “It was only when Xi Jinping came to power that the interventions became more massive and sophisticated.” No one dared to talk about controversial topics anymore. Beijing became untouchable again.
His work is now used by major Western media such as the BBC or organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. New pictures are published several times a month. When events boil up, like the protests in Hong Kong in 2019, Badiucao comments on the events almost on a daily basis. He waives copyright in the process. “Anyone can download, copy, share and distribute the images.” His concern is publicity, freedom of expression, and encouragement, says the artist.
On November 13th, Badiucao will present his first major solo exhibition in three years at the Museo di Santa Giulia in Brescia, Italy. Even the planning for the exhibition experienced disruptions. China’s ambassador stepped in to pressure the city’s mayor. But neither the mayor nor the museum management gave in.
Badiucao hopes his works will help ensure that brave voices against Beijing do not fall silent. “The Covid pandemic has given China the opportunity to present itself on the world stage as a country of peace and unity. My works provide a counterweight to this.”Fabian Peltsch
For more than a year now, the Russian-Chinese border from Pogranichny to Heilongjiang in north-eastern China has repeatedly been beset by kilometer-long traffic jams. Russian truck drivers sometimes wait several days to enter the People’s Republic. On some days, China’s authorities do not allow more than 15 trucks to pass through each border crossing for fear of spreading the Coronavirus.