The successful author and sinologist Stephan Thome has lived in Taiwan for the past 12 years. He writes novels with a local perspective, and most recently published “Pflaumenregen” (Plum Rain) a book set during the period of Japanese colonial rule over the island. Interviewed by Fabian Peltsch, Thome talks about how he experiences the current tense situation on the island, what he wishes for Taiwan, and what he thinks of the occasional accusation of cultural appropriation.
There are surveys according to which most people find hardly anything as annoying as their neighbors. China and India may feel the same way; for decades, both have been feuding about their border. So it’s no wonder that economic relations between the two countries are nowhere near as good as they could be. Now, India is punishing China for its aggressive behavior along the border. As our editorial team in Beijing analyzes, New Delhi is currently cracking down on Chinese IT companies that actually want to set foot in India.
Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, has left for Asia. Whether she will also visit Taiwan, as speculated by publications including the Financial Times, remained unclear on Sunday. Some analysts expect that Pelosi’s trip to Taipei will lead to a political crisis in the US-China-Taiwan triangle. We will keep an eye on the situation.
Your first novel “Grenzgang” was a surprise hit in 2009. You wrote it during your time as a research assistant at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Did you have the necessary distance there to create a portrait of Germany’s provinces?
The inspiration for the place where “Grenzgang” is set is my hometown in Upper Hesse. I know the area so well, I could have written about it anywhere. In fact, almost all of my novels were written in Taiwan. At the time, I simply had the idea with me.
You have now been living in Taiwan for 12 years. Your latest novel, “Pflaumenregen”, (Plum Rain) is set at the time when the island was under Japanese colonial rule. You simultaneously published “Gebrauchsanweisung für Taiwan” (Instruction Manual for Taiwan). How is it that you are only now putting your experiences and knowledge of Taiwan into literary form?
During book tours, the question kept coming up: If you live there, why don’t you write about it? But you first have to get to the point where you can write about Asia in a way that doesn’t turn the settings into an exotic photo wallpaper full of Western heroes. If you want to tell something substantial about these countries, you have to know a bit more about them. Two years of residence and a few language skills are not enough to understand such a rich culture and history.
You write as a German from the perspective of Chinese. This could be seen as a presumption or even cultural appropriation.
Some English-language publishers that we offered the books to actually noted that this was a case of cultural appropriation. However, the accusation came even before anyone had read the text. I was somewhat taken aback by this. With “Pflaumenregen” I had the feeling that I was writing about people I knew well. In the previous book, “Gott der Barbaren” (God of Barbarians), a 19th-century Confucian makes an appearance. How he feels is as difficult for a Chinese person to imagine today as it was for me at the beginning of my research.
I am most certainly not an opponent of the social movements that are calling for more diversity and justice. However, when it comes to literature, I am concerned that there is a narrowing of what makes a text authentic. In-depth research, imagination, empathy, technical craft, and things like that are also important if you want to make a text authentic and credible. Incidentally, society as a whole benefits when we – as writers, readers, and citizens – can better put ourselves in the shoes of other people.
Your wife is Taiwanese and you live in Taipei. Do you consider Taiwan to be your home by now?
I call it my second home. There is no reason to use home only in the singular. In Germany, my sense of feeling at home has something self-evident about it. But self-evident can also mean that many things remain misunderstood because they have never been questioned. In Taiwan, I had to earn my sense of feeling at home by trying to understand the country explicitly and comprehensively. I probably thought more intensively about Taiwanese history than about European history, partly because of the living conditions there. The sword of Damocles of the Chinese threat hovers over us every day – it is quite possible that my wife and I will be forced to leave Taiwan one day.
Do you deal with the Chinese threat differently than your Taiwanese family?
What I observe is that some people in Taiwan tend not to address the threat directly. Perhaps because the degree of the threat is incomparably higher for them than it is for me, who has another home in Germany. That is why I am the one most likely to bring up the subject. I encourage my wife to learn German, as preparation for the worst-case scenario, so to speak. No one knows what will happen; one can only prepare himself on the inside. While the threat has existed for 70 years, I think many people underestimate that Xi Jinping is a game changer. The pressure on Taiwan is increasing, China is now showing a greater will to take on the Western world and pay a price for it.
How do you feel about China today?
