The week starts with a bang: Three Germans have been arrested. The charge: spying for the Chinese intelligence service. Finn Mayer-Kuckuk has taken a closer look at the case and provides several details – on the current background and how the Chinese espionage system operates in Germany.
Thomas R., Ina F., and Herwig F. allegedly spied on “innovative technologies with military applications.” More specifically, research work on the status of ship propulsion systems and laser technology is mentioned. The alleged agent Thomas R. is well known in Chinese circles. But it should be clear: The three suspects are not the only spies in Germany.
Our second analysis also deals with a controversial topic: state-sponsored doping. The Olympic Games in Paris are still 93 days away – and yet China’s athletes are already making headlines. Almost the entire 2021 swimming team has tested positive for doping. China’s Ministry of Public Security blamed it on a dirty kitchen. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) believed the story, and the swimmers were allowed into the pool – and won several gold medals.
Marcel Grzanna has taken a closer look at government-issued doping in China and spoken to people directly involved. Former Chinese sports doctor Xue Yinxian is not surprised by the positive tests. She believes the official explanation is a lie. “Doping has a long tradition in China’s state sports administration, and it has a long tradition in Chinese swimming,” she says. That being said, China is by no means the only nation that practices state-sponsored doping. Germany also has an infamous history in this regard in both East and West.
China’s state security has apparently recruited three individuals in Germany to gain access to technical secrets, as revealed by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The German police have arrested the three suspects, whom the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office accuses in the arrest warrants of spying on “innovative technologies with military applications.” Specifically, they are accused of stealing research on the current state of ship propulsion systems and laser technology.
“The three arrests for suspected espionage for a Chinese intelligence service are a huge success for our counter-espionage efforts,” said Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser on Monday. Faeser thanked the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Federal Criminal Police Office for their “high level of vigilance.” Meanwhile, the Chinese embassy in Berlin rejected the accusation. “We call on Germany to desist from exploiting the espionage accusation to politically manipulate the image of China and defame China.”
The revelation comes at a tense time in Sino-German economic and research relations. Just last weekend, it became known that a Chinese cyber group had been spying on Volkswagen’s knowledge for years. There is also intense debate about the risks of academic cooperation with China.
The positions could hardly be further apart: While German Chancellor Olaf Scholz campaigned for more cooperation in Beijing last week, Federal Research Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger suspects the Communist Party behind every Chinese researcher. In the current case, the suspects did, in fact, orchestrate a research collaboration on behalf of China.
The contact person of the three alleged spies was based in China and worked for the Ministry of State Security (MSS, 国家安全部). The federal prosecutor named Thomas R. as the lead agent in Germany. In turn, Thomas R. commissioned a company in Duesseldorf, which then commissioned a university to carry out a study. The study concerned the technical level of Germany’s naval engines, which are also used in warships. Such information is restricted under the Foreign Trade and Payments Act.
The export of technology that can also be used in weapons (dual use) is also regulated. The suspected spy trio was also active in this area. They acquired a special laser and shipped it to China, bypassing export controls.
The alleged agent, Thomas R., is well-known in China circles. He was involved in initiating business, particularly between Hong Kong and Germany. Together with the other suspects, Ina F. and Herwig F., he ran several companies and associations in the field of Sino-German cooperation, including I-Dragon Ltd, Eurasia Merger and Smartcity-Verein. Herwig F. presents himself as an engineer and inventor with numerous patents.
There are now two possibilities and a number of gray areas, which will certainly also be discussed in court: The suspects were aware of conducting illegal activities for a foreign intelligence service – or they rather naively believed themselves to be in a gray area and misjudged the identity of their Chinese contacts.
A successful investigation by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution led to the arrests, said Thomas Haldenwang, President of the intelligence service, in Berlin on Monday. He said that the individuals involved had been tracked down early on. This was followed by a longer phase of surveillance before the Office for the Protection of the Constitution handed the case over to the public prosecutor’s office.
Haldewang indicated that the three suspects were not the only spies active in Germany. It is “part of a comprehensive business” that often involves the use of front companies and middlemen.
