The orbit is getting crowded. Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX operates 3,700 satellites with its Starlink system. China wants to top that and is planning its own satellite internet program with no less than 13,000 satellites that will soon provide the globe with internet via space.
China has long since recognized how powerful such an instrument is, not least in cases of conflict with the United States, as Joern Petring analyzes. And quite incidentally, it also has economic advantages: African countries already show interest in China’s satellite internet.
Acting like a great philosophical thinker – that has a long tradition among China’s rulers. And Xi Jinping has already had his own theory immortalized in the constitution. However, by trying to pass himself off as an intellectual, Xi is making a fool of himself, says publicist Shi Ming, who has intensively studied contemporary Chinese philosophers and translated their most important texts into a German volume.
The internet in China is full of politically tinged jokes about Xi, explains Shi in an interview with Fabian Peltsch. Unlike under dictator Mao Zedong, Xi will neither achieve watertight censorship in the age of social media nor maintain his concentration of power in the long term. And that, according to Shi Ming, “is, of course, a glimmer of hope for China“. Until then, however, the country’s thinkers are mere service providers for politicians.
In the collection of essays “Chinesisches Denken der Gegenwart” (“Contemporary Chinese Thought”), which you have annotated and translated, you write that high-ranking officials in imperial China were able to criticize the emperor, or at least hold a mirror up to him. How is that with the Chinese leadership today? Does Xi Jinping only gather yes-men around him?
There are certainly still very moral intellectuals who denounce injustice in the name of the people and show that they are not afraid of cruel rulers. However, many of them today are intellectuals turned functionaries, who definitely incorporate their own interests into their theories. That is a big difference from the old scholars who served the emperor. But, of course, there were also shameless yes-men under the emperors. Of course, no one was ultimately allowed to lecture the emperor. But the emperor also had to be careful not to lose the mandate of heaven in the eyes of his ministers. And that kept the emperor’s power in check – not always, but increasingly systematically after the twelfth century. The age of ideology and social revolution changed that from the ground up. The revolutionaries and party leaders all wanted to be political theologians themselves. Even if they didn’t have the faintest idea about theory, almost everyone wanted to be immortalized in the constitution with their own theories, be it Mao or Deng or Xi.
Xi Jinping presents himself in public as a literate thinker who devoured the classics of world literature in his youth. Is that taken seriously in China?
Xi is making a fool of himself by trying to pass himself off as an intellectual in public, and not only among the intellectual elite. You can’t say that publicly, of course. But you can see it in the many politically colored jokes that are circulating about him. What is required of a political leader these days is a kind of reflective daring. In other words, someone who thinks but does not hesitate for long and acts decisively. And Xi Jinping fails to do that. He says something, and half a year later, it is taken back, be it urbanization, which quickly became de-urbanization, or the 180-degree turn on Covid. With Mao, people often didn’t know what his quotes actually meant, but he acted rigorously. When he said, ‘You all go to the countryside,’ 30 million people migrated to the countryside. People respected such characters, whether that is a good or bad thing. Putin is just as much a strong, ruthless leader in the eyes of many Russians. Xi would like to be such a character himself. So far, he has not managed to do that well.
Do you think there could be another campaign against intellectuals, like after the “Hundred Flowers Movement” under Mao Zedong, muzzling all intellectuals at once?
When one man has all the power in his hands, he makes sure that not a hundred flowers bloom and certainly not a hundred schools compete. Today’s question, which is also the question our volume wants to answer, is whether the ruler can even do that anymore: Silencing everything that doesn’t suit him. We are seeing this more and more, especially in the social media sphere, that although there are many imposed taboos, they are also increasingly being broken. A prime example is the Ukraine crisis. In the beginning, people never said anything against Russia. Today, many people on the Internet write that Russia is clearly the aggressor and that we Chinese are supporting them has only to do with our own interests, but nothing to do with morals. Sometimes the censors can’t keep up with it. Sometimes they don’t even delete it anymore.
This does not sound like the totalitarian surveillance state that China is often portrayed as in the West.
Don’t get me wrong. China is not free. So many go to prison, and more are added every day. But I doubt, with some reasons, that the party can achieve watertight censorship again. It will also not be possible to keep this concentration of power in the hands of one man in the long term. And that, of course, is a glimmer of hope for China.