It is a different country today than it was ten or twelve years ago. I never felt as comfortable in China as I did in Taiwan, but I was fascinated by the country, enjoyed traveling there and still have a few friends there. However, since the National Security Act [in Hong Kong], it is clear that I can no longer travel there. They probably wouldn’t issue me a visa. The last few times I had to list all my published books, and now there are also titles like “Instruction Manual for Taiwan”. On top of that, there are some press articles that were clearly critical of China.
Is that a tough loss for you?
Yes, I regret that very much. Also because at some point it becomes difficult to call yourself an expert on the country. If you can no longer collect personal impressions locally, your perception narrows and becomes distorted. After all, you shouldn’t forget how many friendly, cosmopolitan people there are in China who are interested in an honest exchange with the West. Not all of them are patriotic zealots. It’s easy to lose sight of that if you only follow the daily news. We need more China expertise, but it’s getting harder and harder to come by.
As an imaginative writer: What do you think would be the best-case scenario for Taiwan?
If I could make a wish, I would wish that a change would set in on the mainland bit by bit, toward the mindset: We don’t need the island, we could simply have a good neighbor in Taiwan with whom we can trade. But I know that’s completely unrealistic. The realistic best-case scenario is that the US and Europe put enough pressure on China to foster the realization that the price of an invasion would be too high politically, economically, and militarily. Hard enough, but that is what politics should work toward. In Europe, the tide seems to be turning right now. We know that we have made mistakes in dealing with Russia – and we know that we are also making mistakes in dealing with China, keyword dependence: on oil and gas there, on the Chinese sales market here.
Conversely, is it possible that the Taiwanese will want to join Greater China at some point?
That’s very hard to imagine, the whole social development is going in the other direction. People are increasingly emphasizing their own Taiwanese identity; most young people now simply take it for granted. In Taiwan, there is now a whole generation that has grown up in democracy; for them, China is becoming increasingly unattractive, despite its wealth. The People’s Republic would have to make tremendous efforts to work against this, but often such campaigns from the Mainland tend to pour water on the mills of the Taiwanese. Whenever the regime spouts threats, Tsai Ing-wen’s poll numbers immediately skyrocket.
Besides your own, what books do people need to read to better understand Taiwan?
The novel “The Stolen Bicycle” by Wu Ming-yi is the best piece of Taiwanese literature I have read recently. But there are also great academic works, such as “Why Taiwan” by Alan Wachman about China’s geostrategic interest in Taiwan. A wonderful social history has been provided by Andrew D. Morris with “Colonial Project, National Game”. Here you can see that Taiwanese history of the 20th century can actually be told through the development of baseball in the country. There are also very good movies, such as “Warriors Of The Rainbow,” about the struggle of Taiwan’s indigenous people against the Japanese colonial masters. Or “Kanō,” a baseball movie that paints a different, much more positive picture of the colonial era. Or “The Silent Forest,” a very intense film about sexual abuse at a school for deaf youth. To name just a few.
Will your next book be set in Taiwan again?
I don’t like to talk about that yet. What I can imagine for the future, however, is a non-fiction book about the Chinese-Taiwanese conflict, so to speak as a handout for interested German readers without prior knowledge of China: Where does the conflict come from, what is currently driving it, what is it about ideologically, geostrategically and economically? During my book readings with “Pflaumenregen”, I have noticed that a lot of people are interested in the topic, but the daily news press naturally can’t provide the whole historical background.
What would you like to see from German coverage of Taiwan?
Above all, I wish there were more of it! There is no German daily newspaper with a permanent correspondent in Taiwan. The British Guardian has one, which makes the reporting more diverse – even smaller events and the normality of everyday life are covered. Taiwan is much more than a potential crisis region: a fascinating, culturally and scenically diverse country with an unbeatable cuisine.
Stephan Thome was born in 1972 in the German city of Biedenkopf. He studied philosophy and sinology and has lived in East Asia for over 12 years. His last books dealt extensively with Chinese history.
Expansion into foreign markets has been slow for Chinese tech companies. At first, it was Western countries, especially the USA, that began to close their doors to companies out of fear of espionage and over geopolitical tensions. Now the pressure is also increasing massively in neighboring India.
BBK Electronics, for example, has felt this twice in the past few days. The group from the southern province of Guangdong owns Oppo and Vivo, two of China’s largest smartphone brands. Together, they are the market leaders both in their domestic market and in India. But Indian tax authorities have now launched an investigation. First, they accused Vivo last week of concealing profits through illegal transfer payments – and temporarily froze the equivalent of around €60 million in company funds.
