The latest images from Shanghai are dreadful, almost unbearable, says Liao Yiwu, shaking his bald head. The meeting in his Berlin apartment was actually supposed to be about his new book, “Wuhan – A Documentary Novel”. But over a cup of steaming Chinese tea, an intriguing conversation about the social situation in the People’s Republic unfolded.
But a critical mind is never at rest: His thoughtful reflections on China’s society contrasted with simple jokes about leading politicians in the People’s Republic. But Liao is a driven protagonist. “I can’t help it. I have to write all this down before the CP rewrites history,” he says, pointing to his shelf packed with his books, essays, and poems. Read what Liao Yiwu has to say about the truth in China, the dangers to foreign countries, and his contribution to it all in today’s briefing.
On Monday, China’s statistics bureau published the latest economic figures: In the first quarter, national GDP grew by 4.8 percent. Given the Covid pandemic and drastic lockdowns in Shanghai and other regions across China, a plus of almost five percent sounds certainly impressive. But Finn Mayer-Kuckuk warns against a premature sense of relief. China’s economy faces profound problems – be it in the retail index or the container situation in its domestic ports. And that’s not all: China’s problems will have a direct impact on Europe.
Finally, I would like to recommend Johnny Erling’s latest column. This time, Erling has turned his attention to China’s longest monumental structure: the Great Wall. Yet China’s Great Helmsman Mao Zedong once scorned it as a decaying relic of feudalistic times. Johnny Erling explains how the Wall experienced a rebirth thanks to the visit of US President Richard Nixon in 1972, why Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin, and Helmut Schmidt climbed the stone steps near Badaling, and how Xi Jinping twisted its original purpose.
Mr. Liao, Shanghai’s citizens have been locked up for weeks now, and some children have even been separated from their parents. China’s government is convinced that the virus can only be defeated with its strict zero-covid strategy. What is your take on these measures?
The zero covid policy is inhumane, it contradicts science and common sense, but unfortunately, experts are being silenced. Humanity and science are worthless in a dictatorship where politics is paramount.
But President Xi Jinping is pursuing this policy to save many more lives in Shanghai and throughout China.
He is not concerned about human lives. It is all about power. He looks at people as if they were grass. In his eyes, there are only rulers and ruled. Nothing else.
We are now in the second year of the pandemic and have no idea how to break the cycle of new infections and restrictions on everyday life. In your new book “Wuhan,” however, you look at the origins. Why?
Because time is running out. The Chinese government covers up, deletes documents, censors. By rewriting what is happening, it manipulates us all. I had to write all this down before the leadership in Beijing manages to reinterpret the origin of the Covid pandemic. It is my job as a writer to record the truth.
In doing so, you follow, among others, a Chinese citizen journalist named Kcriss. Why?
There is no free press in China. The state media report what the leadership dictates. Independent reporting is not welcome. The only ones who search for the truth are so-called citizen journalists like Kcriss. I noticed him on the Internet and watched everything he wrote. Until his arrest. Because all those who were looking for the origin of the virus around the P4 laboratory in Wuhan have been arrested or disappeared. Now I ask you: why?
You certainly know that better than I do.
Look, the whole world has been living and suffering under the Covid pandemic for more than a year. And we still don’t know where the virus actually came from: from nature, from animals, or from a Chinese lab like the P4 lab in Wuhan after all? But anyone in China who explores this question openly and honestly is in danger. It’s about the truth, that’s why my book.
So what is the state of truth in China right now – in the age of Covid?
Corona is a disaster, without a doubt. But it serves the Chinese government as an excuse for its oppression. In 2008, there was also a disaster, namely the great earthquake in Sichuan. Tens of thousands of people died under the rubble of poorly built houses. But at that time it was possible to do some research and write about it, with the result that houses are now better constructed and so hopefully such a disaster will not happen again. It is different with the Covid pandemic. The origin of the virus is not allowed to be reported on. Anyone who asked questions about the P4 lab in Wuhan was arrested. How are we supposed to learn from it for the future then! Truth is no longer allowed in China.
That sounds very pessimistic.
I still have hope. The future will be better. Citizen journalists like Kcriss or Zhang Zhan are all still young. They are brave. That is a good sign. They are China’s future.
However, your book is not only about citizen journalists, but also tells the story of an ordinary Chinese man named Ai Ding. All he wants to do is travel home to his family in Wuhan for the Spring Festival. But his journey turns into an absurd odyssey with a bitter end.