What do you think of an intellectual like Wang Huning, who has been considered the ideological thought leader of the party leadership since Jiang Zemin?
Wang Huning is a phenomenon that characterizes the post-Mao era. Strictly speaking, he is not an ideologue because he cannot maintain continuity in his ideological or seemingly ideological argumentation. Wang Huning is a reinterpreter. He combines Western theories, for example, by Huntington or Carl Schmitt, with Chinese interpretation. When Jiang Zemin came to power, he needed a kind of people’s party model. This became the theory of the ‘Three Represents’. Hu Jintao needed a constitutional policy that followed the party. Wang Huning put together both of these things. For Xi Jinping, who now holds all the power, Wang again interpreted a new theory. Through Wang, China’s intellectuals have also understood what matters today: They now reinterpret something old every three months. But the more reinterpretations are put into circulation, the less credible the party becomes.
Your book mentions that Western thinkers like Foucault are also reinterpreted to justify things like the surveillance state. Philosophy has become a service in China, so to speak.
Yes, precisely, an ideological service. Maybe I’m being too disrespectful towards such “philosophers”, but I believe they can’t be real philosophers at all because they are too much oriented toward the daily needs of politics. Philosophers have to be a bit unworldly, otherwise you can’t philosophize at all. In this respect, Xi Jinping’s era is also a very tragic time for them. Power does not allow intellectuals to really formulate something new. Nowadays, when students are again called upon to denounce their professors, fear has again become the greatest teacher for the intellectuals. China has a huge amount of power, especially in material terms the rise of the country has been impressive. But China no longer has any spiritual power.
You speak of a vacuum of values in your book in this context.
I would even go further: China has a vacuum of spiritual depth. Values can still be manufactured. But in order to communicate values credibly, you must have spiritual solidity and depth. All schools of faith are thriving in China today. That means that consumption alone is not enough. But if you look at today’s quasi-religious movements in China, almost everything is actually charlatanism. Even Zen Buddhism is only used to make people feel better individually. Wellness. I think China will soon become a country where there will be more and more heated debates because no one has an explanation for anything anymore. That’s why Daniel Leese and I recommend in our volume to pay even more attention to the Chinese debates than before.
What would have to happen for something to change fundamentally?
Either distress becomes so great that not only can you not ban the culture of debate, but you realize that you need this culture of debate. Then perhaps the door would open a little. Or dictatorship and control will become much, much harsher so that at some point, there will no longer be debate, but bloody revolution.
Shi Ming was born in Beijing in 1957. He worked as an announcer, translator and journalist at Radio Beijing and later moved to the Chinese business world. After the bloody suppression of the protests in Beijing in 1989, he went into exile in Germany, where he has since worked as a freelance journalist and publicist for German media. The collection of essays he co-translated and annotated, “Chinesisches Denken der Gegenwart – Schlüsseltexte zu Politik und Gesellschaft” (“Contemporary Chinese Thought – Key Texts on Politics and Society”), was published by C.H. Beck in May 2023.
In response to the Starlink system of US billionaire Elon Musk, China begins to build its own satellite network for space-based internet. In mid-June, Chinese state media reported that a ship in the South China Sea had successfully established an internet connection to a total of 14 satellites for the first time. The Chinese satellite company GalaxySpace had previously placed the spacecraft in low Earth orbit.
The test shows that China’s plans for a Starlink alternative are progressing at an astonishing rate. It was only two years ago that reports first emerged that Beijing planned to build a constellation of nearly 13,000 near-Earth satellites that would one day provide internet around the globe. Reports refer to the system as “GW” or “Guowang”.
The US space company SpaceX operates Starlink, a network that has offered global internet access in several expansion stages since 2020. Starlink is mainly designed for regions with no or only poor internet connections. With currently 3,700 active Starlink satellites in Earth orbit, SpaceX is the largest satellite operator worldwide. The number of Starlink satellites is expected to increase rapidly in the coming years.
China is very keen to jump on this bandwagon. It realizes what a powerful tool it could have at its disposal. Chinese researchers have been looking closely at the risks the SpaceX system could pose to China’s national security. They are also examining how to benefit from independent satellite internet.
The Chinese see a potential danger in the fact that the US military could exploit the Starlink system in the event of a conflict. The war in Ukraine has already shown what is possible with Starlink. The satellite-based internet provides Ukrainian troops with highly reliable communication and reconnaissance at a relatively low cost.