In a speech almost exactly a year ago, Haldewang urgently warned of Chinese espionage. “Russia is the storm – China is climate change,” he said at a symposium hosted by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Berlin.
The annual report of the German domestic intelligence agency even refers to China as the “greatest threat in terms of economic and scientific espionage as well as foreign direct investment in Germany.” It states that the People’s Republic is one of the four main players in espionage against Germany – alongside Russia, Iran and Turkey.
This means that China is particularly well organized and systematically gathers information from other countries. “In Germany, the Chinese agencies focus on politics and administration, business, science and technology as well as the military,” said Haldewang. In order to achieve its ambitious industrial policy, China uses espionage in business and science, buys German high-tech companies either entirely or partially and systematically recruits knowledge carriers, he said.
However, it is not easy to identify the beginning of espionage when initial contacts are made. In many cases, it is a case of so-called open information gathering. Information is first gathered through seemingly harmless socializing. This conversation skimming is particularly aimed at active and former decision-makers in politics and business. However, Chinese agencies have increasingly begun to focus on the scientific community.
The goals are extensive, including obtaining products and knowledge for the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction, their delivery systems, other armaments or elements of new weapon systems. They also seek to acquire other defense equipment and militarily applicable high-tech.
In response to Monday’s arrests, the German government now aims to intensify the search for spies. “We are aware of the considerable danger posed by Chinese espionage to business, industry and science,” said Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser. “We are looking very closely at these risks and threats and have issued clear warnings and raised awareness so that protective measures are increased everywhere,” she added.
Less than 100 days before the Olympic Games in Paris, Chinese athletes are already making headlines. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has confirmed reports that 23 swimmers tested positive for the banned substance trimetazidine in January 2021, just a few months before the Olympic Games in Tokyo. Despite this, the athletes were allowed to compete in Japan shortly afterward and won six medals, including three gold medals.
A debate has now flared up about whether the case – as the Chinese claim – was a chain of unfortunate circumstances and therefore rightly unsanctioned or whether WADA decided not to ban the athletes in question for other reasons. In fact, the Chinese officials had initially remained silent for months before approaching WADA in June 2021, shortly before the Games.
A 31-page investigation report from the Ministry of Public Security had stated at the time that food in the athletes’ kitchen at the competition venue in Shijiazhuang had been contaminated with the substance. However, the investigation was only conducted two months after the competitions due to Covid. Nevertheless, the investigators claim to have found traces of trimetazidine there. The substance can be found in heart medication, among other things, and also promotes muscle growth. Trimetazidine has been on the doping list since 2014.
Wada was satisfied with the ministry’s explanation and allowed the Chinese athletes to participate in the Olympic competitions. It concluded that “no fault or negligence can be attributed to the athletes,” the agency explained. WADA itself was unable to rule out the possibility of contamination. The New York Times and German TV program ARD Sportschau had first reported on the matter.
Former Chinese sports doctor Xue Yinxian, who made her detailed knowledge of state-sponsored doping in China in the 1980s and 1990s public in 2012 and later had to flee to Germany due to state repression, disagrees with the authorities’ account in an interview with Table.Briefings. “Doping has a long tradition in China’s state sports administration, and it has a long tradition in Chinese swimming,” said Xue. She said she was not surprised by the positive tests and believed the official explanation to be a lie.
Xue was never personally involved in the administration of illegal substances to athletes. However, she was in close contact with both colleagues and doped athletes and was banned from the athletes’ extended support team in the late 1980s because of her critical views. Based on her experiences, she is convinced that the National Sports Commission, which is now called the General Administration of Sport, is actively involved in covering up every case that becomes public.
“If you were consistent, you would have to strip China of all the Olympic gold medals it has won to date,” says Xue. Xue’s fight against government cheating continues to this day. She recently published a seven-volume series of diaries in which she meticulously traces her work as a doctor in the sports system. In 2017, she fled to Germany, where she has been granted political asylum.
It is not the first time Chinese swimmers have tested positive for doping. At the 1986 Asian Games in Seoul, 16 members of the Chinese swimming team were caught doping. Numerous Chinese athletes, including track and field athletes and weightlifters, were also found to have doped at the Asian Games four years later in Beijing.
