Before we turn our attention to next week’s Beijing Motor Show, we conclude this week by looking at the aftermath of the German Chancellor’s visit to the Chinese capital.
Michael Radunski spoke with Norbert Roettgen, foreign policy expert for the German Christian Democratic Union party, about the Chancellor’s trip. Having just returned from Washington, Roettgen gives Scholz’s trip a crushing verdict. He accuses the Chancellor of preemptively acting as a supplicant in Beijing. “I wasn’t expecting much anyway, but it was a failure across the board,” summarizes the CDU politician. According to Roettgen, Scholz could have discussed many topics with Xi Jinping: “Huawei and network expansion, Cosco and port stake. But we are not pursuing our own interests in all of this, we are bowing to pressure from China.”
The scientific community has often criticized German Research Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger for her statements on research cooperation with China. The fact that she considers every Chinese academic a potential spy has earned her the accusation that she is encouraging universities to decouple and not derisk, as called for in Germany’s China strategy.
During his trip to China, Chancellor Olaf Scholz struck a more harmonious note and expressed hope for more scientific cooperation and more Chinese students coming to Germany. Our colleague Markus Weisskopf spoke with the community about this discrepancy. Science experts demand more resources and a clear line from the German government to engage seriously with China as a partner and systemic rival.
What do you think of Olaf Scholz’s China visit?
Scholz follows the same China policy as the Russia policy before the war in Ukraine: Dependencies are being increased, security concerns are being glossed over and nothing is being achieved in trade policy.
That is a crushing verdict.
Yes, I wasn’t expecting much anyway, but it was a complete failure.
It was the Chancellor’s first trip since Germany adopted its China strategy. Where have you recognized the German China strategy?
This China strategy has long been in the making – but in practice, it now plays no role. None of what was written down is happening. The Federal Chancellor is completely ignoring the strategy he helped adopt. But I haven’t heard anything more from Ms. Baerbock either. The Foreign Minister seems to have handed over the China issue to a Chancellor who is ignoring his own strategy.
It was striking how nonchalantly the Chinese side brushed off the German concerns: Breaking with Russia: no; Ukraine peace conference: maybe; unfair trade practices: that’s okay. And overcapacity: we don’t care. Has Germany become a mere supplicant?
If the German Chancellor acts like one, you shouldn’t be surprised if he is treated like a supplicant. China only respects strength. Unlike the German Chancellor, the Chinese government recognizes Germany’s economic weaknesses. And China deals ruthlessly with weakness.
Has Scholz simply chosen the wrong approach by traveling with company executives who all fully bank on China?
That is the point. The composition of the Chancellor’s business delegation sends out a signal in advance: I am a kind of traveling salesman and advocate for German business. No wonder the Chinese leadership then believes it can afford to simply brush off all geopolitical and trade concerns.
Why?
Beijing naturally likes to see German companies investing more and more in China. After all, this further increases Germany’s dependency. This means that China doesn’t have to give Germany anything, it gets everything it wants on a silver platter. The trip was a complete denial of Germany’s China strategy with the fixed goal of reducing its own dependencies. Scholz also acts accordingly when it comes to China’s role in Ukraine.
In what way?
Olaf Scholz and Xi Jinping both know that China supplies a considerable amount of components for the production of Russian weapons, in other words, actively supports the war. But in public, Scholz speaks as if China could be won over to a just peace, as if China were a partner – although both know that China is the exact opposite. Anyone who, like Scholz, is actively helping to deceive their own public and taking them for fools will lose China’s respect.
You make me want to defend the Chancellor a little. Is it perhaps simply the new reality that Germany has no – or only little – influence on China?
No. China’s rise is nothing new, and China is currently experiencing considerable economic difficulties itself. The China strategy certainly offers starting points for how we can influence China if we act together and in a coordinated manner at the European level.
You regularly travel to China yourself. How do you have to talk to the Chinese side?
You need to speak frankly in all diplomatic forms.
Certainly. But how? Let’s take Ukraine as an example.
In the Ukraine war, the core issue is not to win China over for a conference, but to tell Beijing that supporting Russian weapons production and thus the war is unacceptable to us. That must be said.
Has Germany simply run out of leverage over China?
There are many areas and topics, such as Huawei and network expansion, Cosco and port participation. But in all of these areas, we are not pursuing our own interests. We are bowing to pressure from China – often preemptively. It is clearly in our own interest that the 5G network is not in Chinese hands. If we continue to do nothing at this point as a government, then we are showing the Chinese that we are too weak to truly represent our own interests.
How can Germany return to a more active position?
