The obviously rushed withdrawal from Afghanistan is currently the biggest failure of US policy in Central Asia. Germany, as an ally, is now also deeply involved in the disaster. The big neighbor China, on the other hand, brags that it had predicted the course of events and realistically assessed the Taliban’s strength. America’s decline begins in Afghanistan – that is the way Beijing sees it.
In fact, China has much better ties to the region than the USA has. And Beijing applies purely pragmatic standards in foreign policy. China now practices the policy of non-interference that it always demands of other nations. If the Taliban are the de facto rulers, then Chinese foreign policy recognizes them as the country’s rulers. Michael Radunski analyzes what ominous message China derives from these events for Taiwan.
At the same time, the pragmatism of Chinese policy means staying its hard course in the trade war with the US. Specifically, this creates an effective blockade for the potentially largest takeover in the semiconductor industry. The American chip manufacturer Nvidia planned the acquisition of British chip design service provider ARM. China, however, strongly objects: The concentration in the Western semiconductor industry threatens supplies to Chinese tech giants like Huawei. And Beijing certainly has a say in the matter; after all, antitrust authorities on all continents have to give their approval.
Hu Xijin could hardly hide his joy on Monday. “Chinese Internet users joke that the transition of power in Afghanistan was more smooth than the presidential transition in the US,” tweets the editor-in-chief of Chinese newspaper Global Times.
With great pleasure, his newspaper refers to cynical comments posted on online platforms such as Sina Weibo: “The 20-year war is ending like a joke. American soldiers have died for nothing, the Taliban are back, and the only difference is that more people have died and American taxpayers have wasted their money.” Other comments read: “Those people who still believe in the US will never learn their lesson. They have been left behind like garbage by Americans.“
Meanwhile, the Global Times’ official opinion piece derided the US as a “paper tiger”. “A country as powerful as the US cannot even defeat the Afghan Taliban in 20 years, which have received virtually no outside help.” And so the editors conclude that the US defeat being “a clearer demonstration of US impotence than the Vietnam War” showing the US was “a paper tiger.”
Current developments in Afghanistan fuel this view. In no time at all, the Taliban are conquering the entire country, and the government troops, equipped and trained by the US, are offering little resistance. While U.S. helicopters rescue diplomatic staff from the roof of the American embassy in Kabul, thousands of people at the airport are desperately trying to get a seat on one of the few evacuation flights. Meanwhile, reports of retaliatory killings and other brutal Taliban practices are beginning to emerge from areas captured by the Taliban.
In light of this dramatic situation, China’s priority as a direct neighbor is to restore stability in Afghanistan – especially in the Wakhan Corridor. This region is a narrow strip of land in the province of Badakhshan in northeastern Afghanistan. It connects the Chinese region of Xinjiang with Afghanistan. It is therefore the most critical strategic region in the country for China.
According to a UN report, several hundred Uighur fighters are active throughout the region, which is why Beijing worked closely with the government in Kabul for years and helped to set up a special brigade to increase security in this border area. However, it has become clear in recent weeks that this was purely pragmatic cooperation for China: As soon as the government in Kabul lost power, Beijing initiated talks with the Taliban.
Less than three weeks ago, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi met in Tianjin with a Taliban delegation led by Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Wang received explicit guarantees that the Taliban would no longer allow for Uighur insurgents or other groups to retreat to Afghanistan or to plan and carry out attacks against China from Afghan soil.
The timing of this meeting is remarkable: it took place right before the Taliban launched its major Taliban offensive. Back then, the radical Islamists sent several delegations to neighboring countries. But neither in Russia nor in Iran were they received as glamorously and with such a high profile as in China (as reported by China.Table).
China’s state media published almost friendship-like photos showing Foreign Minister Wang Yi shoulder-to-shoulder with representatives of the radical Islamic movement. In retrospect, it seems as if the intention was to gently prepare China’s population for the increasingly likely scenario that Beijing will recognize the Taliban as the legitimate regime in Afghanistan in the not too distant future.
At the time, U.S. intelligence agencies were still firmly convinced that after the announced withdrawal of U.S. troops, the Afghan government would keep the rival Taliban under control for at least six months. China was clearly better informed: Behind closed doors, the foreign ministry in Beijing was even told that the Taliban’s triumphant march was imminent.