However, China is not the only country where doping has been carried out with state knowledge in the past. For example, due to widespread doping, Russia was excluded from the 2021 Summer Games in Tokyo and the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing. In the 1980s, East Germany and West Germany were also entangled in doping with state knowledge. However, a tighter control system, stricter criminal prosecution and social ostracism in Germany have ensured that doping has become an individual or increasingly private problem from which the state distances itself.
With regard to China, the 23 swimmers who tested positive have rekindled accusations of state-controlled performance enhancement in systemic competition with democratic countries. However, there are those who defend China. For example, Australian swimming coach Denis Cotterell rejected the accusations of systematic doping. Cotterell prepares China’s top swimmers for participation in the Olympic Games.
Cotterell told the Sydney Morning Herald he was “100 percent” behind his swimmers. He said the positive test results in Chinese swimming were not part of a government program. It was sad to see what was being implied, said Cotterell. He sympathized with the athletes because he knew how hard they were working to get rid of the image of the past. In the past, Cotterell had trained the 1,500-meter freestyle world record holder Sun Yang, who is currently serving a four-year doping ban.
This is not Sun’s first doping ban. In May 2014, the three-time Olympic and eleven-time world champion tested positive once before and was banned for three months. At the time, investigators found traces of trimetazidine in his urine – the substance with which the food in Shijiazhuang was allegedly contaminated.
The anti-doping agency WADA apparently wanted to sweep the matter under the rug. Australian Olympic champion Mack Horton spoke of a failed anti-doping system that was letting clean athletes down. At the 2019 World Championship final, Horton lost the 400 m freestyle against Sun, who was already under suspicion of doping at the time. In response, Horton refused to stand next to Sun on the podium at the award ceremony.
The conflict – or rather the conflicts in the Middle East – clearly show that although China is the world’s second-largest economic power, it can so far only rely on its economic power in geopolitical matters. In recent weeks, the US has repeatedly urged China to use its influence on Iran, and even if we don’t hear about it, it can be assumed that there are talks between Beijing and Tehran.
However, the use of economic power is not entirely without risk for China. In fact, China is gaining more and more friends in the so-called global South because it allegedly refrains from setting conditions for cooperation. If it now uses its economic power, which the country possesses because Iran has been dependent on Chinese imports since it was sanctioned, to bring about certain geopolitical decisions, it adopts an approach from which it has previously distanced itself. While the United States maintains around 800 military bases worldwide, China probably only has one military base in Djibouti. Unlike the US, it is not in a position to act as a “world policeman.” Apart from its economic power, it has nothing at its disposal.
Moreover, the PRC has little experience developing an independent global policy strategy. Since assuming its seat on the UN Security Council in 1971, the PRC initially pursued a policy of close alignment with the US. In most cases, China has supported US proposals. Only since 2011 has the PRC made unusually frequent use of its veto right and more often voted with Russia against the US.
Since the 1970s, Beijing’s foreign policy strategy has been geared towards pursuing its own interests and only discovered the instrument of multilateralism comparatively late. To this day, the country is more interested in bilateral relations. Although academic circles have been discussing a Chinese theory of international relations since the 1990s, the People’s Republic of China has been reluctant to make proposals for a new world order.
The last foray in this direction was Deng Xiaoping’s 1984 speech at the UN General Assembly on the so-called “Three Worlds Theory” attributed to Mao Zedong. Since then, comparable interventions have been limited to introducing new buzzwords and formulations into the UN vocabulary, such as Xi Jinping’s idea of a global community of shared future, which now appears in many UN documents. The ideas derived from this have so far found little resonance. China’s influence on strategizing for the reorganization of the world is still weak.
The leading elite in Beijing cannot decide whether it can risk fundamentally challenging the current world order with Russia. It is wavering back and forth in an attempt to convince the US to permit China’s rise and, as repeatedly emphasized in talks between the presidents of the two countries, to share responsibility for maintaining peace.