We need a clear economic policy strategy, something the Chancellor does not have. At its core, it must be an economic strategy with the aim of achieving growth outside and independently of China. This is the most important lever we can use vis-à-vis China by saying: We want to cooperate with you and be successful. But we don’t have to do so unconditionally, and that’s why we expect fair competitive conditions from you. But if, like Scholz, you show the opposite and demonstrate through the business delegation’s composition that the German economic policy relies entirely on China in its growth strategy, then you are almost willingly placing yourself in China’s hands and losing all influence.
However, there are tangible results from the Scholz trip, like the declaration of intent on “cooperation in autonomous driving.” The problem is that the EU is very concerned about precisely this area and has launched an investigation against Chinese electric cars – with an explicit focus on data security in autonomous driving. Is this how Scholz is tearing the EU apart?
Absolutely. This trade policy approach weakens everyone, Germany and the EU. The EU has a completely rational trade and security policy risk analysis – and the German Chancellor is simply brushing it aside and pursuing his own interests at the expense of security and long-term economic interests.
What do you mean specifically?
Security is about data and cyber protection. In the economic area, the EU is worried that electromobility will become another area where China is using massive state subsidies to compete unfairly in the European market. This is of real strategic and economic importance. The German Chancellor is leaving the EU out in the cold here and dividing the European Union in the process.
I hear from the Chinese side that Beijing is observing the different positions of France and Germany with great interest.
If we, as Europeans, believe that everyone can represent their individual interests toward China, then the result is that we all remain European dwarfs and have no influence on China. Our strength vis-à-vis China comes to the fore when we join forces. Then, we will be a single market of 450 million consumers with an economic output of around 16 trillion euros. Only then will we be on an equal footing with China. If we fragment ourselves and everyone tries to represent individual interests, then China will mercilessly play us off against each other. Unfortunately, this is exactly the pattern that the German Chancellor is following.
You don’t have to look to Brussels or Paris to find disagreement. There seems to be no consensus between the Chancellery, Foreign Ministry and Economy Ministry in Berlin, either.
I share the Green Party’s view, the CDU/CSU and the Greens generally share a common position here. But unfortunately, the Greens are not fighting for their China policy, which they still brashly advocated when they were in the opposition. Nothing of what was set out on paper in the China strategy is being implemented in government policy – and the Greens are silent. To give one example: I can’t see anyone in the Greens still actively and loudly campaigning to exclude Huawei from the German 5G network.
Let’s look to the future: What do we need when dealing with China?
Firstly, we need European unity vis-à-vis China. We should also strive for transatlantic coordination. Secondly, we need our own growth strength, independent of China. Thirdly, we need the courage to speak out clearly in foreign and security policy. In Europe, China is a supporter of Putin’s war in Ukraine. This is an issue of existential security interests for us Germans and Europeans. This must be called by its name – also in public.
Norbert Roettgen has been a member of the German Bundestag since 1994 and chaired the Committee on Foreign Affairs between 2014 and 2021.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s statements during his visit to Tongji University in Shanghai sounded different from many of the statements made by Germany’s Research Minister. During the COVID crisis, contacts had declined significantly, which was not good, Scholz said in China. He advocated a return to greater scientific exchange and said talks and reciprocal visits should increase again. The Chancellor was also pleased about the increasing numbers of Chinese students in Germany.
This contrasts with the statements made by Bettina Stark-Watzinger in recent months. “The Communist Party can hide behind every Chinese researcher, we have to be clear about that,” she told the German newspaper Die Welt last year, for instance. And just a few days ago, she warned: “The Chinese state is using scientific findings and new technologies such as artificial intelligence not only for the benefit of its population, but also for surveillance, control and influence.” We must not be naive in our dealings with China.
So is the German Chancellor naive? Ultimately, Scholz merely repeated in China what is laid down in the German government’s China strategy: “In order to strengthen bilateral relations and expand expertise on China, the Federal Government supports collaboration between universities and research institutes.”
Obviously, there is room for debate about the interpretation of the strategy. Kai Gehring, Chairman of the Research Committee, emphasizes with reference to the China strategy that the aim is to “increase awareness, reduce dependencies and thus minimize risks.” After all, China is not pursuing a geostrategic partnership strategy, but a hegemonic one, he says.
“We want to continue the scientific exchange with China, but make it more interest- and value-driven and with the necessary risk awareness,” the Green politician told Table.Briefings. He added that where German and European technological and digital sovereignty is affected, competitiveness and safeguarding interests must be prioritized and know-how espionage prevented. That doesn’t sound like strengthening relations.
Hannes Gohli, Head of the China Competence Center at the University of Wurzburg, is surprised at the lack of differentiation in the choice of words in recent months, especially by the Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). “Recently, knowledge transfer has too often been characterized purely as a risk. In some areas, we should also remain cautious. Nevertheless, the fundamental ethos of science is the exchange of knowledge. This fundamental ethos should be upheld in as many areas as possible, while constantly weighing up the risks.”