Right. When the Coronavirus broke out in China, Ai Ding was living and working in Germany. However, he booked his tickets well in advance; he wants to celebrate the spring festival with his wife and daughter. So he had nothing to do with Covid until then. But that makes no difference. As I said, the Covid pandemic only serves as a smokescreen. Whatever happens concerns all of us. It can affect everyone. The Chinese state monitors everyone. It controls, permits and prohibits completely arbitrarily. This has been further exacerbated by Covid. In the meantime, the leadership has become nearly omnipotent.
Only nearly omnipotent? To us in the West, China’s leadership currently appears very strong; President Xi Jinping is considered by many to be the most powerful man in the world.
Yes, yes. But only nearly omnipotent. Because the truth is more powerful. That is why China’s leadership fears the truth. That, too, is revealed by the pandemic.
How so?
That’s the only way my documentary novel came about. People are smarter, and the Internet is faster than government censorship. So at the start of the pandemic, I was able to download and save many documents, scientific studies and reports from the Internet. These documents are like pieces of a puzzle that I then put together in my book.
But your book shows more than just government surveillance. Ai Ding is not only controlled by the government. His journey to Wuhan becomes a drama because other Chinese, from the north or the east, are also suspicious of him. Just because his family is from Wuhan. They show how Wuhan became a kind of stigma as a result of the Covid pandemic, even in Chinese society.
Yes. Even in the nearest village, no one trusts each other anymore. People from Wuhan were ostracized, even if they were healthy or, like Ai Ding, were not even in Wuhan during the Covid outbreak. In the pandemic, the deep distrust within Chinese society has once again come to light. Its causes go back to the Cultural Revolution.
That was a long time ago.
Yes, but it still has an impact to this day. Then there is a leader like Xi Jinping. He learned from Mao and now combines the old methods with new technology like surveillance cameras and facial recognition.
What does all this mean for social coexistence? We in the West often see China as a fixed, unified entity.
That is deceptive. China’s society is fragmented; it is characterized by mistrust. It was already there, but the virus has amplified it again. That makes people vulnerable. In democracies, you can speak openly, you and I can speak openly here. You have already disagreed with me twice. You can do that here, but not in China. People don’t trust each other, they are afraid – of others, of the virus, of Wuhan. Dictatorships like the one in China profit from this.
Is this a Chinese problem?
No, that is also your problem. Because the Chinese government tells its people that foreign countries are also bad. As a result, China isolates itself more and more, and interaction becomes more and more difficult. But if people don’t know each other anymore, that promotes fear and mistrust. Only openness and truth can counter this.
Liao Yiwu is a writer, poet and musician. In his works such as The Corpse Walker, God Is Red, and For a Song and a Hundred Songs he gives a voice to those who have been cast out and persecuted. In 2011, he received the Geschwister Scholl Prize, and in 2012 the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. His latest book: “Wuhan – A Documentary Novel,” S. Fischer Verlag, 352 pages, 24 euro.
China’s growth plunged sharply in March. This was mainly due to the resurgence of the Covid pandemic in China, which is why the economic downturn had been widely expected. Over the entire first quarter, from January to March, GDP actually grew by 4.8 percent. While this is remarkable, the data for the three-month period cannot hide the ongoing difficulties that have emerged since the large-scale lockdowns in Shanghai and other regions across China: retail sales dropped by almost two percent in March alone. This is alarming, because the purchasing power of China’s consumers has so far been a vital pillar of the global economy.
The new shopping restraint of the Chinese has several reasons: Those who are locked up, like the otherwise consumerist inhabitants of Shanghai, are simply unable to spend their money. Many citizens also lack the necessary sources of income. In addition, other areas lack goods as a result of supply problems. And last, but not least, the return of the Covid pandemic is simply affecting people’s moods.
On the other end of the spectrum, the industry also slides back into a downward spiral of factory closures and component shortages. “When the supply for just a small part fails, production elsewhere could come to a standstill,” says Klaus-Juergen Gern, an economist at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW). “After many ups and downs, the signs have now turned back to escalation.” And even where production is still up and running, goods often don’t make it to their destination due to a lack of truck capacity.
Meanwhile, the industry tries to keep the production outages as low as possible. Volkswagen partner Saic Motor started up the assembly lines again on Monday under difficult conditions. US carmaker Tesla plans to follow suit on Tuesday, according to Reuters. Both companies have recalled as many workers as possible to their factories.