But since China needs Russia, just as Russia cannot do without China, Beijing also has to adopt Moscow’s preferred formulation of the “multipolar order” and thus admit that not just two, but at least three world powers will rule the world of tomorrow. This indecision has the advantage that China is talking with both sides. However, it harbors the problem that any move toward the US could spook Russia and vice versa. The PRC’s preferred “middle” position means Beijing is not good at setting milestones.
Here, the current economic situation in China plays a significant role. Even though trade with Russia has increased significantly in the years since the start of the Ukraine war, it cannot replace economic relations with the US and Europe. The government in Beijing seeks foreign investment and is particularly keen to maintain good relations with Europe in order to prevent further measures in line with the US trade war against China. Considering the EU’s clear alignment with the US against Russia, the PRC cannot take any measures that could be regarded as unilateral support for Russia and possibly fall into the category of secondary sanctions.
At the same time, domestic overproduction requires exports to be boosted before the geopolitical situation deteriorates to the extent that China is cut off from some of its export markets. The current flood of cheap products from the PRC into the world market is not only a consequence of the PRC’s increasingly planned and state-run economic system. It is also a precautionary measure in anticipation of expected sanctions, just as Beijing has bought an abundance of chips in anticipation of export restrictions on computer chips to the PRC.
At present, the leadership in Beijing prefers a foreign policy from behind the curtain. It pulls the strings without talking about it. This allows it to tackle the various problems individually while avoiding the country’s citizens, who are extremely active on social media, getting involved in foreign policy!
This text is part of the Global China Conversations event series of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. Sinologist and political scientist Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik was a professor at Heidelberg University and later taught in Vienna until her retirement in 2020. One of the topics on which she has been frequently interviewed in the past year is the war in Ukraine.
What looks like a crater landscape on the moon is actually part of the Karez irrigation system of the Hami Basin in Xinjiang. The technology for underground storage of groundwater is probably thousands of years old. However, the craters in Xinjiang probably only date back to the 15th century. Along with the Great Wall and the Great Canal, the Karez system is considered one of China’s three great mythical construction projects. However, the construction of dams, the canalization of rivers and the use of electrically powered pumps have made the irrigation system increasingly obsolete. grz
The week starts with a bang: Three Germans have been arrested. The charge: spying for the Chinese intelligence service. Finn Mayer-Kuckuk has taken a closer look at the case and provides several details – on the current background and how the Chinese espionage system operates in Germany.
Thomas R., Ina F., and Herwig F. allegedly spied on “innovative technologies with military applications.” More specifically, research work on the status of ship propulsion systems and laser technology is mentioned. The alleged agent Thomas R. is well known in Chinese circles. But it should be clear: The three suspects are not the only spies in Germany.
Our second analysis also deals with a controversial topic: state-sponsored doping. The Olympic Games in Paris are still 93 days away – and yet China’s athletes are already making headlines. Almost the entire 2021 swimming team has tested positive for doping. China’s Ministry of Public Security blamed it on a dirty kitchen. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) believed the story, and the swimmers were allowed into the pool – and won several gold medals.
Marcel Grzanna has taken a closer look at government-issued doping in China and spoken to people directly involved. Former Chinese sports doctor Xue Yinxian is not surprised by the positive tests. She believes the official explanation is a lie. “Doping has a long tradition in China’s state sports administration, and it has a long tradition in Chinese swimming,” she says. That being said, China is by no means the only nation that practices state-sponsored doping. Germany also has an infamous history in this regard in both East and West.
China’s state security has apparently recruited three individuals in Germany to gain access to technical secrets, as revealed by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The German police have arrested the three suspects, whom the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office accuses in the arrest warrants of spying on “innovative technologies with military applications.” Specifically, they are accused of stealing research on the current state of ship propulsion systems and laser technology.
“The three arrests for suspected espionage for a Chinese intelligence service are a huge success for our counter-espionage efforts,” said Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser on Monday. Faeser thanked the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Federal Criminal Police Office for their “high level of vigilance.” Meanwhile, the Chinese embassy in Berlin rejected the accusation. “We call on Germany to desist from exploiting the espionage accusation to politically manipulate the image of China and defame China.”