And so China was clearly better prepared for the Taliban advance than the US and its Western allies. While embassies were evacuated in a hurry and without warning on Monday, China’s diplomatic mission in Kabul announced that they would of course keep the embassy open and continue their work as usual.
In this, observers see the continuation of a policy that has been emerging for some time. “For years, the People’s Republic has been working to establish good relations with the Taliban,” says regional expert Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institution in Washington in an interview with China.Table. Through covert channels, Beijing has downright courted the holy warriors, the expert explains. This is now paying off.
China’s foreign ministry announced on Monday that it was ready for “friendly relations” with the new rulers of Afghanistan. “China respects the right of the Afghan people to independently decide their own fate and is willing to maintain friendly and cooperative relations with Afghanistan,” foreign office spokeswoman Hua Chunying said in Beijing.
If Beijing has its way, these friendly relations will focus primarily on economic aspects. China is already the largest foreign investor in the country, for example, financing oil and gas production. In addition, Beijing has been trying for some time to integrate Afghanistan into its prestigious New Silk Road project. A Peshawar-Kabul highway could close an important gap within the infrastructure project. However, so far Beijing’s plans have failed because Kabul did not want to alienate leaders in Washington.
Beijing is already building several roads in the Wakhan Corridor. This would connect Xinjiang to Afghanistan, from where goods and commodities will be delivered to Central Asia – and eventually Europe – via Pakistan. “If Beijing succeeds in building these links, trade in the region and exploitation of Afghanistan’s natural resources will increase dramatically,” Derek Grossman of US think tank Rand Corporation told China.Table. According to experts, Afghanistan is said to have huge deposits of rare minerals and other rare earth elements, estimated to be worth more than a trillion US dollars.
But China’s economic ambitions have clear limits. Global Times stressed on Monday that the People’s Republic will not repeat the same mistake as several other major powers like the British Empire, the Soviet Union and most recently the US have done in the past: Sending troops to Afghanistan. “China is in a relatively comfortable situation. The principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries has always been the guiding principle of China’s foreign policy,” the state-run newspaper says.
Regional observer Zhang Junhua of the European Institute for Asian Studies in Brussels also makes it clear: “Beijing will not burden itself with getting deeply involved in Afghan politics,” the China expert told China.Table. He sees two possible scenarios for how Beijing could increase its influence in Afghanistan – without being drawn into the depths of national politics: via the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) or through bilateral cooperation with Russia.
However, both options come with certain issues. “The members of the SCO are pursuing very different interests in Afghanistan,” Zhang explained. India, in particular, is determined to prevent the Taliban from cooperating with Pakistan and China at all costs. Delhi fears a geopolitical siege. The problem with a bilateral solution with Russia, according to Zhang, is that, despite currently friendly relations with China in Central Asia, Russia still sees itself as hegemony and protector and wants to keep China’s influence in Afghanistan as low as possible. It is evident that an expansion of influence also means new problems for Beijing.
This is one of the reasons why China explicitly distances itself from the West and deliberately avoids any moral superstructure for its plans of the kind propagated by its Western allies with slogans about democracy, human rights and free elections.
Lin Minwang, a South Asia expert at Fudan University in Shanghai, sums up Beijing’s attitude towards the Taliban and the current situation in Afghanistan: “We are quite pragmatic. The way they want to govern their country is largely up to them,” he told news agency Reuters.
In any case, the security situation in Afghanistan remains unclear, which is why it is difficult to make predictions about future developments. But right now, something else may be of bigger importance for strategists in Beijing.
The caustic cynicism and biting mockery in column inches put aside, another, much more far-reaching message resonates within these lines and is directed above all at America’s allies: The failure of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan shows that Washington’s leadership can no longer be trusted. In this context, the Global Times already refers to Taiwan, which now should start to be seriously worried.
It is likely that only a handful of warmongers within the Global Times’ circle of influence are capable of such mental acrobatics as to draw a direct line from the events in Kabul to Taipei. But the underlying message is loud and clear: Washington’s guarantees of security no longer count for anything. Should this opinion prevail, the US would stand to lose far more than just its influence in Afghanistan.