Managers and economic policymakers are extremely nervous, because supply disruptions inevitably replicate themselves globally in highly developed economies. As a result, production disruptions in China will almost certainly drive prices up further in Germany. “A production disruption in Shanghai means that we have less supply in a market that is already plagued by shortages,” Gern explains. Dealers in Germany would therefore simply raise prices in response to supply problems. The reason is simple: “Demand fights over fewer goods.” But this is already creating the next problem: The already rapid inflation will gain further momentum.
Economist Rodrigo Zeidan of the Shanghai campus of New York University (NYU) has already warned of a new container traffic jam. Contrary to the Shanghai city government’s assurances that everything is running reasonably smoothly at the port, Zeidan registers considerable disruptions in container logistics. This, he says, threatens a return of supply-side inflation. “It will take a while for things to normalize,” Zeidan writes. He expects a turning point in mid-May at the earliest. And after that, it would take another while for supply chains to recover from the disruptions.
This will repeat problems that the global economy already struggled with in 2020 and 2021 (China.Table reported): Containers sitting around on ships outside ports will be unavailable in other parts of the world where, according to schedule, they have long been expected. The interruptions in trade thus spread around the globe. On top of that, parts from China are not only missing in Germany, but in all other economies as well, which means that the supply of preliminary products from other parts of the world is also interrupted.
Zeidan debunks a rumor that currently spreads on social media: China is using the lockdown to harm the EU and the US on behalf of Russia. Apart from the fact that the virus is real, and China’s lockdowns follow the government’s established strategy for dealing with the pandemic, the theory also makes no economic sense. After all, China would be hurting itself first and foremost. What’s more, if it were just a matter of sabotaging its trading partners, a port shutdown would be the best course of action. “Local authorities are desperately trying to keep it open. The port is one exception to the harshest lockdown in the world.”
And so central banks are also finding themselves in a dilemma. In fact, they should be lowering interest rates to stimulate growth. But at the same time, they would have to raise interest rates to fight inflation. So there is no longer a proper monetary policy. And this makes it very difficult for economic policymakers to find their way out of this situation.
The situation in China tends to reinforce the risk of a particularly unfavorable development in Europe: Stagflation is the term economists use to describe a situation in which rapidly rising prices clash with poor growth. As China’s role as an economic powerhouse is no longer as strong and global supply chains are also slowing down, both trends are being compounded.
The US, for example, experienced stagflation in the mid-1970s. “At that time, the oil price shock had led to a shock on the supply side,” says Gern. Goods became scarce and expensive, while the central bank printed a lot of money. This situation is remarkably similar to today’s situation. Loose monetary policy since the euro and Covid crisis meets high oil and gas prices in the wake of the Ukraine war.
Now, on top of that, there is a never-ending series of lockdowns in China. ” Therefore, we are currently in an extremely tense situation,” says IfW economist Gern. However, China still has the opportunity to support its own economy in the process. Since the troubles at Evergrande (China.Table reported), the real estate market and construction activity have been slowing. “There is still an opportunity here to expand employment again,” says Gern. But there is also a danger here: Covid could lead to production stops for building materials. In that case, the attempt to boost demand would simply lead to a further price spike.
China’s central bankers are obviously also aware of potential stagflation. So far, the People’s Bank of China has abstained from easing monetary policy. When commodities are in short supply, increased liquidity is not a harmless panacea. Instead, the central bank presented a catalog of stimulus options for regions, industries and entrepreneurs.
Volkswagen China has to accept a sharp decline in sales in the first quarter of 2022. In the year’s first three months, VW and its Chinese joint ventures shipped a total of 754,000 vehicles in China. That is a drop of nearly 24 percent, the German automaker announced in Beijing. VW is the leader in the world’s largest car market, accounting for about 40 percent of the group’s total sales.
Volkswagen cited the pandemic restrictions imposed by China’s zero-covid policy as one of the reasons for the poor performance in China. The current Covid wave affects mainly regions such as the northeastern province of Jilin, the Yangtze River Delta or the provinces of Shandong and Hebei, where VW typically sells a lot of cars, the group said in a statement. Due to the current lockdowns in China, VW had to suspend operations at its Shanghai and Changchun plants, among others (China.Table reported).