Only three days later, the Indian authorities announced that Oppo had also evaded taxes. The company was said to have failed to pay the equivalent of around €550 million in import taxes. Two months ago, the Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi suffered a similar fate. Indian authorities seized around €700 million of the company’s bank deposits. However, a court later overturned the ruling.
Just three weeks ago, at the virtual BRICS summit, China made an effort to demonstrate its unity with its partner countries Brazil, Russia, South Africa and India against the backdrop of the Ukraine conflict (China.Table reported). The reality, however, looks different. While India also opposes the Western sanctions on Russia, a similar position does not make New Delhi and Beijing friends.
Relations between the two most populous nations have remained strained since a deadly military clash between the two countries on their shared border in the Himalayan region two years ago. Indian and Chinese military officials are currently holding their 16th round of talks to resolve the conflict. So far, however, without result. Although the Indian leadership emphasized that the measures against Chinese companies were not politically motivated, the great crackdown demonstrably began directly after the border dispute.
Since then, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has banned more than 200 Chinese apps in India. Chinese network equipment suppliers Huawei and ZTE have also come under fire. Both are effectively barred from rolling out the 5G network. Meanwhile, tax authorities have launched investigations into more than 500 Chinese companies, insiders told financial service Bloomberg. In addition to ZTE, Vivo, Xiaomi, Huawei and Oppo, several subsidiaries of Alibaba are also said to be concerned.
According to observers, India’s measures are probably not solely a reaction to the border conflict. Instead, given the aggressive expansion of Chinese companies, the government is concerned that local companies are falling behind. Chinese manufacturers recently accounted for around 60 percent of the Indian smartphone market. The trade balance between the two countries also speaks for itself. India imported $27.7 billion worth of goods from China in the first three months of the year, but exported only $4.9 billion to the People’s Republic.
Now, domestic companies are expected to regain market share with government help. “In many ways, India is following the Chinese model,” Professor Jabin T. Jacob, a China expert at Shiv Nadar University in New Delhi, told the Financial Times. Just as China has in the past deliberately supported its own tech giants in order to keep US corporations such as Google, Amazon and Facebook out of its market, India also prefers to rely on its own companies. Ultimately, this is intended to reduce the country’s dependence on Chinese imports. Joern Petring/Gregor Koppenburg
Will there be a change of power in China’s leadership in November 2022? Viktoria Laura Herczegh works on questions like these as an analyst at Geopolitical Futures, the geopolitical forecasting publication founded by George Friedman in 2015. On the side, she is writing her Ph.D. in International Relations and Political Science at Corvinus University in Budapest.
Her take: “I don’t think that Xi will not be reelected.” But, “the shifts now taking place inside the closest leadership circle suggest that Xi Jinping’s power is not nearly as strong as it once was.” The very fact that politicians from his inner circle are voicing concerns about key points in the current Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) calls his claim to power into question – and are a fist. Herczegh sees China’s Vice Premier Han Zheng as the leading figure of the opposition camp. Should he, contrary to expectations, be elected in November, this would go hand in hand with an opening toward the Western world, according to Herczegh.
China’s political structures also play a major role in Herczegh’s dissertation on the double standard projection of great powers through specific cases. In it, she examines, among other things, China’s political interaction with the United States – and comes to interesting conclusions: “My findings show that if there is a double standard, there is also a reverse double standard.” So none of the major powers has the right to accuse others of double standards. “They themselves tend to have double standards.”
Even as a child, Herczegh was a linguistic prodigy, absorbing new words and structures with joy and ease. Then, in 2012, she came into contact with Chinese during her bachelor’s studies: “With Chinese, it was really the first time I had to study for a language,” she says. It just doesn’t help to simply look at the characters and memorize them. “You have to practice the sounds first, and second, more importantly, practice writing the characters.” Today, in addition to her native tongue, the native Hungarian speaks Mandarin, English, Spanish, Italian and some Korean.
After completing her Bachelor’s degree in Chinese and Spanish and Culture at Eötvös Loránd University, she went to Shanghai for one semester to deepen her Chinese language skills. Back in Hungary, she studied the brand-new master’s program in East Asian Studies in 2015-2018 – a cooperation between Corvinus University Budapest and Pázmány Péter Catholic University. “I’ve always been interested in politics and the modern aspects of China and East Asia – especially because of the Chinese economic miracle we experienced during my years of study.”