Eva Lüdi Kong spent 17 years on the German translation of “Journey to the West”, one of four great classics of Chinese literature. The work was as groundbreaking for East Asian culture as Dante’s “Divine Comedy” once was for Europe. This was probably why no one before Lüdi Kong had dared to fully translate the epoch-making novel into German. All Publishers the 52-year-old Swiss author approached had declared the project as “too ambitious.” Nevertheless, the sinologist, who first came to China in the early 1990s at the age of 21, continued to work relentlessly – following a feeling of “inner necessity and meaningfulness”, as she says.
In addition to her work as an interpreter and university lecturer in Hangzhou, located in eastern China, Lüdi Kong repeatedly had found herself at her desk, tracing the heroes of the novel written in the 16th century. “When it was possible, I could sit at it for days, translating the stories. In the evening, I felt like I had an incredibly eventful day – until I realized that, yes, it had all happened in the book.”
In 2017, Lüdi Kong was awarded the German Book Prize for the 1,300-page mammoth project. The renowned Reclam publishing house published the 6th edition in 2019. “Back then, I would have been quite satisfied with a few hundred readers and a dozen friendly feedbacks,” the translator says modestly. “I never expected success.” Above all, she wanted “Chinese literature to break out of the “sinology cage” and become “a natural part of world literature,” she says today.
The epic, which interweaves the journey of a monk with Chinese folk tales and themes of Buddhism and Daoism, not only belongs to the canon of China’s four classic novels but is a fundamental part of popular culture throughout East Asia. Movies, video games, and manga such as “Dragonball” are based on the works. Every child knows the monkey king Sun Wukong. The shiny hero with his many character flaws is also Eva Lüdi Kong’s favorite character from the novel. “He is the free spirit who stays true to himself without compromise. In this way, he also embodies a secret longing that runs through the entire history of China: the longing not to have to submit. In the strictly hierarchical society, this was hardly possible – except in the case of open rebellions.
The conscience of the individual is a topic that continues to keep Lüdi Kong busy, even after the completion of her major translation work. Since the end of 2019, she has been working on a collection of textual testimonies exploring the theme of “rule and dissent in China” through historical documents from ancient times to the Ming Dynasty. “The writings are made by famous figures such as Qu Yuan, Sima Qian and Ji Kang, and show great sincerity in the desire to improve social justice.”
It was precisely their commitment to human values that made these historical figures the victims of intrigues in the ruling power structure, Lüdi Kong sums up. “They could have conformed and bowed to authority to get off scot-free. But they chose to follow the voice of their conscience. The incredible courage to stay true to themselves in the face of all repression has earned them great reverence at all times.”
While she was working on the writings, the Coronavirus broke out in Wuhan. Doctors and other whistleblowers were now also faced with the choice of going public with unwelcome truths or keeping them to themselves. After some were silenced by order or even arrested, it dawned on Lüdi Kong that history was repeating itself before her very eyes. “The parallels to ancient texts were fascinating,” she says. “The advocacy of some courageous individuals for openness, for social improvement, and for justice was equal to the same attitude expressed in ancient scriptural testimonies.”
Feeling the need to make these voices heard, Lüdi Kong created a YouTube channel called “China’s Free Voices” as a side project. There she translates critical voices from Chinese into German, such as of professor Cai Xia or martial artist Xu Xiaodong, who is outlawed by the state. “With a work like this, you come to an invisible threshold, where sooner or later you have to make exactly the same decision that Qu Yuan already formulated,” Lüdi Kong admits: “Should I say what I think without reservations, even though I’m putting myself in danger?”
European policymakers also face similar questions, says Lüdi Kong, who moved back to Switzerland in 2016: “Should we rather silently ignore grievances so as not to spoil our market access?” The sinologist nevertheless dislikes the term “dissident” because it blew certain personalities like Ai Weiwei out of proportion. For her, her work is also not primarily about criticism of the Chinese state, but a critical reflection on Chinese culture, which we can no longer avoid today. Fabian Peltsch
Shanghai saw rainfall on Monday. No heavy rain, but proper summer rain accompanied by local thunderstorms. While low-pressure areas are causing abundant precipitation in Germany, the weather radar also shows more rain pockets in East Asia.