The revelation comes at a tense time in Sino-German economic and research relations. Just last weekend, it became known that a Chinese cyber group had been spying on Volkswagen’s knowledge for years. There is also intense debate about the risks of academic cooperation with China.
The positions could hardly be further apart: While German Chancellor Olaf Scholz campaigned for more cooperation in Beijing last week, Federal Research Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger suspects the Communist Party behind every Chinese researcher. In the current case, the suspects did, in fact, orchestrate a research collaboration on behalf of China.
The contact person of the three alleged spies was based in China and worked for the Ministry of State Security (MSS, 国家安全部). The federal prosecutor named Thomas R. as the lead agent in Germany. In turn, Thomas R. commissioned a company in Duesseldorf, which then commissioned a university to carry out a study. The study concerned the technical level of Germany’s naval engines, which are also used in warships. Such information is restricted under the Foreign Trade and Payments Act.
The export of technology that can also be used in weapons (dual use) is also regulated. The suspected spy trio was also active in this area. They acquired a special laser and shipped it to China, bypassing export controls.
The alleged agent, Thomas R., is well-known in China circles. He was involved in initiating business, particularly between Hong Kong and Germany. Together with the other suspects, Ina F. and Herwig F., he ran several companies and associations in the field of Sino-German cooperation, including I-Dragon Ltd, Eurasia Merger and Smartcity-Verein. Herwig F. presents himself as an engineer and inventor with numerous patents.
There are now two possibilities and a number of gray areas, which will certainly also be discussed in court: The suspects were aware of conducting illegal activities for a foreign intelligence service – or they rather naively believed themselves to be in a gray area and misjudged the identity of their Chinese contacts.
A successful investigation by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution led to the arrests, said Thomas Haldenwang, President of the intelligence service, in Berlin on Monday. He said that the individuals involved had been tracked down early on. This was followed by a longer phase of surveillance before the Office for the Protection of the Constitution handed the case over to the public prosecutor’s office.
Haldewang indicated that the three suspects were not the only spies active in Germany. It is “part of a comprehensive business” that often involves the use of front companies and middlemen.
In a speech almost exactly a year ago, Haldewang urgently warned of Chinese espionage. “Russia is the storm – China is climate change,” he said at a symposium hosted by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Berlin.
The annual report of the German domestic intelligence agency even refers to China as the “greatest threat in terms of economic and scientific espionage as well as foreign direct investment in Germany.” It states that the People’s Republic is one of the four main players in espionage against Germany – alongside Russia, Iran and Turkey.
This means that China is particularly well organized and systematically gathers information from other countries. “In Germany, the Chinese agencies focus on politics and administration, business, science and technology as well as the military,” said Haldewang. In order to achieve its ambitious industrial policy, China uses espionage in business and science, buys German high-tech companies either entirely or partially and systematically recruits knowledge carriers, he said.
However, it is not easy to identify the beginning of espionage when initial contacts are made. In many cases, it is a case of so-called open information gathering. Information is first gathered through seemingly harmless socializing. This conversation skimming is particularly aimed at active and former decision-makers in politics and business. However, Chinese agencies have increasingly begun to focus on the scientific community.
The goals are extensive, including obtaining products and knowledge for the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction, their delivery systems, other armaments or elements of new weapon systems. They also seek to acquire other defense equipment and militarily applicable high-tech.
In response to Monday’s arrests, the German government now aims to intensify the search for spies. “We are aware of the considerable danger posed by Chinese espionage to business, industry and science,” said Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser. “We are looking very closely at these risks and threats and have issued clear warnings and raised awareness so that protective measures are increased everywhere,” she added.
Less than 100 days before the Olympic Games in Paris, Chinese athletes are already making headlines. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has confirmed reports that 23 swimmers tested positive for the banned substance trimetazidine in January 2021, just a few months before the Olympic Games in Tokyo. Despite this, the athletes were allowed to compete in Japan shortly afterward and won six medals, including three gold medals.
A debate has now flared up about whether the case – as the Chinese claim – was a chain of unfortunate circumstances and therefore rightly unsanctioned or whether WADA decided not to ban the athletes in question for other reasons. In fact, the Chinese officials had initially remained silent for months before approaching WADA in June 2021, shortly before the Games.