So it is no wonder that Taiwan announced plans to launch its own satellite internet after the Starlink success in Ukraine last December. The country would be less vulnerable in the event of a Chinese invasion. After all, space-based internet could potentially compensate for destroyed underwater cables.
“The Starlink constellation has finally shown its military colors in the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” the Washington Post recently quoted a Beijing academic familiar with Chinese research. The focus in China is now to advance the development of its own constellation and to research defensive measures against foreign Starlink satellites.
Beijing even considers ways to render Starlink unusable in the event of a conflict. Above all, they want to send their own network of Chinese mini-satellites into space as quickly as possible.
This also involves tapping into a large market outside the country’s own borders. Analyst Juliana Suess of the British defense think tank Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) believes that African countries, in particular, could be interested in Chinese satellite internet.
After all, Chinese companies have also provided most of the continent’s communications infrastructure. China has built around 70 percent of Africa’s 4G network. According to Suess, Beijing could use its own satellite constellation as a soft-power instrument, as it could control information flows. This would allow for global internet censorship from space, similar to what China already does with the conventional internet.
Getting a hold of Roland Roesch for an interview is not easy. He has only just returned from a conference in China. After all, Roesch’s field of expertise, renewable energies, impacts the whole world. So he travels around the world. For IRENA.
IRENA stands for International Renewable Energy Agency and is a governmental organization with currently 168 member states. The organization was founded in Bonn, Germany, in 2009 with the goal of supporting and accelerating the development of renewable energies worldwide. Roesch summarizes: “We want to share our knowledge about renewable energies and are also advocates for renewable energies.”
Part of IRENA is the Innovation and Technology Centre in Bonn, with almost 80 employees from 50 countries, where Roesch serves as the acting director. He was born in the German city of Recklinghausen but proudly sees the southern Black Forest as his home. This is where he lives with his wife and two teenagers. Sustainability is also important to him here: He uses nuclear-free electricity generated 100 percent from renewable energy sources. Soon he will probably also buy an electric car.
Roesch would never have dreamed that he would one day end up in this job. “Even at school, I developed an enthusiasm for everything related to energy,” he says. He studied industrial engineering at the University of Darmstadt, specializing in mechanical engineering, with a focus on energy, energy technologies and energy management. After earning his Ph.D., he worked for E.ON and Shell, among others.
In connection with the energy transition, Fukushima, and the phase-out of nuclear energy, he also made his own energy transition, so to speak, Roesch explains. “I converted from fossil fuels, which played a role at Shell and E.ON, and nuclear energy, into the field of renewable energies.” He felt a huge appetite to get involved in the global energy transition. “That was a very exciting task, to help shape this start-up, the Innovation and Technology Centre in Bonn, and the development of IRENA.” You don’t often get an opportunity like this in life.
This makes Roesch all the more passionate about renewables today because he knows there is still a long way to go. “Today we have a situation where there is already good investment in renewable generation capacity in the G20 countries,” he says. But he says it’s also important to recognize that outside the G20, only one percent of renewable generation capacity has been invested globally, for example, in Africa. The Finance Report by the Knowledge Policy Finance Centre shows that investment in renewable energy does not benefit 50 percent of the world’s population, he says.
At the same time, expansion and approval processes, for example, of off-shore wind farms, need to happen much faster, stresses Roesch, who now sees renewable energy as his calling. “I’ve gone from someone who believed in nuclear energy to someone who has a strong belief that only renewables can solve the problems we have.” For a bold energy transition, that is what Roland Roesch personally stands for. Sarah Tekath
A chance encounter with your boss on the train, a standing reception with small talk at the embassy, hours of hiking with complete strangers – these scenarios trigger a thrill of adrenaline in you? Then you are probably a true social cattle, in Chinese 社牛 shèniú, literally “social cow,” also known as “social butterfly”. Social cows are charismatic and extroverted social all-rounders, constantly on the move and quick to warm up to anyone they talk to.