Gohli reports that many scientists are interested in collaborations, but are currently concerned about loss of reputation and political consequences. The increased red tape resulting from a complex risk assessment of research projects with Chinese partners could also turn the planned derisking into decoupling.
Lambert Koch, President of the German Association of University Professors and Lecturers (DHV), believes that the “seemingly contradictory signals from the federal government are not helpful.” Science needs “unambiguous guidelines which it can use to evaluate opportunities for cooperation and exchange.”
As part of the necessary coordination between the scientific community and politics, it must be clear “whose standards apply in the federal government.” These standards must then be used to provide qualified information and advice, allowing viable decision-making while preserving scientific autonomy. Koch sees “an increased need to act following the Chancellor’s visit to China.”
Alicia Hennig, who taught and researched in Shenzhen and Nanjing from 2015 to 2021, notes that it has now become clear once again that the BMBF has been unable to assert itself with its rather critical stance in the China strategy. And as long as the government does not take a clear position and consequently does not clearly regulate cooperation with China, there will be no operational implementation at universities.
Regardless of what the final guidelines look like, there are also differing opinions on the structure and process of implementation. While the BMBF and the German Academic Exchange Service see the responsibility for developing competencies and processes mainly with the universities, Hennig disagrees. Among other things, she points to the lack of resources available at universities. After all, the China strategy is not backed by money to create the capacities that have now become necessary, she added.
That is why the German government and the BMBF need a risk framework and the associated establishment of upper-level capacities. This would not completely relieve the burden on universities and research institutions. “But at least there would be centralized capacities, contact points and resources to bundle these necessary activities,” says the TU Dresden scientist.
According to research by Business Insider, the Christian Bible is the best-selling book in the world, with up to five billion copies sold. But in close second place are the “Words of Chairman Mao Zedong,” the so-called Mao Bible, which he distributed more than one billion copies to the people of China and the world during the Cultural Revolution.
The great dictator passed away in 1976, lamenting in the last year of his life that he had failed to abolish money as a symbol of capitalism in socialist China. Today, he would be spinning in his crystal coffin if he knew how much money his fellow compatriots and foreigners were paying for his former memorabilia, including the Red Bible – not because they are revolutionaries, but because they are speculators and nostalgic collectors of all kinds.
In the novel “Mao Zedong Returns to the Human World” 毛泽东重返人间, Shanghai historian Ye Yonglie (叶永烈 1940-2020), who specializes in political biographies, imagines how Mao would react today. His book has him reawakened 20 years after his death: In the dead of night, eerie noises startle the dozing honor guards in Beijing’s Mao Mausoleum. They do not come from a supposed saboteur trying to break into the sacred shrine, but from an escapee. Alarmed, the soldiers rush over, salute, and help the embalmed Mao out of his glass sarcophagus.
Ye wrote the novel, which was published in Taiwan in 2002 and Hong Kong in 2011, long before similar satires about Adolf Hitler’s resurrection. “It was impossible to publish a book like this here,” he told me in June 2018. At the time, he already suspected: “It will probably soon be the same in Hong Kong.” Today, under Xi Jinping’s ideologized rule, Beijing would probably prosecute Ye for denigrating Mao and China’s revolution.
In the novel, Mao stumbles around the year 2000 through a world that is alien to him. He sees photos and statues of himself everywhere. However, in one of Beijing’s popular “Mao restaurants,” which serves Mao’s favorite dishes, there are photos of his former arch-enemies, such as Liu Shaoqi. Close confidants, including his wife, Jiang Qing, and political rivals, haunt Mao’s waking dreams in the novel. In Liulichang Antiques Street, a vendor pays him a bundle of 100-yuan bills bearing his portrait for a calligraphy Mao painted. During his lifetime, Mao received a monthly official (symbolic) maximum salary of 400 yuan. The highest banknote value was ten yuan. None had his portrait on it.
Today, almost 50 years after Mao’s death, everything that once had anything to do with him (except his class struggle thinking) is worth even more money. What would the Great Chairman say if he came across the new auction catalog for Mao objects from the Cultural Revolution? On 216 pages, the London auction house “Chiswick Auctions” offered bundles of the “Words of Chairman Mao Zedong” 毛主席语录 and other Mao trinkets. The starting bids were generally far higher than Mao’s former monthly salary.
The items auctioned off at the end of February were owned by New York bookseller Justin Schiller, who, according to the auction house, owns “one of the world’s largest and best private collections of artifacts from the Cultural Revolution.” Schiller has been buying everything related to Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China for 25 years and has filled 15 rooms of his house with it, The Guardian wrote. In the early 2000s, he bought the entire warehouse from a Chinese flea market dealer for 40,000 US dollars. It took him three containers to ship his “treasures” to the USA via various Chinese ports. This allowed him to bypass the authorities.