“We have been hit hard by Covid-19 outbreaks since mid-March, which means that we are temporarily unable to meet high customer demand,” said VW China CEO Stephan Woellenstein. However, he did express confidence that the group would be able to overcome the current challenges. There is a clear plan to get back on track, Woellenstein said. “We hope that the situation will calm down soon and that we will be able to compensate for the delays in production in the coming months.”
On the other hand, VW posted strong sales in the electric segment, selling a total of 38,700 NEV units in China (+67.3%), including more than 27,000 ID models. Volkswagen thus continues its race to catch up in the high-potential field of electric mobility (China.Table reported). In addition, Volkswagen’s Jetta sub-brand grew by 16.9% in the first quarter, delivering 42,500 vehicles to customers in China. rad
After nearly 183 days in space , three Chinese space travelers have landed safely back on Earth. The capsule carrying taikonaut Wang Yaping and her two male colleagues Zhai Zhigang and Ye Guangfu landed in the Gobi Desert in northwest China on Saturday morning (local time). As reported by state broadcaster CCTV, this marked the end of the country’s longest manned space mission to date.
The crew’s return flight from the space station, which orbits about 400 kilometers above Earth, took a little more than nine hours. “We thank all the Chinese people for their support and encouragement,” 55-year-old commander Zhai said in a live broadcast on state television.
The taikonauts had spent half a year on board the core module of the future Chinese space station “Tiangong”. During their stay in space, the taikonauts undertook two spacewalks. They conducted numerous experiments and also prepared for the future expansion of the Tiangong. Wang Yaping, 41, was the first Chinese woman to be aboard the Tianhe core module. She also completed a task outside the station (China.Table reported).
It was the second of four manned missions to complete construction of the space station, which had only begun last April. According to Chinese plans, Tiangong will be fully operational this year. China then plans to permanently maintain a manned outpost there.
The space station underlines China’s aspiration to become a space power and catch up with the leading space nations, the USA and Russia. China is excluded from the International Space Station (ISS). The Chinese space program is run by the military, which is why the US refuses cooperation. rad
Called the “Ten-Thousand Mile Long Wall” (万里长城) in Chinese, the Great Wall was meant to serve as an impregnable bulwark for all dynasties to repel invaders for more than 2,000 years. It was rebuilt many times, most recently during the Ming period. In the meantime, the People’s Republic has discovered it as a national symbol of its imperial grandeur, and uses it as a soft power symbol for true strength and recognition of its global claim to the outside world.
Beijing’s most famous section of the wall, Badaling, has long since become an international catwalk. Until the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, 520 heads of state and government from around the world paraded on Beijing’s wall, competing to see who could climb higher on its steps.
On the night of February 24, 1972, there was heavy snowfall in Beijing. At around 9:30 PM, Premier Zhou Enlai abruptly stood up in the sports stadium. He left his guest of honor, US President Richard Nixon, without a word. Not long after, Zhou came back and watched the end of the matches with Mr. and Mrs. Nixon. Afterward, he had them both driven to the Diaoyutai State Guest House.
50 years later, Hong Kong TV channel Phoenix revealed why the prime minister disappeared so suddenly at that time. He instructed Beijing’s authorities to mobilize all forces so that Nixon could visit the Great Wall at Badaling Pass the next morning.
Until the early morning, legions of helpers cleared and swept all access roads from the state guesthouse 80 kilometers away to the Wall free of ice and snow. The city leadership rounded up 800,000 men for the operation. Nixon was so impressed by the organizational power of Mao’s Communists that he warned in his memoirs that the US would have to “cultivate China during the next few decades while it is still learning to develop its national strength and potential. Otherwise we will one day be confronted with the most formidable enemy that ever existed in the history of the world.” (Richard Nixon, Memoirs, Ullstein 1981. p. 594.)
Today, there is a heated debate in Washington about whether such and similar assumptions contributed to a naïve US-China strategy that turned the People’s Republic into the adversary that once was feared it could become.
Host Mao Zedong approached the USA in 1972 because he wanted to win them over as a counterweight to the increasingly menacing Soviet Union. He therefore pulled out all the stops of Chinese hospitality for Nixon. The trip to the Great Wall crowned the elaborate visit program. Mao himself did not understand the Western enthusiasm for the dilapidated, weathered ruins and remnants of feudalistic times. No photograph shows him with or on the Wall. In 1952, however, he was persuaded by his friend, the polymath and culture minister Guo Moruo, to have at least part of this bulwark renovated as a place of interest.