A 31-page investigation report from the Ministry of Public Security had stated at the time that food in the athletes’ kitchen at the competition venue in Shijiazhuang had been contaminated with the substance. However, the investigation was only conducted two months after the competitions due to Covid. Nevertheless, the investigators claim to have found traces of trimetazidine there. The substance can be found in heart medication, among other things, and also promotes muscle growth. Trimetazidine has been on the doping list since 2014.
Wada was satisfied with the ministry’s explanation and allowed the Chinese athletes to participate in the Olympic competitions. It concluded that “no fault or negligence can be attributed to the athletes,” the agency explained. WADA itself was unable to rule out the possibility of contamination. The New York Times and German TV program ARD Sportschau had first reported on the matter.
Former Chinese sports doctor Xue Yinxian, who made her detailed knowledge of state-sponsored doping in China in the 1980s and 1990s public in 2012 and later had to flee to Germany due to state repression, disagrees with the authorities’ account in an interview with Table.Briefings. “Doping has a long tradition in China’s state sports administration, and it has a long tradition in Chinese swimming,” said Xue. She said she was not surprised by the positive tests and believed the official explanation to be a lie.
Xue was never personally involved in the administration of illegal substances to athletes. However, she was in close contact with both colleagues and doped athletes and was banned from the athletes’ extended support team in the late 1980s because of her critical views. Based on her experiences, she is convinced that the National Sports Commission, which is now called the General Administration of Sport, is actively involved in covering up every case that becomes public.
“If you were consistent, you would have to strip China of all the Olympic gold medals it has won to date,” says Xue. Xue’s fight against government cheating continues to this day. She recently published a seven-volume series of diaries in which she meticulously traces her work as a doctor in the sports system. In 2017, she fled to Germany, where she has been granted political asylum.
It is not the first time Chinese swimmers have tested positive for doping. At the 1986 Asian Games in Seoul, 16 members of the Chinese swimming team were caught doping. Numerous Chinese athletes, including track and field athletes and weightlifters, were also found to have doped at the Asian Games four years later in Beijing.
However, China is not the only country where doping has been carried out with state knowledge in the past. For example, due to widespread doping, Russia was excluded from the 2021 Summer Games in Tokyo and the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing. In the 1980s, East Germany and West Germany were also entangled in doping with state knowledge. However, a tighter control system, stricter criminal prosecution and social ostracism in Germany have ensured that doping has become an individual or increasingly private problem from which the state distances itself.
With regard to China, the 23 swimmers who tested positive have rekindled accusations of state-controlled performance enhancement in systemic competition with democratic countries. However, there are those who defend China. For example, Australian swimming coach Denis Cotterell rejected the accusations of systematic doping. Cotterell prepares China’s top swimmers for participation in the Olympic Games.
Cotterell told the Sydney Morning Herald he was “100 percent” behind his swimmers. He said the positive test results in Chinese swimming were not part of a government program. It was sad to see what was being implied, said Cotterell. He sympathized with the athletes because he knew how hard they were working to get rid of the image of the past. In the past, Cotterell had trained the 1,500-meter freestyle world record holder Sun Yang, who is currently serving a four-year doping ban.
This is not Sun’s first doping ban. In May 2014, the three-time Olympic and eleven-time world champion tested positive once before and was banned for three months. At the time, investigators found traces of trimetazidine in his urine – the substance with which the food in Shijiazhuang was allegedly contaminated.
The anti-doping agency WADA apparently wanted to sweep the matter under the rug. Australian Olympic champion Mack Horton spoke of a failed anti-doping system that was letting clean athletes down. At the 2019 World Championship final, Horton lost the 400 m freestyle against Sun, who was already under suspicion of doping at the time. In response, Horton refused to stand next to Sun on the podium at the award ceremony.
The conflict – or rather the conflicts in the Middle East – clearly show that although China is the world’s second-largest economic power, it can so far only rely on its economic power in geopolitical matters. In recent weeks, the US has repeatedly urged China to use its influence on Iran, and even if we don’t hear about it, it can be assumed that there are talks between Beijing and Tehran.