However, Schiller could not get rid of the London auction’s advertising piece, a 156-page precursor to the “Words of Chairman Mao” brochure from 1963. The starting price was between 35,000 and 40,000 euros. Perhaps it was not rare enough for the buyers. After all, as Chinese special catalogs for Mao’s words, also known as “Red Treasure Books” 红宝书, revealed, there were many more precursors. In 1961, the army newspaper started with daily Mao quotes in its top right corner, which were then arranged on index cards and turned into a book.
It was only with the foreword by army chief Lin Biao, who later, as Mao’s designated crown prince, staged a coup against the Chairman and died on the run in a mysterious plane crash in 1971, that Mao’s famous quote book became a must-read for all of China after 1964.
From May 1964 to February 12, 1979, when China’s Ministry of Propaganda decreed that no further volumes would be produced, over 1,055 billion red books had been printed. Mao’s wisdom was also spread and proselytized overseas. Between October 1966 and May 1967, Beijing had 800,000 Mao Bibles translated into 14 languages and shipped to 117 countries.
It was not only the glorification of Mao by the student movement in Europe and the USA that turned the Great Dictator of China (unlike Hitler or Stalin) into an international icon. World artists like Salvador Dalí and especially Andy Warhol hailed Mao as their muse.
Warhol was captivated by Mao’s state portrait printed on the inside of his Little Red Books. After Nixon’s trip to China in 1972, he turned Mao’s face into one of the most iconic portraits of the 20th century. His color screen prints transformed the chairman into a pop star of the US consumer world. Warhol created a total of 199 Mao prints in five individual series and variations in 1972 and 1973. They broke all records. First in 2006, when Christie’s New York sold one for 17.4 million US dollars, and again in 2015 for 47.5 million at Sotheby’s.
Even multimillionaires in the People’s Republic, where collectors have been paying ridiculous sums for Chinese Mao paintings and revolutionary art since 1995, own Warhol’s Mao portraits. But they don’t make a fuss about it. Because, officially, the screen prints are frowned upon. A large Warhol exhibition, held in Shanghai after Singapore in April 2013, was not allowed to display the Mao portraits. Apparently, the authorities objected to pictures depicting Mao with painted lips and eye shadow.
The conversion of crude Mao and revolutionary propaganda into highly valued Chinese and international revolutionary art began with an auction by Guardian on October 7, 1995, one of the People’s Republic’s art auction houses. The original of the iconic painting “Chairman Mao en route to Anyuan,” created in 1967, was auctioned off at the Kunlun Hotel in Beijing. The pseudo-religious motif shows the young Mao in flowing scholarly robes on a pilgrimage to the revolution. During the Cultural Revolution, it was reprinted 900 million times. A state bank bought it at auction for 6.05 million yuan, several times the starting price.
After that, there was no holding back, not even among the tens of thousands of Chinese who immediately checked whether they had any similar art treasures at home. Overnight, testimonies of a brutal time that destroyed China’s true culture turned into valuable objects of a “Cultural Revolution culture” that also became internationally coveted.
Collectors used three categories to determine whether a piece of cultural revolutionary art was a noble work of art: whether it is a symbol of contemporary history, the work of a famous painter, or the product of a legendary workshop or factory, such as the Jingdezhen porcelain kilns which once served China’s emperors.
The Cultural Revolution had permeated all public and everyday life, placing every area of society, no matter how mundane, at the service of Mao’s class struggle mission and power struggle. When the Communist Party forbade any appraisal of the horrific past, a counter-effect emerged and a collector’s society developed.
Only limited public criticism – which has since been deleted – was voiced in cultural magazines such as “华人” (Chinese). In 1997, it said: “Nostalgia, kitsch and business characterize China’s way of coming to terms with the past. The history of the Cultural Revolution must not be written and analyzed. It may only be collected”. This is even desirable because it leads to a “superficial memory.” It said that collectors look at past events like an uninvolved third party, even if they participated in them.
This schizophrenia was reflected in the first Guardian auctions in 1995 and 1995, which were groundbreaking for the culture of the Cultural Revolution. Few people knew that the much-vaunted chief auctioneer Gao Deming (高德明, 1934 -2021), who sold the “treasures of the Cultural Revolution” for millions, was himself a victim of Maoism. In 1957, he was persecuted as a “rightist element” and as a spy during the Cultural Revolution. He was sent to a labor camp and had to slave away in the coal mines of Pingyao for three years before he was rehabilitated in 1979. When he was asked after the successful auction in 1996 what the person in charge would think if he had witnessed it, Gao said: “I’m sure he would say: ‘What a joke.’”
Mao would not laugh much if he knew how much his memorabilia is worth today. His image appears in dazzling colors on all of China’s banknotes, from pink, green and brown to blue. This, too, is a kind of Chinese red art today.
Spring is here – PE lessons are back outdoors, like here in Suqian in Jiangsu province, where students learn how to play basketball.