Premier Zhou shouldered the task. From 1952 to 1958, he had the best-preserved Beijing Pass near Badaling restored to a length of 3,741 meters. In October 1954, he accompanied India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru as the first foreign visitor to the wall. During the 1950s, Beijing would arrange trips to the Wall for only three dignitaries. Nine were added in the 1960s. It was not until Nixon’s visit and the start of reforms and liberalization in 1978 that the great run on the Wall began, and it became a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1987.
To better promote the structure, Mao, of all people, provided China’s propagandists with a catchy advertising slogan. “He who has never been to the Great Wall is not a true man” (不到长城非好汉) Mao had once poetized. From then on, it became a must for international leaders to climb the Badaling Wall and receive a Mao facsimile as recognition that they were “true men”.
More than 520 leading politicians (including six US presidents and nearly ten German chancellors and presidents) climbed the Badaling Wall after Nixon, China’s cultural authority announced in February 2022 at the launch of a series of short videos, “外国领导人登长城.” Wall expert Xie Jiuzhong, author of official chronicles on “China’s State Guests and the Wall,” kept a record of the illustrious visitors. Badaling had become an “eternal monument in China’s diplomatic history.”
The names say it all: In the 1970s, the first to make a pilgrimage to China were the representatives of diplomatic newcomers: the heads of state of Japan, Western Europe and the USA climbed the wall. In the second half of the 1980s, after the end of the schism between Beijing and Moscow, the leaders of the still socialist Eastern Bloc went hiking. Poland’s Jaruzelski and East Germany’s Erich Honnecker (1986), the Czechs Štrougal and Husák and Bulgaria’s Todor Zhivkov – they all climbed the Wall. It was the last appearance of “true men” of real socialism. At the end, when the fall of the other wall built in 1962 was already imminent, Gorbachev and his Raissa climbed the structure on May 17, 1989.
China loved them all, and they loved China’s Wall: tyrants, democrats, emperors (Japan’s Akihito) or kings (Elizabeth II): On December 3, 2002, Vladimir Putin posed on the Great Wall with his then-wife Lyudmila Putina. In February, George W. Bush and his wife had already posed there, and a year earlier Joe Biden, then chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. All three received the prestigious trophy for being “true men”.
However, Mao’s praise was not meant for them at all. It came from his poem written in October 1935, when he had crossed the Liupan Shan mountain range in China’s northwest Ningxia on the Long March. The guerrilla leader wanted to inspire his exhausted troops. They would not be far from northern China, where the Great Wall runs. They would have to make it there if they were true men.
At the end of 1978, the magazine “Cultural Goods of the Revolution” (革命文物) published Mao’s 1961 calligraphic copy of his poem. The line about the true men took on a life of its own and became a popular saying. US President Bush felt inspired in February 2002. The Texan climbed up to behind the third watchtower. Before that, he kept asking how far Richard Nixon had once climbed, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman recalled. When they reached the spot where Nixon ran out of breath at elevation 760 on February 24, 1972, Bush rejoiced, “Now I’m going farther.”
There was also competition among Germans, for example between SPD Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and his opponent, CSU leader Franz Josef Strauß, China’s former ambassador to Bonn Wang Shu, who accompanied them both, told me. Schmidt had asked him during the climb in late October 1975 how far Strauß (who had climbed the Wall in January 1975) had gotten. When Wang pointed to the spot, the Hamburg native and his wife Loki continued to struggle up the wall. “For me, there is no other choice. I have to get higher.”
Nowadays, China’s Great Wall has become a beaten path of mass tourism. “For the first time, the enemy is coming from within,” lamented British historian and author Willam Lindesay, who lives in China. Since 1987, he has devoted himself to exploring and, above all, protecting the Great Wall from littering and environmental degradation.
On long excursions, he explored the course of the Great Wall through a dozen Chinese provinces. From 2009 onwards, geologists and researchers began to systematically survey the course of the wall using GPS, infrared and high-resolution surface photos. They discovered buried ancient precursors and border ramparts. Instead of the official length of 8,851.8 kilometers for the Ming-era rebuilt wall, they now calculate an original length of 21,196.18 kilometers. ” 16 out of the 66 dynasties in China’s history built walls to defend themselves,” Lindesay discovered.