However, the use of economic power is not entirely without risk for China. In fact, China is gaining more and more friends in the so-called global South because it allegedly refrains from setting conditions for cooperation. If it now uses its economic power, which the country possesses because Iran has been dependent on Chinese imports since it was sanctioned, to bring about certain geopolitical decisions, it adopts an approach from which it has previously distanced itself. While the United States maintains around 800 military bases worldwide, China probably only has one military base in Djibouti. Unlike the US, it is not in a position to act as a “world policeman.” Apart from its economic power, it has nothing at its disposal.
Moreover, the PRC has little experience developing an independent global policy strategy. Since assuming its seat on the UN Security Council in 1971, the PRC initially pursued a policy of close alignment with the US. In most cases, China has supported US proposals. Only since 2011 has the PRC made unusually frequent use of its veto right and more often voted with Russia against the US.
Since the 1970s, Beijing’s foreign policy strategy has been geared towards pursuing its own interests and only discovered the instrument of multilateralism comparatively late. To this day, the country is more interested in bilateral relations. Although academic circles have been discussing a Chinese theory of international relations since the 1990s, the People’s Republic of China has been reluctant to make proposals for a new world order.
The last foray in this direction was Deng Xiaoping’s 1984 speech at the UN General Assembly on the so-called “Three Worlds Theory” attributed to Mao Zedong. Since then, comparable interventions have been limited to introducing new buzzwords and formulations into the UN vocabulary, such as Xi Jinping’s idea of a global community of shared future, which now appears in many UN documents. The ideas derived from this have so far found little resonance. China’s influence on strategizing for the reorganization of the world is still weak.
The leading elite in Beijing cannot decide whether it can risk fundamentally challenging the current world order with Russia. It is wavering back and forth in an attempt to convince the US to permit China’s rise and, as repeatedly emphasized in talks between the presidents of the two countries, to share responsibility for maintaining peace.
But since China needs Russia, just as Russia cannot do without China, Beijing also has to adopt Moscow’s preferred formulation of the “multipolar order” and thus admit that not just two, but at least three world powers will rule the world of tomorrow. This indecision has the advantage that China is talking with both sides. However, it harbors the problem that any move toward the US could spook Russia and vice versa. The PRC’s preferred “middle” position means Beijing is not good at setting milestones.
Here, the current economic situation in China plays a significant role. Even though trade with Russia has increased significantly in the years since the start of the Ukraine war, it cannot replace economic relations with the US and Europe. The government in Beijing seeks foreign investment and is particularly keen to maintain good relations with Europe in order to prevent further measures in line with the US trade war against China. Considering the EU’s clear alignment with the US against Russia, the PRC cannot take any measures that could be regarded as unilateral support for Russia and possibly fall into the category of secondary sanctions.
At the same time, domestic overproduction requires exports to be boosted before the geopolitical situation deteriorates to the extent that China is cut off from some of its export markets. The current flood of cheap products from the PRC into the world market is not only a consequence of the PRC’s increasingly planned and state-run economic system. It is also a precautionary measure in anticipation of expected sanctions, just as Beijing has bought an abundance of chips in anticipation of export restrictions on computer chips to the PRC.
At present, the leadership in Beijing prefers a foreign policy from behind the curtain. It pulls the strings without talking about it. This allows it to tackle the various problems individually while avoiding the country’s citizens, who are extremely active on social media, getting involved in foreign policy!
This text is part of the Global China Conversations event series of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. Sinologist and political scientist Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik was a professor at Heidelberg University and later taught in Vienna until her retirement in 2020. One of the topics on which she has been frequently interviewed in the past year is the war in Ukraine.
What looks like a crater landscape on the moon is actually part of the Karez irrigation system of the Hami Basin in Xinjiang. The technology for underground storage of groundwater is probably thousands of years old. However, the craters in Xinjiang probably only date back to the 15th century. Along with the Great Wall and the Great Canal, the Karez system is considered one of China’s three great mythical construction projects. However, the construction of dams, the canalization of rivers and the use of electrically powered pumps have made the irrigation system increasingly obsolete. grz