Before we turn our attention to next week’s Beijing Motor Show, we conclude this week by looking at the aftermath of the German Chancellor’s visit to the Chinese capital.
Michael Radunski spoke with Norbert Roettgen, foreign policy expert for the German Christian Democratic Union party, about the Chancellor’s trip. Having just returned from Washington, Roettgen gives Scholz’s trip a crushing verdict. He accuses the Chancellor of preemptively acting as a supplicant in Beijing. “I wasn’t expecting much anyway, but it was a failure across the board,” summarizes the CDU politician. According to Roettgen, Scholz could have discussed many topics with Xi Jinping: “Huawei and network expansion, Cosco and port stake. But we are not pursuing our own interests in all of this, we are bowing to pressure from China.”
The scientific community has often criticized German Research Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger for her statements on research cooperation with China. The fact that she considers every Chinese academic a potential spy has earned her the accusation that she is encouraging universities to decouple and not derisk, as called for in Germany’s China strategy.
During his trip to China, Chancellor Olaf Scholz struck a more harmonious note and expressed hope for more scientific cooperation and more Chinese students coming to Germany. Our colleague Markus Weisskopf spoke with the community about this discrepancy. Science experts demand more resources and a clear line from the German government to engage seriously with China as a partner and systemic rival.
What do you think of Olaf Scholz’s China visit?
Scholz follows the same China policy as the Russia policy before the war in Ukraine: Dependencies are being increased, security concerns are being glossed over and nothing is being achieved in trade policy.
That is a crushing verdict.
Yes, I wasn’t expecting much anyway, but it was a complete failure.
It was the Chancellor’s first trip since Germany adopted its China strategy. Where have you recognized the German China strategy?
This China strategy has long been in the making – but in practice, it now plays no role. None of what was written down is happening. The Federal Chancellor is completely ignoring the strategy he helped adopt. But I haven’t heard anything more from Ms. Baerbock either. The Foreign Minister seems to have handed over the China issue to a Chancellor who is ignoring his own strategy.
It was striking how nonchalantly the Chinese side brushed off the German concerns: Breaking with Russia: no; Ukraine peace conference: maybe; unfair trade practices: that’s okay. And overcapacity: we don’t care. Has Germany become a mere supplicant?
If the German Chancellor acts like one, you shouldn’t be surprised if he is treated like a supplicant. China only respects strength. Unlike the German Chancellor, the Chinese government recognizes Germany’s economic weaknesses. And China deals ruthlessly with weakness.
Has Scholz simply chosen the wrong approach by traveling with company executives who all fully bank on China?
That is the point. The composition of the Chancellor’s business delegation sends out a signal in advance: I am a kind of traveling salesman and advocate for German business. No wonder the Chinese leadership then believes it can afford to simply brush off all geopolitical and trade concerns.
Why?
Beijing naturally likes to see German companies investing more and more in China. After all, this further increases Germany’s dependency. This means that China doesn’t have to give Germany anything, it gets everything it wants on a silver platter. The trip was a complete denial of Germany’s China strategy with the fixed goal of reducing its own dependencies. Scholz also acts accordingly when it comes to China’s role in Ukraine.
In what way?
Olaf Scholz and Xi Jinping both know that China supplies a considerable amount of components for the production of Russian weapons, in other words, actively supports the war. But in public, Scholz speaks as if China could be won over to a just peace, as if China were a partner – although both know that China is the exact opposite. Anyone who, like Scholz, is actively helping to deceive their own public and taking them for fools will lose China’s respect.
You make me want to defend the Chancellor a little. Is it perhaps simply the new reality that Germany has no – or only little – influence on China?
No. China’s rise is nothing new, and China is currently experiencing considerable economic difficulties itself. The China strategy certainly offers starting points for how we can influence China if we act together and in a coordinated manner at the European level.
You regularly travel to China yourself. How do you have to talk to the Chinese side?
You need to speak frankly in all diplomatic forms.
Certainly. But how? Let’s take Ukraine as an example.
In the Ukraine war, the core issue is not to win China over for a conference, but to tell Beijing that supporting Russian weapons production and thus the war is unacceptable to us. That must be said.
Has Germany simply run out of leverage over China?
There are many areas and topics, such as Huawei and network expansion, Cosco and port participation. But in all of these areas, we are not pursuing our own interests. We are bowing to pressure from China – often preemptively. It is clearly in our own interest that the 5G network is not in Chinese hands. If we continue to do nothing at this point as a government, then we are showing the Chinese that we are too weak to truly represent our own interests.
How can Germany return to a more active position?