The obviously rushed withdrawal from Afghanistan is currently the biggest failure of US policy in Central Asia. Germany, as an ally, is now also deeply involved in the disaster. The big neighbor China, on the other hand, brags that it had predicted the course of events and realistically assessed the Taliban’s strength. America’s decline begins in Afghanistan – that is the way Beijing sees it.
In fact, China has much better ties to the region than the USA has. And Beijing applies purely pragmatic standards in foreign policy. China now practices the policy of non-interference that it always demands of other nations. If the Taliban are the de facto rulers, then Chinese foreign policy recognizes them as the country’s rulers. Michael Radunski analyzes what ominous message China derives from these events for Taiwan.
At the same time, the pragmatism of Chinese policy means staying its hard course in the trade war with the US. Specifically, this creates an effective blockade for the potentially largest takeover in the semiconductor industry. The American chip manufacturer Nvidia planned the acquisition of British chip design service provider ARM. China, however, strongly objects: The concentration in the Western semiconductor industry threatens supplies to Chinese tech giants like Huawei. And Beijing certainly has a say in the matter; after all, antitrust authorities on all continents have to give their approval.
Hu Xijin could hardly hide his joy on Monday. “Chinese Internet users joke that the transition of power in Afghanistan was more smooth than the presidential transition in the US,” tweets the editor-in-chief of Chinese newspaper Global Times.
With great pleasure, his newspaper refers to cynical comments posted on online platforms such as Sina Weibo: “The 20-year war is ending like a joke. American soldiers have died for nothing, the Taliban are back, and the only difference is that more people have died and American taxpayers have wasted their money.” Other comments read: “Those people who still believe in the US will never learn their lesson. They have been left behind like garbage by Americans.“
Meanwhile, the Global Times’ official opinion piece derided the US as a “paper tiger”. “A country as powerful as the US cannot even defeat the Afghan Taliban in 20 years, which have received virtually no outside help.” And so the editors conclude that the US defeat being “a clearer demonstration of US impotence than the Vietnam War” showing the US was “a paper tiger.”
Current developments in Afghanistan fuel this view. In no time at all, the Taliban are conquering the entire country, and the government troops, equipped and trained by the US, are offering little resistance. While U.S. helicopters rescue diplomatic staff from the roof of the American embassy in Kabul, thousands of people at the airport are desperately trying to get a seat on one of the few evacuation flights. Meanwhile, reports of retaliatory killings and other brutal Taliban practices are beginning to emerge from areas captured by the Taliban.
In light of this dramatic situation, China’s priority as a direct neighbor is to restore stability in Afghanistan – especially in the Wakhan Corridor. This region is a narrow strip of land in the province of Badakhshan in northeastern Afghanistan. It connects the Chinese region of Xinjiang with Afghanistan. It is therefore the most critical strategic region in the country for China.
According to a UN report, several hundred Uighur fighters are active throughout the region, which is why Beijing worked closely with the government in Kabul for years and helped to set up a special brigade to increase security in this border area. However, it has become clear in recent weeks that this was purely pragmatic cooperation for China: As soon as the government in Kabul lost power, Beijing initiated talks with the Taliban.
Less than three weeks ago, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi met in Tianjin with a Taliban delegation led by Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Wang received explicit guarantees that the Taliban would no longer allow for Uighur insurgents or other groups to retreat to Afghanistan or to plan and carry out attacks against China from Afghan soil.
The timing of this meeting is remarkable: it took place right before the Taliban launched its major Taliban offensive. Back then, the radical Islamists sent several delegations to neighboring countries. But neither in Russia nor in Iran were they received as glamorously and with such a high profile as in China (as reported by China.Table).
China’s state media published almost friendship-like photos showing Foreign Minister Wang Yi shoulder-to-shoulder with representatives of the radical Islamic movement. In retrospect, it seems as if the intention was to gently prepare China’s population for the increasingly likely scenario that Beijing will recognize the Taliban as the legitimate regime in Afghanistan in the not too distant future.
At the time, U.S. intelligence agencies were still firmly convinced that after the announced withdrawal of U.S. troops, the Afghan government would keep the rival Taliban under control for at least six months. China was clearly better informed: Behind closed doors, the foreign ministry in Beijing was even told that the Taliban’s triumphant march was imminent.