Beijing’s current rulers do things differently. Since the early 1980s, they have used the Great Wall as a new synonym for China. After taking office in 2013, President Xi Jinping even promoted it to a national icon and symbol of China’s power, which is now expanding outward. During his televised New Year’s speeches, he always sits in front of the state flag and the painting of the Great Wall. Its original meaning has since been reversed.
Peaches from Pinggu are not just a delicacy in nearby Beijing. However, it will still be a while before they can be picked. But even before that, the district in northeastern Beijing is worth a visit. At the moment, the peach blossoms are beckoning in pale pink, as these two children know how to enjoy.
The latest images from Shanghai are dreadful, almost unbearable, says Liao Yiwu, shaking his bald head. The meeting in his Berlin apartment was actually supposed to be about his new book, “Wuhan – A Documentary Novel”. But over a cup of steaming Chinese tea, an intriguing conversation about the social situation in the People’s Republic unfolded.
But a critical mind is never at rest: His thoughtful reflections on China’s society contrasted with simple jokes about leading politicians in the People’s Republic. But Liao is a driven protagonist. “I can’t help it. I have to write all this down before the CP rewrites history,” he says, pointing to his shelf packed with his books, essays, and poems. Read what Liao Yiwu has to say about the truth in China, the dangers to foreign countries, and his contribution to it all in today’s briefing.
On Monday, China’s statistics bureau published the latest economic figures: In the first quarter, national GDP grew by 4.8 percent. Given the Covid pandemic and drastic lockdowns in Shanghai and other regions across China, a plus of almost five percent sounds certainly impressive. But Finn Mayer-Kuckuk warns against a premature sense of relief. China’s economy faces profound problems – be it in the retail index or the container situation in its domestic ports. And that’s not all: China’s problems will have a direct impact on Europe.
Finally, I would like to recommend Johnny Erling’s latest column. This time, Erling has turned his attention to China’s longest monumental structure: the Great Wall. Yet China’s Great Helmsman Mao Zedong once scorned it as a decaying relic of feudalistic times. Johnny Erling explains how the Wall experienced a rebirth thanks to the visit of US President Richard Nixon in 1972, why Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin, and Helmut Schmidt climbed the stone steps near Badaling, and how Xi Jinping twisted its original purpose.
Mr. Liao, Shanghai’s citizens have been locked up for weeks now, and some children have even been separated from their parents. China’s government is convinced that the virus can only be defeated with its strict zero-covid strategy. What is your take on these measures?
The zero covid policy is inhumane, it contradicts science and common sense, but unfortunately, experts are being silenced. Humanity and science are worthless in a dictatorship where politics is paramount.
But President Xi Jinping is pursuing this policy to save many more lives in Shanghai and throughout China.
He is not concerned about human lives. It is all about power. He looks at people as if they were grass. In his eyes, there are only rulers and ruled. Nothing else.
We are now in the second year of the pandemic and have no idea how to break the cycle of new infections and restrictions on everyday life. In your new book “Wuhan,” however, you look at the origins. Why?
Because time is running out. The Chinese government covers up, deletes documents, censors. By rewriting what is happening, it manipulates us all. I had to write all this down before the leadership in Beijing manages to reinterpret the origin of the Covid pandemic. It is my job as a writer to record the truth.
In doing so, you follow, among others, a Chinese citizen journalist named Kcriss. Why?
There is no free press in China. The state media report what the leadership dictates. Independent reporting is not welcome. The only ones who search for the truth are so-called citizen journalists like Kcriss. I noticed him on the Internet and watched everything he wrote. Until his arrest. Because all those who were looking for the origin of the virus around the P4 laboratory in Wuhan have been arrested or disappeared. Now I ask you: why?
You certainly know that better than I do.
Look, the whole world has been living and suffering under the Covid pandemic for more than a year. And we still don’t know where the virus actually came from: from nature, from animals, or from a Chinese lab like the P4 lab in Wuhan after all? But anyone in China who explores this question openly and honestly is in danger. It’s about the truth, that’s why my book.
So what is the state of truth in China right now – in the age of Covid?
Corona is a disaster, without a doubt. But it serves the Chinese government as an excuse for its oppression. In 2008, there was also a disaster, namely the great earthquake in Sichuan. Tens of thousands of people died under the rubble of poorly built houses. But at that time it was possible to do some research and write about it, with the result that houses are now better constructed and so hopefully such a disaster will not happen again. It is different with the Covid pandemic. The origin of the virus is not allowed to be reported on. Anyone who asked questions about the P4 lab in Wuhan was arrested. How are we supposed to learn from it for the future then! Truth is no longer allowed in China.