What fascinates her about China is how the country combines tradition and modernity. This applies not only to architecture, but also to people’s thought patterns. Even today, young people naturally use old Chinese proverbs in their everyday speech. And her interest in Southeast Asia is far from exhausted. She has even set her sights on Japan and South Korea for her honeymoon. Juliane Scholuebbers
You’ve heard plenty of horror stories about the culinary preferences of the people of China, and now this: Your Chinese companion casually orders a bowl of “tofu brain” (豆腐脑 dòufunǎo) for you in the restaurant. But please, do not panic. Snap out of your fight or flight instinct. Because the gourmet horror story, which is perhaps just celebrating its premiere in your mind, is unfounded. What is served is not a soft-boiled brain mass, but a tasty and protein-rich tofu pudding, either sweet (southern China) or hearty (northern China), made from fresh and healthy ingredients – first and foremost lots of soy protein.
Us Westerners are usually a bit startled when it comes to food experiments in the Middle Kingdom. Everyday culinary life in China is definitely much less wild than some false preconceptions might suggest. But horror legends are so persistent, that if you’re a Chinese learner on a China restaurant safari, you might have your gun always at the ready for fear of unexpected attacks on your taste buds. Unfortunately, taking Chinese menus and supermarket labels all too literally doesn’t exactly help defuse your inner emergency mode, either. After all, many dishes – or rather their Chinese names – are not eaten as the dictionary suggests. In other words, some initially unappetizing-sounding word monstrosities turn out to be harmless snacks on closer inspection.
This also applies, for example, to another tofu dish – namely “Tofu in the style of pockmarked elderly” (麻婆豆腐 mápó dòufǔ), a nationally popular classic of Sichuan cuisine. Needless to say that its flavor secret is not prepared by house ladies with skin issues, but rather tender mild tofu curd seasoned with fiery Sichuan spice and garnished with roasted pork mince to top it off. Bon appétit!
You may feel a strange tingling in your stomach when you discover “ants crawling up a tree” on the menu (蚂蚁上树 mǎyǐ shàng shù). You might have guessed that the Chinese have once again reached deep into their metaphorical bag of tricks. It is simply fried glass noodles with spicy minced pork. The grainy minced meat, which sticks to the supple glass noodles, has probably reminded some of the crawling creatures that climb twigs and branches in their hunger delirium. Hence the somewhat bizarre name.
The next dish is not for the faint of heart, but at least it is not as bloodthirsty as the name might suggest. We are talking about “lung pieces from a couple” (夫妻肺片 fūqī fèipiàn). Fortunately, no one murdered their neighbors for this popular Sichuan cold dish, only some animals. The main ingredient of this spicy appetizer is everything that beef has to offer, including beef head skin, beef heart, beef tongue and beef tripe. All this is pickled in brine, later sliced and served with chili oil, spring onions and other ingredients. The dish owes its name, “spouse’s lung,” to its inventors – a Chengdu couple who are said to have once sold cold pieces of beef lung as a poor man’s food in the 1930s. With growing prosperity, the snack was then spruced up over time with higher-quality offal.
In Chinese company canteens, you can also expect to find:
By the way, food hypochondriacs will also stumble across suspicious things at the fruit merchant, for example, “dragon eyes” (龙眼 lóngyǎn) – meaning the ocher-colored longan fruits, which remotely resemble lychees in shape – or “macaque peaches” (猕猴桃 míhóutáo) – this is actually the official Chinese name for kiwis (with a bit of imagination, the peel also somehow reminds one of gruff monkey fur).
If you’d rather crawl back into familiar cuisine territory in the face of all this word mumbo-jumbo, I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you (linguistically speaking). Because Western companies like Haribo also have a somewhat unusual name in China, namely “eraser sugar” (橡皮糖 xiàngpítáng) – the Chinese name for fruit gum. And curling up on the grill are “fragrant intestines” (香肠 xiāngcháng) – Chinese for “sausages”. So if you want to play it safe linguistically, the best thing to do this summer is to just stick with the “hundred-scented fruit” 百香果 bǎixiāngguǒ – the passion fruit. You absolutely cannot go wrong with this association and your mind will not stay at ease.
Verena Menzel runs the online language school New Chinese in Beijing.