We need a clear economic policy strategy, something the Chancellor does not have. At its core, it must be an economic strategy with the aim of achieving growth outside and independently of China. This is the most important lever we can use vis-à-vis China by saying: We want to cooperate with you and be successful. But we don’t have to do so unconditionally, and that’s why we expect fair competitive conditions from you. But if, like Scholz, you show the opposite and demonstrate through the business delegation’s composition that the German economic policy relies entirely on China in its growth strategy, then you are almost willingly placing yourself in China’s hands and losing all influence.
However, there are tangible results from the Scholz trip, like the declaration of intent on “cooperation in autonomous driving.” The problem is that the EU is very concerned about precisely this area and has launched an investigation against Chinese electric cars – with an explicit focus on data security in autonomous driving. Is this how Scholz is tearing the EU apart?
Absolutely. This trade policy approach weakens everyone, Germany and the EU. The EU has a completely rational trade and security policy risk analysis – and the German Chancellor is simply brushing it aside and pursuing his own interests at the expense of security and long-term economic interests.
What do you mean specifically?
Security is about data and cyber protection. In the economic area, the EU is worried that electromobility will become another area where China is using massive state subsidies to compete unfairly in the European market. This is of real strategic and economic importance. The German Chancellor is leaving the EU out in the cold here and dividing the European Union in the process.
I hear from the Chinese side that Beijing is observing the different positions of France and Germany with great interest.
If we, as Europeans, believe that everyone can represent their individual interests toward China, then the result is that we all remain European dwarfs and have no influence on China. Our strength vis-à-vis China comes to the fore when we join forces. Then, we will be a single market of 450 million consumers with an economic output of around 16 trillion euros. Only then will we be on an equal footing with China. If we fragment ourselves and everyone tries to represent individual interests, then China will mercilessly play us off against each other. Unfortunately, this is exactly the pattern that the German Chancellor is following.
You don’t have to look to Brussels or Paris to find disagreement. There seems to be no consensus between the Chancellery, Foreign Ministry and Economy Ministry in Berlin, either.
I share the Green Party’s view, the CDU/CSU and the Greens generally share a common position here. But unfortunately, the Greens are not fighting for their China policy, which they still brashly advocated when they were in the opposition. Nothing of what was set out on paper in the China strategy is being implemented in government policy – and the Greens are silent. To give one example: I can’t see anyone in the Greens still actively and loudly campaigning to exclude Huawei from the German 5G network.
Let’s look to the future: What do we need when dealing with China?
Firstly, we need European unity vis-à-vis China. We should also strive for transatlantic coordination. Secondly, we need our own growth strength, independent of China. Thirdly, we need the courage to speak out clearly in foreign and security policy. In Europe, China is a supporter of Putin’s war in Ukraine. This is an issue of existential security interests for us Germans and Europeans. This must be called by its name – also in public.
Norbert Roettgen has been a member of the German Bundestag since 1994 and chaired the Committee on Foreign Affairs between 2014 and 2021.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s statements during his visit to Tongji University in Shanghai sounded different from many of the statements made by Germany’s Research Minister. During the COVID crisis, contacts had declined significantly, which was not good, Scholz said in China. He advocated a return to greater scientific exchange and said talks and reciprocal visits should increase again. The Chancellor was also pleased about the increasing numbers of Chinese students in Germany.
This contrasts with the statements made by Bettina Stark-Watzinger in recent months. “The Communist Party can hide behind every Chinese researcher, we have to be clear about that,” she told the German newspaper Die Welt last year, for instance. And just a few days ago, she warned: “The Chinese state is using scientific findings and new technologies such as artificial intelligence not only for the benefit of its population, but also for surveillance, control and influence.” We must not be naive in our dealings with China.
So is the German Chancellor naive? Ultimately, Scholz merely repeated in China what is laid down in the German government’s China strategy: “In order to strengthen bilateral relations and expand expertise on China, the Federal Government supports collaboration between universities and research institutes.”
Obviously, there is room for debate about the interpretation of the strategy. Kai Gehring, Chairman of the Research Committee, emphasizes with reference to the China strategy that the aim is to “increase awareness, reduce dependencies and thus minimize risks.” After all, China is not pursuing a geostrategic partnership strategy, but a hegemonic one, he says.
“We want to continue the scientific exchange with China, but make it more interest- and value-driven and with the necessary risk awareness,” the Green politician told Table.Briefings. He added that where German and European technological and digital sovereignty is affected, competitiveness and safeguarding interests must be prioritized and know-how espionage prevented. That doesn’t sound like strengthening relations.
Hannes Gohli, Head of the China Competence Center at the University of Wurzburg, is surprised at the lack of differentiation in the choice of words in recent months, especially by the Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). “Recently, knowledge transfer has too often been characterized purely as a risk. In some areas, we should also remain cautious. Nevertheless, the fundamental ethos of science is the exchange of knowledge. This fundamental ethos should be upheld in as many areas as possible, while constantly weighing up the risks.”