And so China was clearly better prepared for the Taliban advance than the US and its Western allies. While embassies were evacuated in a hurry and without warning on Monday, China’s diplomatic mission in Kabul announced that they would of course keep the embassy open and continue their work as usual.
In this, observers see the continuation of a policy that has been emerging for some time. “For years, the People’s Republic has been working to establish good relations with the Taliban,” says regional expert Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institution in Washington in an interview with China.Table. Through covert channels, Beijing has downright courted the holy warriors, the expert explains. This is now paying off.
China’s foreign ministry announced on Monday that it was ready for “friendly relations” with the new rulers of Afghanistan. “China respects the right of the Afghan people to independently decide their own fate and is willing to maintain friendly and cooperative relations with Afghanistan,” foreign office spokeswoman Hua Chunying said in Beijing.
If Beijing has its way, these friendly relations will focus primarily on economic aspects. China is already the largest foreign investor in the country, for example, financing oil and gas production. In addition, Beijing has been trying for some time to integrate Afghanistan into its prestigious New Silk Road project. A Peshawar-Kabul highway could close an important gap within the infrastructure project. However, so far Beijing’s plans have failed because Kabul did not want to alienate leaders in Washington.
Beijing is already building several roads in the Wakhan Corridor. This would connect Xinjiang to Afghanistan, from where goods and commodities will be delivered to Central Asia – and eventually Europe – via Pakistan. “If Beijing succeeds in building these links, trade in the region and exploitation of Afghanistan’s natural resources will increase dramatically,” Derek Grossman of US think tank Rand Corporation told China.Table. According to experts, Afghanistan is said to have huge deposits of rare minerals and other rare earth elements, estimated to be worth more than a trillion US dollars.
But China’s economic ambitions have clear limits. Global Times stressed on Monday that the People’s Republic will not repeat the same mistake as several other major powers like the British Empire, the Soviet Union and most recently the US have done in the past: Sending troops to Afghanistan. “China is in a relatively comfortable situation. The principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries has always been the guiding principle of China’s foreign policy,” the state-run newspaper says.
Regional observer Zhang Junhua of the European Institute for Asian Studies in Brussels also makes it clear: “Beijing will not burden itself with getting deeply involved in Afghan politics,” the China expert told China.Table. He sees two possible scenarios for how Beijing could increase its influence in Afghanistan – without being drawn into the depths of national politics: via the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) or through bilateral cooperation with Russia.
However, both options come with certain issues. “The members of the SCO are pursuing very different interests in Afghanistan,” Zhang explained. India, in particular, is determined to prevent the Taliban from cooperating with Pakistan and China at all costs. Delhi fears a geopolitical siege. The problem with a bilateral solution with Russia, according to Zhang, is that, despite currently friendly relations with China in Central Asia, Russia still sees itself as hegemony and protector and wants to keep China’s influence in Afghanistan as low as possible. It is evident that an expansion of influence also means new problems for Beijing.
This is one of the reasons why China explicitly distances itself from the West and deliberately avoids any moral superstructure for its plans of the kind propagated by its Western allies with slogans about democracy, human rights and free elections.
Lin Minwang, a South Asia expert at Fudan University in Shanghai, sums up Beijing’s attitude towards the Taliban and the current situation in Afghanistan: “We are quite pragmatic. The way they want to govern their country is largely up to them,” he told news agency Reuters.
In any case, the security situation in Afghanistan remains unclear, which is why it is difficult to make predictions about future developments. But right now, something else may be of bigger importance for strategists in Beijing.
The caustic cynicism and biting mockery in column inches put aside, another, much more far-reaching message resonates within these lines and is directed above all at America’s allies: The failure of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan shows that Washington’s leadership can no longer be trusted. In this context, the Global Times already refers to Taiwan, which now should start to be seriously worried.
It is likely that only a handful of warmongers within the Global Times’ circle of influence are capable of such mental acrobatics as to draw a direct line from the events in Kabul to Taipei. But the underlying message is loud and clear: Washington’s guarantees of security no longer count for anything. Should this opinion prevail, the US would stand to lose far more than just its influence in Afghanistan.