The successful author and sinologist Stephan Thome has lived in Taiwan for the past 12 years. He writes novels with a local perspective, and most recently published “Pflaumenregen” (Plum Rain) a book set during the period of Japanese colonial rule over the island. Interviewed by Fabian Peltsch, Thome talks about how he experiences the current tense situation on the island, what he wishes for Taiwan, and what he thinks of the occasional accusation of cultural appropriation.
There are surveys according to which most people find hardly anything as annoying as their neighbors. China and India may feel the same way; for decades, both have been feuding about their border. So it’s no wonder that economic relations between the two countries are nowhere near as good as they could be. Now, India is punishing China for its aggressive behavior along the border. As our editorial team in Beijing analyzes, New Delhi is currently cracking down on Chinese IT companies that actually want to set foot in India.
Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, has left for Asia. Whether she will also visit Taiwan, as speculated by publications including the Financial Times, remained unclear on Sunday. Some analysts expect that Pelosi’s trip to Taipei will lead to a political crisis in the US-China-Taiwan triangle. We will keep an eye on the situation.
Your first novel “Grenzgang” was a surprise hit in 2009. You wrote it during your time as a research assistant at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Did you have the necessary distance there to create a portrait of Germany’s provinces?
The inspiration for the place where “Grenzgang” is set is my hometown in Upper Hesse. I know the area so well, I could have written about it anywhere. In fact, almost all of my novels were written in Taiwan. At the time, I simply had the idea with me.
You have now been living in Taiwan for 12 years. Your latest novel, “Pflaumenregen”, (Plum Rain) is set at the time when the island was under Japanese colonial rule. You simultaneously published “Gebrauchsanweisung für Taiwan” (Instruction Manual for Taiwan). How is it that you are only now putting your experiences and knowledge of Taiwan into literary form?
During book tours, the question kept coming up: If you live there, why don’t you write about it? But you first have to get to the point where you can write about Asia in a way that doesn’t turn the settings into an exotic photo wallpaper full of Western heroes. If you want to tell something substantial about these countries, you have to know a bit more about them. Two years of residence and a few language skills are not enough to understand such a rich culture and history.
You write as a German from the perspective of Chinese. This could be seen as a presumption or even cultural appropriation.
Some English-language publishers that we offered the books to actually noted that this was a case of cultural appropriation. However, the accusation came even before anyone had read the text. I was somewhat taken aback by this. With “Pflaumenregen” I had the feeling that I was writing about people I knew well. In the previous book, “Gott der Barbaren” (God of Barbarians), a 19th-century Confucian makes an appearance. How he feels is as difficult for a Chinese person to imagine today as it was for me at the beginning of my research.
I am most certainly not an opponent of the social movements that are calling for more diversity and justice. However, when it comes to literature, I am concerned that there is a narrowing of what makes a text authentic. In-depth research, imagination, empathy, technical craft, and things like that are also important if you want to make a text authentic and credible. Incidentally, society as a whole benefits when we – as writers, readers, and citizens – can better put ourselves in the shoes of other people.
Your wife is Taiwanese and you live in Taipei. Do you consider Taiwan to be your home by now?
I call it my second home. There is no reason to use home only in the singular. In Germany, my sense of feeling at home has something self-evident about it. But self-evident can also mean that many things remain misunderstood because they have never been questioned. In Taiwan, I had to earn my sense of feeling at home by trying to understand the country explicitly and comprehensively. I probably thought more intensively about Taiwanese history than about European history, partly because of the living conditions there. The sword of Damocles of the Chinese threat hovers over us every day – it is quite possible that my wife and I will be forced to leave Taiwan one day.
Do you deal with the Chinese threat differently than your Taiwanese family?
What I observe is that some people in Taiwan tend not to address the threat directly. Perhaps because the degree of the threat is incomparably higher for them than it is for me, who has another home in Germany. That is why I am the one most likely to bring up the subject. I encourage my wife to learn German, as preparation for the worst-case scenario, so to speak. No one knows what will happen; one can only prepare himself on the inside. While the threat has existed for 70 years, I think many people underestimate that Xi Jinping is a game changer. The pressure on Taiwan is increasing, China is now showing a greater will to take on the Western world and pay a price for it.
How do you feel about China today?