Are cattle considered to be particularly sociable animals in the Middle Kingdom? Not really. This popular term is actually a creative portmanteau of 社交 shèjiāo (“social interaction / social contact”) and 牛人 niúrén “genius, badass, great guy” (literally “cattle person”). This is because the character 牛 niú, actually “bovine,” “cow” or “buffalo,” can also figuratively mean “cool,” “fantastic,” “impressive,” or “great” (as in 真牛 zhēn niú, “really great”).
However, if your sociability is pathological, the Chinese online community will diagnose you with “Social NB Disorder” (社交牛逼症 shèjiāo niúbīzhèng). 牛逼 niúbī (often abbreviated 牛B or simply NB) is a crude colloquial term for anything impressive. It is a popular street slang, especially in northern China. There, it is also sometimes shouted as a cheer in soccer stadiums.
So, are you possibly suffering from such a “social butterfly disorder”? Here is a small list of typical symptoms for a spontaneous self-check:
Did you answer “yes” to all three questions? Then you are unfortunately suffering from a clear case of Social NB Disorder!
By the way, the counterpart to this is called 社交恐惧症 shèjiāo kǒngjùzhèng in Chinese vernacular, or social anxiety disorder, often abbreviated simply as 社恐 shèkǒng. This refers to introverted individuals whose toes cramp into a state of shock at the very thought of miserably long pauses in conversation and awkward small talk.
Whether you are a shèniú or a shèkǒng – channel your inner cow during your next Chinese conversation by learning a few idiomatic expressions beforehand and dropping them casually in your conversation.
Here’s a small selection:
With these beefy expressions, you’re sure to make an impression or, as the Chinese would say: blow up the cow (吹牛 chuī niú). This is, in fact, a common expression for “bragging” or “showing off”. The word finds its origin in the phrase 吹牛皮 (chuī niúpí – literally “to puff up cowhide”), which is said to have come from the harsh climes of northwest China. The term dates back to a time when people traveled the Yellow River on leather rafts. Chinese craftsmen supposedly inflated sheep or pig skins to make the rafts float. Cowhide, on the other hand, was not suitable as a floating device due to its size and lack of fat, so the term 吹牛皮 (chuī niúpí) was coined as a synonym for exaggeration.
With this in mind, keep studying so that you can someday blow up the cow in style.
Verena Menzel runs the online language school New Chinese in Beijing.
The orbit is getting crowded. Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX operates 3,700 satellites with its Starlink system. China wants to top that and is planning its own satellite internet program with no less than 13,000 satellites that will soon provide the globe with internet via space.
China has long since recognized how powerful such an instrument is, not least in cases of conflict with the United States, as Joern Petring analyzes. And quite incidentally, it also has economic advantages: African countries already show interest in China’s satellite internet.
Acting like a great philosophical thinker – that has a long tradition among China’s rulers. And Xi Jinping has already had his own theory immortalized in the constitution. However, by trying to pass himself off as an intellectual, Xi is making a fool of himself, says publicist Shi Ming, who has intensively studied contemporary Chinese philosophers and translated their most important texts into a German volume.
The internet in China is full of politically tinged jokes about Xi, explains Shi in an interview with Fabian Peltsch. Unlike under dictator Mao Zedong, Xi will neither achieve watertight censorship in the age of social media nor maintain his concentration of power in the long term. And that, according to Shi Ming, “is, of course, a glimmer of hope for China“. Until then, however, the country’s thinkers are mere service providers for politicians.
In the collection of essays “Chinesisches Denken der Gegenwart” (“Contemporary Chinese Thought”), which you have annotated and translated, you write that high-ranking officials in imperial China were able to criticize the emperor, or at least hold a mirror up to him. How is that with the Chinese leadership today? Does Xi Jinping only gather yes-men around him?
There are certainly still very moral intellectuals who denounce injustice in the name of the people and show that they are not afraid of cruel rulers. However, many of them today are intellectuals turned functionaries, who definitely incorporate their own interests into their theories. That is a big difference from the old scholars who served the emperor. But, of course, there were also shameless yes-men under the emperors. Of course, no one was ultimately allowed to lecture the emperor. But the emperor also had to be careful not to lose the mandate of heaven in the eyes of his ministers. And that kept the emperor’s power in check – not always, but increasingly systematically after the twelfth century. The age of ideology and social revolution changed that from the ground up. The revolutionaries and party leaders all wanted to be political theologians themselves. Even if they didn’t have the faintest idea about theory, almost everyone wanted to be immortalized in the constitution with their own theories, be it Mao or Deng or Xi.