Eva Lüdi Kong spent 17 years on the German translation of “Journey to the West”, one of four great classics of Chinese literature. The work was as groundbreaking for East Asian culture as Dante’s “Divine Comedy” once was for Europe. This was probably why no one before Lüdi Kong had dared to fully translate the epoch-making novel into German. All Publishers the 52-year-old Swiss author approached had declared the project as “too ambitious.” Nevertheless, the sinologist, who first came to China in the early 1990s at the age of 21, continued to work relentlessly – following a feeling of “inner necessity and meaningfulness”, as she says.
In addition to her work as an interpreter and university lecturer in Hangzhou, located in eastern China, Lüdi Kong repeatedly had found herself at her desk, tracing the heroes of the novel written in the 16th century. “When it was possible, I could sit at it for days, translating the stories. In the evening, I felt like I had an incredibly eventful day – until I realized that, yes, it had all happened in the book.”
In 2017, Lüdi Kong was awarded the German Book Prize for the 1,300-page mammoth project. The renowned Reclam publishing house published the 6th edition in 2019. “Back then, I would have been quite satisfied with a few hundred readers and a dozen friendly feedbacks,” the translator says modestly. “I never expected success.” Above all, she wanted “Chinese literature to break out of the “sinology cage” and become “a natural part of world literature,” she says today.
The epic, which interweaves the journey of a monk with Chinese folk tales and themes of Buddhism and Daoism, not only belongs to the canon of China’s four classic novels but is a fundamental part of popular culture throughout East Asia. Movies, video games, and manga such as “Dragonball” are based on the works. Every child knows the monkey king Sun Wukong. The shiny hero with his many character flaws is also Eva Lüdi Kong’s favorite character from the novel. “He is the free spirit who stays true to himself without compromise. In this way, he also embodies a secret longing that runs through the entire history of China: the longing not to have to submit. In the strictly hierarchical society, this was hardly possible – except in the case of open rebellions.
The conscience of the individual is a topic that continues to keep Lüdi Kong busy, even after the completion of her major translation work. Since the end of 2019, she has been working on a collection of textual testimonies exploring the theme of “rule and dissent in China” through historical documents from ancient times to the Ming Dynasty. “The writings are made by famous figures such as Qu Yuan, Sima Qian and Ji Kang, and show great sincerity in the desire to improve social justice.”
It was precisely their commitment to human values that made these historical figures the victims of intrigues in the ruling power structure, Lüdi Kong sums up. “They could have conformed and bowed to authority to get off scot-free. But they chose to follow the voice of their conscience. The incredible courage to stay true to themselves in the face of all repression has earned them great reverence at all times.”
While she was working on the writings, the Coronavirus broke out in Wuhan. Doctors and other whistleblowers were now also faced with the choice of going public with unwelcome truths or keeping them to themselves. After some were silenced by order or even arrested, it dawned on Lüdi Kong that history was repeating itself before her very eyes. “The parallels to ancient texts were fascinating,” she says. “The advocacy of some courageous individuals for openness, for social improvement, and for justice was equal to the same attitude expressed in ancient scriptural testimonies.”
Feeling the need to make these voices heard, Lüdi Kong created a YouTube channel called “China’s Free Voices” as a side project. There she translates critical voices from Chinese into German, such as of professor Cai Xia or martial artist Xu Xiaodong, who is outlawed by the state. “With a work like this, you come to an invisible threshold, where sooner or later you have to make exactly the same decision that Qu Yuan already formulated,” Lüdi Kong admits: “Should I say what I think without reservations, even though I’m putting myself in danger?”
European policymakers also face similar questions, says Lüdi Kong, who moved back to Switzerland in 2016: “Should we rather silently ignore grievances so as not to spoil our market access?” The sinologist nevertheless dislikes the term “dissident” because it blew certain personalities like Ai Weiwei out of proportion. For her, her work is also not primarily about criticism of the Chinese state, but a critical reflection on Chinese culture, which we can no longer avoid today. Fabian Peltsch
Shanghai saw rainfall on Monday. No heavy rain, but proper summer rain accompanied by local thunderstorms. While low-pressure areas are causing abundant precipitation in Germany, the weather radar also shows more rain pockets in East Asia.