It is a different country today than it was ten or twelve years ago. I never felt as comfortable in China as I did in Taiwan, but I was fascinated by the country, enjoyed traveling there and still have a few friends there. However, since the National Security Act [in Hong Kong], it is clear that I can no longer travel there. They probably wouldn’t issue me a visa. The last few times I had to list all my published books, and now there are also titles like “Instruction Manual for Taiwan”. On top of that, there are some press articles that were clearly critical of China.
Is that a tough loss for you?
Yes, I regret that very much. Also because at some point it becomes difficult to call yourself an expert on the country. If you can no longer collect personal impressions locally, your perception narrows and becomes distorted. After all, you shouldn’t forget how many friendly, cosmopolitan people there are in China who are interested in an honest exchange with the West. Not all of them are patriotic zealots. It’s easy to lose sight of that if you only follow the daily news. We need more China expertise, but it’s getting harder and harder to come by.
As an imaginative writer: What do you think would be the best-case scenario for Taiwan?
If I could make a wish, I would wish that a change would set in on the mainland bit by bit, toward the mindset: We don’t need the island, we could simply have a good neighbor in Taiwan with whom we can trade. But I know that’s completely unrealistic. The realistic best-case scenario is that the US and Europe put enough pressure on China to foster the realization that the price of an invasion would be too high politically, economically, and militarily. Hard enough, but that is what politics should work toward. In Europe, the tide seems to be turning right now. We know that we have made mistakes in dealing with Russia – and we know that we are also making mistakes in dealing with China, keyword dependence: on oil and gas there, on the Chinese sales market here.
Conversely, is it possible that the Taiwanese will want to join Greater China at some point?
That’s very hard to imagine, the whole social development is going in the other direction. People are increasingly emphasizing their own Taiwanese identity; most young people now simply take it for granted. In Taiwan, there is now a whole generation that has grown up in democracy; for them, China is becoming increasingly unattractive, despite its wealth. The People’s Republic would have to make tremendous efforts to work against this, but often such campaigns from the Mainland tend to pour water on the mills of the Taiwanese. Whenever the regime spouts threats, Tsai Ing-wen’s poll numbers immediately skyrocket.
Besides your own, what books do people need to read to better understand Taiwan?
The novel “The Stolen Bicycle” by Wu Ming-yi is the best piece of Taiwanese literature I have read recently. But there are also great academic works, such as “Why Taiwan” by Alan Wachman about China’s geostrategic interest in Taiwan. A wonderful social history has been provided by Andrew D. Morris with “Colonial Project, National Game”. Here you can see that Taiwanese history of the 20th century can actually be told through the development of baseball in the country. There are also very good movies, such as “Warriors Of The Rainbow,” about the struggle of Taiwan’s indigenous people against the Japanese colonial masters. Or “Kanō,” a baseball movie that paints a different, much more positive picture of the colonial era. Or “The Silent Forest,” a very intense film about sexual abuse at a school for deaf youth. To name just a few.
Will your next book be set in Taiwan again?
I don’t like to talk about that yet. What I can imagine for the future, however, is a non-fiction book about the Chinese-Taiwanese conflict, so to speak as a handout for interested German readers without prior knowledge of China: Where does the conflict come from, what is currently driving it, what is it about ideologically, geostrategically and economically? During my book readings with “Pflaumenregen”, I have noticed that a lot of people are interested in the topic, but the daily news press naturally can’t provide the whole historical background.
What would you like to see from German coverage of Taiwan?
Above all, I wish there were more of it! There is no German daily newspaper with a permanent correspondent in Taiwan. The British Guardian has one, which makes the reporting more diverse – even smaller events and the normality of everyday life are covered. Taiwan is much more than a potential crisis region: a fascinating, culturally and scenically diverse country with an unbeatable cuisine.
Stephan Thome was born in 1972 in the German city of Biedenkopf. He studied philosophy and sinology and has lived in East Asia for over 12 years. His last books dealt extensively with Chinese history.
Expansion into foreign markets has been slow for Chinese tech companies. At first, it was Western countries, especially the USA, that began to close their doors to companies out of fear of espionage and over geopolitical tensions. Now the pressure is also increasing massively in neighboring India.
BBK Electronics, for example, has felt this twice in the past few days. The group from the southern province of Guangdong owns Oppo and Vivo, two of China’s largest smartphone brands. Together, they are the market leaders both in their domestic market and in India. But Indian tax authorities have now launched an investigation. First, they accused Vivo last week of concealing profits through illegal transfer payments – and temporarily froze the equivalent of around €60 million in company funds.