Xi Jinping presents himself in public as a literate thinker who devoured the classics of world literature in his youth. Is that taken seriously in China?
Xi is making a fool of himself by trying to pass himself off as an intellectual in public, and not only among the intellectual elite. You can’t say that publicly, of course. But you can see it in the many politically colored jokes that are circulating about him. What is required of a political leader these days is a kind of reflective daring. In other words, someone who thinks but does not hesitate for long and acts decisively. And Xi Jinping fails to do that. He says something, and half a year later, it is taken back, be it urbanization, which quickly became de-urbanization, or the 180-degree turn on Covid. With Mao, people often didn’t know what his quotes actually meant, but he acted rigorously. When he said, ‘You all go to the countryside,’ 30 million people migrated to the countryside. People respected such characters, whether that is a good or bad thing. Putin is just as much a strong, ruthless leader in the eyes of many Russians. Xi would like to be such a character himself. So far, he has not managed to do that well.
Do you think there could be another campaign against intellectuals, like after the “Hundred Flowers Movement” under Mao Zedong, muzzling all intellectuals at once?
When one man has all the power in his hands, he makes sure that not a hundred flowers bloom and certainly not a hundred schools compete. Today’s question, which is also the question our volume wants to answer, is whether the ruler can even do that anymore: Silencing everything that doesn’t suit him. We are seeing this more and more, especially in the social media sphere, that although there are many imposed taboos, they are also increasingly being broken. A prime example is the Ukraine crisis. In the beginning, people never said anything against Russia. Today, many people on the Internet write that Russia is clearly the aggressor and that we Chinese are supporting them has only to do with our own interests, but nothing to do with morals. Sometimes the censors can’t keep up with it. Sometimes they don’t even delete it anymore.
This does not sound like the totalitarian surveillance state that China is often portrayed as in the West.
Don’t get me wrong. China is not free. So many go to prison, and more are added every day. But I doubt, with some reasons, that the party can achieve watertight censorship again. It will also not be possible to keep this concentration of power in the hands of one man in the long term. And that, of course, is a glimmer of hope for China.
What do you think of an intellectual like Wang Huning, who has been considered the ideological thought leader of the party leadership since Jiang Zemin?
Wang Huning is a phenomenon that characterizes the post-Mao era. Strictly speaking, he is not an ideologue because he cannot maintain continuity in his ideological or seemingly ideological argumentation. Wang Huning is a reinterpreter. He combines Western theories, for example, by Huntington or Carl Schmitt, with Chinese interpretation. When Jiang Zemin came to power, he needed a kind of people’s party model. This became the theory of the ‘Three Represents’. Hu Jintao needed a constitutional policy that followed the party. Wang Huning put together both of these things. For Xi Jinping, who now holds all the power, Wang again interpreted a new theory. Through Wang, China’s intellectuals have also understood what matters today: They now reinterpret something old every three months. But the more reinterpretations are put into circulation, the less credible the party becomes.
Your book mentions that Western thinkers like Foucault are also reinterpreted to justify things like the surveillance state. Philosophy has become a service in China, so to speak.
Yes, precisely, an ideological service. Maybe I’m being too disrespectful towards such “philosophers”, but I believe they can’t be real philosophers at all because they are too much oriented toward the daily needs of politics. Philosophers have to be a bit unworldly, otherwise you can’t philosophize at all. In this respect, Xi Jinping’s era is also a very tragic time for them. Power does not allow intellectuals to really formulate something new. Nowadays, when students are again called upon to denounce their professors, fear has again become the greatest teacher for the intellectuals. China has a huge amount of power, especially in material terms the rise of the country has been impressive. But China no longer has any spiritual power.
You speak of a vacuum of values in your book in this context.
I would even go further: China has a vacuum of spiritual depth. Values can still be manufactured. But in order to communicate values credibly, you must have spiritual solidity and depth. All schools of faith are thriving in China today. That means that consumption alone is not enough. But if you look at today’s quasi-religious movements in China, almost everything is actually charlatanism. Even Zen Buddhism is only used to make people feel better individually. Wellness. I think China will soon become a country where there will be more and more heated debates because no one has an explanation for anything anymore. That’s why Daniel Leese and I recommend in our volume to pay even more attention to the Chinese debates than before.