Gohli reports that many scientists are interested in collaborations, but are currently concerned about loss of reputation and political consequences. The increased red tape resulting from a complex risk assessment of research projects with Chinese partners could also turn the planned derisking into decoupling.
Lambert Koch, President of the German Association of University Professors and Lecturers (DHV), believes that the “seemingly contradictory signals from the federal government are not helpful.” Science needs “unambiguous guidelines which it can use to evaluate opportunities for cooperation and exchange.”
As part of the necessary coordination between the scientific community and politics, it must be clear “whose standards apply in the federal government.” These standards must then be used to provide qualified information and advice, allowing viable decision-making while preserving scientific autonomy. Koch sees “an increased need to act following the Chancellor’s visit to China.”
Alicia Hennig, who taught and researched in Shenzhen and Nanjing from 2015 to 2021, notes that it has now become clear once again that the BMBF has been unable to assert itself with its rather critical stance in the China strategy. And as long as the government does not take a clear position and consequently does not clearly regulate cooperation with China, there will be no operational implementation at universities.
Regardless of what the final guidelines look like, there are also differing opinions on the structure and process of implementation. While the BMBF and the German Academic Exchange Service see the responsibility for developing competencies and processes mainly with the universities, Hennig disagrees. Among other things, she points to the lack of resources available at universities. After all, the China strategy is not backed by money to create the capacities that have now become necessary, she added.
That is why the German government and the BMBF need a risk framework and the associated establishment of upper-level capacities. This would not completely relieve the burden on universities and research institutions. “But at least there would be centralized capacities, contact points and resources to bundle these necessary activities,” says the TU Dresden scientist.
According to research by Business Insider, the Christian Bible is the best-selling book in the world, with up to five billion copies sold. But in close second place are the “Words of Chairman Mao Zedong,” the so-called Mao Bible, which he distributed more than one billion copies to the people of China and the world during the Cultural Revolution.
The great dictator passed away in 1976, lamenting in the last year of his life that he had failed to abolish money as a symbol of capitalism in socialist China. Today, he would be spinning in his crystal coffin if he knew how much money his fellow compatriots and foreigners were paying for his former memorabilia, including the Red Bible – not because they are revolutionaries, but because they are speculators and nostalgic collectors of all kinds.
In the novel “Mao Zedong Returns to the Human World” 毛泽东重返人间, Shanghai historian Ye Yonglie (叶永烈 1940-2020), who specializes in political biographies, imagines how Mao would react today. His book has him reawakened 20 years after his death: In the dead of night, eerie noises startle the dozing honor guards in Beijing’s Mao Mausoleum. They do not come from a supposed saboteur trying to break into the sacred shrine, but from an escapee. Alarmed, the soldiers rush over, salute, and help the embalmed Mao out of his glass sarcophagus.
Ye wrote the novel, which was published in Taiwan in 2002 and Hong Kong in 2011, long before similar satires about Adolf Hitler’s resurrection. “It was impossible to publish a book like this here,” he told me in June 2018. At the time, he already suspected: “It will probably soon be the same in Hong Kong.” Today, under Xi Jinping’s ideologized rule, Beijing would probably prosecute Ye for denigrating Mao and China’s revolution.
In the novel, Mao stumbles around the year 2000 through a world that is alien to him. He sees photos and statues of himself everywhere. However, in one of Beijing’s popular “Mao restaurants,” which serves Mao’s favorite dishes, there are photos of his former arch-enemies, such as Liu Shaoqi. Close confidants, including his wife, Jiang Qing, and political rivals, haunt Mao’s waking dreams in the novel. In Liulichang Antiques Street, a vendor pays him a bundle of 100-yuan bills bearing his portrait for a calligraphy Mao painted. During his lifetime, Mao received a monthly official (symbolic) maximum salary of 400 yuan. The highest banknote value was ten yuan. None had his portrait on it.
Today, almost 50 years after Mao’s death, everything that once had anything to do with him (except his class struggle thinking) is worth even more money. What would the Great Chairman say if he came across the new auction catalog for Mao objects from the Cultural Revolution? On 216 pages, the London auction house “Chiswick Auctions” offered bundles of the “Words of Chairman Mao Zedong” 毛主席语录 and other Mao trinkets. The starting bids were generally far higher than Mao’s former monthly salary.
The items auctioned off at the end of February were owned by New York bookseller Justin Schiller, who, according to the auction house, owns “one of the world’s largest and best private collections of artifacts from the Cultural Revolution.” Schiller has been buying everything related to Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China for 25 years and has filled 15 rooms of his house with it, The Guardian wrote. In the early 2000s, he bought the entire warehouse from a Chinese flea market dealer for 40,000 US dollars. It took him three containers to ship his “treasures” to the USA via various Chinese ports. This allowed him to bypass the authorities.