Only three days later, the Indian authorities announced that Oppo had also evaded taxes. The company was said to have failed to pay the equivalent of around €550 million in import taxes. Two months ago, the Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi suffered a similar fate. Indian authorities seized around €700 million of the company’s bank deposits. However, a court later overturned the ruling.
Just three weeks ago, at the virtual BRICS summit, China made an effort to demonstrate its unity with its partner countries Brazil, Russia, South Africa and India against the backdrop of the Ukraine conflict (China.Table reported). The reality, however, looks different. While India also opposes the Western sanctions on Russia, a similar position does not make New Delhi and Beijing friends.
Relations between the two most populous nations have remained strained since a deadly military clash between the two countries on their shared border in the Himalayan region two years ago. Indian and Chinese military officials are currently holding their 16th round of talks to resolve the conflict. So far, however, without result. Although the Indian leadership emphasized that the measures against Chinese companies were not politically motivated, the great crackdown demonstrably began directly after the border dispute.
Since then, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has banned more than 200 Chinese apps in India. Chinese network equipment suppliers Huawei and ZTE have also come under fire. Both are effectively barred from rolling out the 5G network. Meanwhile, tax authorities have launched investigations into more than 500 Chinese companies, insiders told financial service Bloomberg. In addition to ZTE, Vivo, Xiaomi, Huawei and Oppo, several subsidiaries of Alibaba are also said to be concerned.
According to observers, India’s measures are probably not solely a reaction to the border conflict. Instead, given the aggressive expansion of Chinese companies, the government is concerned that local companies are falling behind. Chinese manufacturers recently accounted for around 60 percent of the Indian smartphone market. The trade balance between the two countries also speaks for itself. India imported $27.7 billion worth of goods from China in the first three months of the year, but exported only $4.9 billion to the People’s Republic.
Now, domestic companies are expected to regain market share with government help. “In many ways, India is following the Chinese model,” Professor Jabin T. Jacob, a China expert at Shiv Nadar University in New Delhi, told the Financial Times. Just as China has in the past deliberately supported its own tech giants in order to keep US corporations such as Google, Amazon and Facebook out of its market, India also prefers to rely on its own companies. Ultimately, this is intended to reduce the country’s dependence on Chinese imports. Joern Petring/Gregor Koppenburg
Will there be a change of power in China’s leadership in November 2022? Viktoria Laura Herczegh works on questions like these as an analyst at Geopolitical Futures, the geopolitical forecasting publication founded by George Friedman in 2015. On the side, she is writing her Ph.D. in International Relations and Political Science at Corvinus University in Budapest.
Her take: “I don’t think that Xi will not be reelected.” But, “the shifts now taking place inside the closest leadership circle suggest that Xi Jinping’s power is not nearly as strong as it once was.” The very fact that politicians from his inner circle are voicing concerns about key points in the current Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) calls his claim to power into question – and are a fist. Herczegh sees China’s Vice Premier Han Zheng as the leading figure of the opposition camp. Should he, contrary to expectations, be elected in November, this would go hand in hand with an opening toward the Western world, according to Herczegh.
China’s political structures also play a major role in Herczegh’s dissertation on the double standard projection of great powers through specific cases. In it, she examines, among other things, China’s political interaction with the United States – and comes to interesting conclusions: “My findings show that if there is a double standard, there is also a reverse double standard.” So none of the major powers has the right to accuse others of double standards. “They themselves tend to have double standards.”
Even as a child, Herczegh was a linguistic prodigy, absorbing new words and structures with joy and ease. Then, in 2012, she came into contact with Chinese during her bachelor’s studies: “With Chinese, it was really the first time I had to study for a language,” she says. It just doesn’t help to simply look at the characters and memorize them. “You have to practice the sounds first, and second, more importantly, practice writing the characters.” Today, in addition to her native tongue, the native Hungarian speaks Mandarin, English, Spanish, Italian and some Korean.
After completing her Bachelor’s degree in Chinese and Spanish and Culture at Eötvös Loránd University, she went to Shanghai for one semester to deepen her Chinese language skills. Back in Hungary, she studied the brand-new master’s program in East Asian Studies in 2015-2018 – a cooperation between Corvinus University Budapest and Pázmány Péter Catholic University. “I’ve always been interested in politics and the modern aspects of China and East Asia – especially because of the Chinese economic miracle we experienced during my years of study.”