What would have to happen for something to change fundamentally?
Either distress becomes so great that not only can you not ban the culture of debate, but you realize that you need this culture of debate. Then perhaps the door would open a little. Or dictatorship and control will become much, much harsher so that at some point, there will no longer be debate, but bloody revolution.
Shi Ming was born in Beijing in 1957. He worked as an announcer, translator and journalist at Radio Beijing and later moved to the Chinese business world. After the bloody suppression of the protests in Beijing in 1989, he went into exile in Germany, where he has since worked as a freelance journalist and publicist for German media. The collection of essays he co-translated and annotated, “Chinesisches Denken der Gegenwart – Schlüsseltexte zu Politik und Gesellschaft” (“Contemporary Chinese Thought – Key Texts on Politics and Society”), was published by C.H. Beck in May 2023.
In response to the Starlink system of US billionaire Elon Musk, China begins to build its own satellite network for space-based internet. In mid-June, Chinese state media reported that a ship in the South China Sea had successfully established an internet connection to a total of 14 satellites for the first time. The Chinese satellite company GalaxySpace had previously placed the spacecraft in low Earth orbit.
The test shows that China’s plans for a Starlink alternative are progressing at an astonishing rate. It was only two years ago that reports first emerged that Beijing planned to build a constellation of nearly 13,000 near-Earth satellites that would one day provide internet around the globe. Reports refer to the system as “GW” or “Guowang”.
The US space company SpaceX operates Starlink, a network that has offered global internet access in several expansion stages since 2020. Starlink is mainly designed for regions with no or only poor internet connections. With currently 3,700 active Starlink satellites in Earth orbit, SpaceX is the largest satellite operator worldwide. The number of Starlink satellites is expected to increase rapidly in the coming years.
China is very keen to jump on this bandwagon. It realizes what a powerful tool it could have at its disposal. Chinese researchers have been looking closely at the risks the SpaceX system could pose to China’s national security. They are also examining how to benefit from independent satellite internet.
The Chinese see a potential danger in the fact that the US military could exploit the Starlink system in the event of a conflict. The war in Ukraine has already shown what is possible with Starlink. The satellite-based internet provides Ukrainian troops with highly reliable communication and reconnaissance at a relatively low cost.
So it is no wonder that Taiwan announced plans to launch its own satellite internet after the Starlink success in Ukraine last December. The country would be less vulnerable in the event of a Chinese invasion. After all, space-based internet could potentially compensate for destroyed underwater cables.
“The Starlink constellation has finally shown its military colors in the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” the Washington Post recently quoted a Beijing academic familiar with Chinese research. The focus in China is now to advance the development of its own constellation and to research defensive measures against foreign Starlink satellites.
Beijing even considers ways to render Starlink unusable in the event of a conflict. Above all, they want to send their own network of Chinese mini-satellites into space as quickly as possible.
This also involves tapping into a large market outside the country’s own borders. Analyst Juliana Suess of the British defense think tank Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) believes that African countries, in particular, could be interested in Chinese satellite internet.
After all, Chinese companies have also provided most of the continent’s communications infrastructure. China has built around 70 percent of Africa’s 4G network. According to Suess, Beijing could use its own satellite constellation as a soft-power instrument, as it could control information flows. This would allow for global internet censorship from space, similar to what China already does with the conventional internet.
Getting a hold of Roland Roesch for an interview is not easy. He has only just returned from a conference in China. After all, Roesch’s field of expertise, renewable energies, impacts the whole world. So he travels around the world. For IRENA.
IRENA stands for International Renewable Energy Agency and is a governmental organization with currently 168 member states. The organization was founded in Bonn, Germany, in 2009 with the goal of supporting and accelerating the development of renewable energies worldwide. Roesch summarizes: “We want to share our knowledge about renewable energies and are also advocates for renewable energies.”
Part of IRENA is the Innovation and Technology Centre in Bonn, with almost 80 employees from 50 countries, where Roesch serves as the acting director. He was born in the German city of Recklinghausen but proudly sees the southern Black Forest as his home. This is where he lives with his wife and two teenagers. Sustainability is also important to him here: He uses nuclear-free electricity generated 100 percent from renewable energy sources. Soon he will probably also buy an electric car.