However, Schiller could not get rid of the London auction’s advertising piece, a 156-page precursor to the “Words of Chairman Mao” brochure from 1963. The starting price was between 35,000 and 40,000 euros. Perhaps it was not rare enough for the buyers. After all, as Chinese special catalogs for Mao’s words, also known as “Red Treasure Books” 红宝书, revealed, there were many more precursors. In 1961, the army newspaper started with daily Mao quotes in its top right corner, which were then arranged on index cards and turned into a book.
It was only with the foreword by army chief Lin Biao, who later, as Mao’s designated crown prince, staged a coup against the Chairman and died on the run in a mysterious plane crash in 1971, that Mao’s famous quote book became a must-read for all of China after 1964.
From May 1964 to February 12, 1979, when China’s Ministry of Propaganda decreed that no further volumes would be produced, over 1,055 billion red books had been printed. Mao’s wisdom was also spread and proselytized overseas. Between October 1966 and May 1967, Beijing had 800,000 Mao Bibles translated into 14 languages and shipped to 117 countries.
It was not only the glorification of Mao by the student movement in Europe and the USA that turned the Great Dictator of China (unlike Hitler or Stalin) into an international icon. World artists like Salvador Dalí and especially Andy Warhol hailed Mao as their muse.
Warhol was captivated by Mao’s state portrait printed on the inside of his Little Red Books. After Nixon’s trip to China in 1972, he turned Mao’s face into one of the most iconic portraits of the 20th century. His color screen prints transformed the chairman into a pop star of the US consumer world. Warhol created a total of 199 Mao prints in five individual series and variations in 1972 and 1973. They broke all records. First in 2006, when Christie’s New York sold one for 17.4 million US dollars, and again in 2015 for 47.5 million at Sotheby’s.
Even multimillionaires in the People’s Republic, where collectors have been paying ridiculous sums for Chinese Mao paintings and revolutionary art since 1995, own Warhol’s Mao portraits. But they don’t make a fuss about it. Because, officially, the screen prints are frowned upon. A large Warhol exhibition, held in Shanghai after Singapore in April 2013, was not allowed to display the Mao portraits. Apparently, the authorities objected to pictures depicting Mao with painted lips and eye shadow.
The conversion of crude Mao and revolutionary propaganda into highly valued Chinese and international revolutionary art began with an auction by Guardian on October 7, 1995, one of the People’s Republic’s art auction houses. The original of the iconic painting “Chairman Mao en route to Anyuan,” created in 1967, was auctioned off at the Kunlun Hotel in Beijing. The pseudo-religious motif shows the young Mao in flowing scholarly robes on a pilgrimage to the revolution. During the Cultural Revolution, it was reprinted 900 million times. A state bank bought it at auction for 6.05 million yuan, several times the starting price.
After that, there was no holding back, not even among the tens of thousands of Chinese who immediately checked whether they had any similar art treasures at home. Overnight, testimonies of a brutal time that destroyed China’s true culture turned into valuable objects of a “Cultural Revolution culture” that also became internationally coveted.
Collectors used three categories to determine whether a piece of cultural revolutionary art was a noble work of art: whether it is a symbol of contemporary history, the work of a famous painter, or the product of a legendary workshop or factory, such as the Jingdezhen porcelain kilns which once served China’s emperors.
The Cultural Revolution had permeated all public and everyday life, placing every area of society, no matter how mundane, at the service of Mao’s class struggle mission and power struggle. When the Communist Party forbade any appraisal of the horrific past, a counter-effect emerged and a collector’s society developed.
Only limited public criticism – which has since been deleted – was voiced in cultural magazines such as “华人” (Chinese). In 1997, it said: “Nostalgia, kitsch and business characterize China’s way of coming to terms with the past. The history of the Cultural Revolution must not be written and analyzed. It may only be collected”. This is even desirable because it leads to a “superficial memory.” It said that collectors look at past events like an uninvolved third party, even if they participated in them.
This schizophrenia was reflected in the first Guardian auctions in 1995 and 1995, which were groundbreaking for the culture of the Cultural Revolution. Few people knew that the much-vaunted chief auctioneer Gao Deming (高德明, 1934 -2021), who sold the “treasures of the Cultural Revolution” for millions, was himself a victim of Maoism. In 1957, he was persecuted as a “rightist element” and as a spy during the Cultural Revolution. He was sent to a labor camp and had to slave away in the coal mines of Pingyao for three years before he was rehabilitated in 1979. When he was asked after the successful auction in 1996 what the person in charge would think if he had witnessed it, Gao said: “I’m sure he would say: ‘What a joke.’”
Mao would not laugh much if he knew how much his memorabilia is worth today. His image appears in dazzling colors on all of China’s banknotes, from pink, green and brown to blue. This, too, is a kind of Chinese red art today.
Spring is here – PE lessons are back outdoors, like here in Suqian in Jiangsu province, where students learn how to play basketball.