What fascinates her about China is how the country combines tradition and modernity. This applies not only to architecture, but also to people’s thought patterns. Even today, young people naturally use old Chinese proverbs in their everyday speech. And her interest in Southeast Asia is far from exhausted. She has even set her sights on Japan and South Korea for her honeymoon. Juliane Scholuebbers
You’ve heard plenty of horror stories about the culinary preferences of the people of China, and now this: Your Chinese companion casually orders a bowl of “tofu brain” (豆腐脑 dòufunǎo) for you in the restaurant. But please, do not panic. Snap out of your fight or flight instinct. Because the gourmet horror story, which is perhaps just celebrating its premiere in your mind, is unfounded. What is served is not a soft-boiled brain mass, but a tasty and protein-rich tofu pudding, either sweet (southern China) or hearty (northern China), made from fresh and healthy ingredients – first and foremost lots of soy protein.
Us Westerners are usually a bit startled when it comes to food experiments in the Middle Kingdom. Everyday culinary life in China is definitely much less wild than some false preconceptions might suggest. But horror legends are so persistent, that if you’re a Chinese learner on a China restaurant safari, you might have your gun always at the ready for fear of unexpected attacks on your taste buds. Unfortunately, taking Chinese menus and supermarket labels all too literally doesn’t exactly help defuse your inner emergency mode, either. After all, many dishes – or rather their Chinese names – are not eaten as the dictionary suggests. In other words, some initially unappetizing-sounding word monstrosities turn out to be harmless snacks on closer inspection.
This also applies, for example, to another tofu dish – namely “Tofu in the style of pockmarked elderly” (麻婆豆腐 mápó dòufǔ), a nationally popular classic of Sichuan cuisine. Needless to say that its flavor secret is not prepared by house ladies with skin issues, but rather tender mild tofu curd seasoned with fiery Sichuan spice and garnished with roasted pork mince to top it off. Bon appétit!
You may feel a strange tingling in your stomach when you discover “ants crawling up a tree” on the menu (蚂蚁上树 mǎyǐ shàng shù). You might have guessed that the Chinese have once again reached deep into their metaphorical bag of tricks. It is simply fried glass noodles with spicy minced pork. The grainy minced meat, which sticks to the supple glass noodles, has probably reminded some of the crawling creatures that climb twigs and branches in their hunger delirium. Hence the somewhat bizarre name.
The next dish is not for the faint of heart, but at least it is not as bloodthirsty as the name might suggest. We are talking about “lung pieces from a couple” (夫妻肺片 fūqī fèipiàn). Fortunately, no one murdered their neighbors for this popular Sichuan cold dish, only some animals. The main ingredient of this spicy appetizer is everything that beef has to offer, including beef head skin, beef heart, beef tongue and beef tripe. All this is pickled in brine, later sliced and served with chili oil, spring onions and other ingredients. The dish owes its name, “spouse’s lung,” to its inventors – a Chengdu couple who are said to have once sold cold pieces of beef lung as a poor man’s food in the 1930s. With growing prosperity, the snack was then spruced up over time with higher-quality offal.
In Chinese company canteens, you can also expect to find:
By the way, food hypochondriacs will also stumble across suspicious things at the fruit merchant, for example, “dragon eyes” (龙眼 lóngyǎn) – meaning the ocher-colored longan fruits, which remotely resemble lychees in shape – or “macaque peaches” (猕猴桃 míhóutáo) – this is actually the official Chinese name for kiwis (with a bit of imagination, the peel also somehow reminds one of gruff monkey fur).
If you’d rather crawl back into familiar cuisine territory in the face of all this word mumbo-jumbo, I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you (linguistically speaking). Because Western companies like Haribo also have a somewhat unusual name in China, namely “eraser sugar” (橡皮糖 xiàngpítáng) – the Chinese name for fruit gum. And curling up on the grill are “fragrant intestines” (香肠 xiāngcháng) – Chinese for “sausages”. So if you want to play it safe linguistically, the best thing to do this summer is to just stick with the “hundred-scented fruit” 百香果 bǎixiāngguǒ – the passion fruit. You absolutely cannot go wrong with this association and your mind will not stay at ease.
Verena Menzel runs the online language school New Chinese in Beijing.