Roesch would never have dreamed that he would one day end up in this job. “Even at school, I developed an enthusiasm for everything related to energy,” he says. He studied industrial engineering at the University of Darmstadt, specializing in mechanical engineering, with a focus on energy, energy technologies and energy management. After earning his Ph.D., he worked for E.ON and Shell, among others.
In connection with the energy transition, Fukushima, and the phase-out of nuclear energy, he also made his own energy transition, so to speak, Roesch explains. “I converted from fossil fuels, which played a role at Shell and E.ON, and nuclear energy, into the field of renewable energies.” He felt a huge appetite to get involved in the global energy transition. “That was a very exciting task, to help shape this start-up, the Innovation and Technology Centre in Bonn, and the development of IRENA.” You don’t often get an opportunity like this in life.
This makes Roesch all the more passionate about renewables today because he knows there is still a long way to go. “Today we have a situation where there is already good investment in renewable generation capacity in the G20 countries,” he says. But he says it’s also important to recognize that outside the G20, only one percent of renewable generation capacity has been invested globally, for example, in Africa. The Finance Report by the Knowledge Policy Finance Centre shows that investment in renewable energy does not benefit 50 percent of the world’s population, he says.
At the same time, expansion and approval processes, for example, of off-shore wind farms, need to happen much faster, stresses Roesch, who now sees renewable energy as his calling. “I’ve gone from someone who believed in nuclear energy to someone who has a strong belief that only renewables can solve the problems we have.” For a bold energy transition, that is what Roland Roesch personally stands for. Sarah Tekath
A chance encounter with your boss on the train, a standing reception with small talk at the embassy, hours of hiking with complete strangers – these scenarios trigger a thrill of adrenaline in you? Then you are probably a true social cattle, in Chinese 社牛 shèniú, literally “social cow,” also known as “social butterfly”. Social cows are charismatic and extroverted social all-rounders, constantly on the move and quick to warm up to anyone they talk to.
Are cattle considered to be particularly sociable animals in the Middle Kingdom? Not really. This popular term is actually a creative portmanteau of 社交 shèjiāo (“social interaction / social contact”) and 牛人 niúrén “genius, badass, great guy” (literally “cattle person”). This is because the character 牛 niú, actually “bovine,” “cow” or “buffalo,” can also figuratively mean “cool,” “fantastic,” “impressive,” or “great” (as in 真牛 zhēn niú, “really great”).
However, if your sociability is pathological, the Chinese online community will diagnose you with “Social NB Disorder” (社交牛逼症 shèjiāo niúbīzhèng). 牛逼 niúbī (often abbreviated 牛B or simply NB) is a crude colloquial term for anything impressive. It is a popular street slang, especially in northern China. There, it is also sometimes shouted as a cheer in soccer stadiums.
So, are you possibly suffering from such a “social butterfly disorder”? Here is a small list of typical symptoms for a spontaneous self-check:
Did you answer “yes” to all three questions? Then you are unfortunately suffering from a clear case of Social NB Disorder!
By the way, the counterpart to this is called 社交恐惧症 shèjiāo kǒngjùzhèng in Chinese vernacular, or social anxiety disorder, often abbreviated simply as 社恐 shèkǒng. This refers to introverted individuals whose toes cramp into a state of shock at the very thought of miserably long pauses in conversation and awkward small talk.
Whether you are a shèniú or a shèkǒng – channel your inner cow during your next Chinese conversation by learning a few idiomatic expressions beforehand and dropping them casually in your conversation.
Here’s a small selection:
With these beefy expressions, you’re sure to make an impression or, as the Chinese would say: blow up the cow (吹牛 chuī niú). This is, in fact, a common expression for “bragging” or “showing off”. The word finds its origin in the phrase 吹牛皮 (chuī niúpí – literally “to puff up cowhide”), which is said to have come from the harsh climes of northwest China. The term dates back to a time when people traveled the Yellow River on leather rafts. Chinese craftsmen supposedly inflated sheep or pig skins to make the rafts float. Cowhide, on the other hand, was not suitable as a floating device due to its size and lack of fat, so the term 吹牛皮 (chuī niúpí) was coined as a synonym for exaggeration.
With this in mind, keep studying so that you can someday blow up the cow in style.
Verena Menzel runs the online language school New Chinese in Beijing.