That sounds very pessimistic.
I still have hope. The future will be better. Citizen journalists like Kcriss or Zhang Zhan are all still young. They are brave. That is a good sign. They are China’s future.
However, your book is not only about citizen journalists, but also tells the story of an ordinary Chinese man named Ai Ding. All he wants to do is travel home to his family in Wuhan for the Spring Festival. But his journey turns into an absurd odyssey with a bitter end.
Right. When the Coronavirus broke out in China, Ai Ding was living and working in Germany. However, he booked his tickets well in advance; he wants to celebrate the spring festival with his wife and daughter. So he had nothing to do with Covid until then. But that makes no difference. As I said, the Covid pandemic only serves as a smokescreen. Whatever happens concerns all of us. It can affect everyone. The Chinese state monitors everyone. It controls, permits and prohibits completely arbitrarily. This has been further exacerbated by Covid. In the meantime, the leadership has become nearly omnipotent.
Only nearly omnipotent? To us in the West, China’s leadership currently appears very strong; President Xi Jinping is considered by many to be the most powerful man in the world.
Yes, yes. But only nearly omnipotent. Because the truth is more powerful. That is why China’s leadership fears the truth. That, too, is revealed by the pandemic.
How so?
That’s the only way my documentary novel came about. People are smarter, and the Internet is faster than government censorship. So at the start of the pandemic, I was able to download and save many documents, scientific studies and reports from the Internet. These documents are like pieces of a puzzle that I then put together in my book.
But your book shows more than just government surveillance. Ai Ding is not only controlled by the government. His journey to Wuhan becomes a drama because other Chinese, from the north or the east, are also suspicious of him. Just because his family is from Wuhan. They show how Wuhan became a kind of stigma as a result of the Covid pandemic, even in Chinese society.
Yes. Even in the nearest village, no one trusts each other anymore. People from Wuhan were ostracized, even if they were healthy or, like Ai Ding, were not even in Wuhan during the Covid outbreak. In the pandemic, the deep distrust within Chinese society has once again come to light. Its causes go back to the Cultural Revolution.
That was a long time ago.
Yes, but it still has an impact to this day. Then there is a leader like Xi Jinping. He learned from Mao and now combines the old methods with new technology like surveillance cameras and facial recognition.
What does all this mean for social coexistence? We in the West often see China as a fixed, unified entity.
That is deceptive. China’s society is fragmented; it is characterized by mistrust. It was already there, but the virus has amplified it again. That makes people vulnerable. In democracies, you can speak openly, you and I can speak openly here. You have already disagreed with me twice. You can do that here, but not in China. People don’t trust each other, they are afraid – of others, of the virus, of Wuhan. Dictatorships like the one in China profit from this.
Is this a Chinese problem?
No, that is also your problem. Because the Chinese government tells its people that foreign countries are also bad. As a result, China isolates itself more and more, and interaction becomes more and more difficult. But if people don’t know each other anymore, that promotes fear and mistrust. Only openness and truth can counter this.
Liao Yiwu is a writer, poet and musician. In his works such as The Corpse Walker, God Is Red, and For a Song and a Hundred Songs he gives a voice to those who have been cast out and persecuted. In 2011, he received the Geschwister Scholl Prize, and in 2012 the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. His latest book: “Wuhan – A Documentary Novel,” S. Fischer Verlag, 352 pages, 24 euro.
China’s growth plunged sharply in March. This was mainly due to the resurgence of the Covid pandemic in China, which is why the economic downturn had been widely expected. Over the entire first quarter, from January to March, GDP actually grew by 4.8 percent. While this is remarkable, the data for the three-month period cannot hide the ongoing difficulties that have emerged since the large-scale lockdowns in Shanghai and other regions across China: retail sales dropped by almost two percent in March alone. This is alarming, because the purchasing power of China’s consumers has so far been a vital pillar of the global economy.
The new shopping restraint of the Chinese has several reasons: Those who are locked up, like the otherwise consumerist inhabitants of Shanghai, are simply unable to spend their money. Many citizens also lack the necessary sources of income. In addition, other areas lack goods as a result of supply problems. And last, but not least, the return of the Covid pandemic is simply affecting people’s moods.
On the other end of the spectrum, the industry also slides back into a downward spiral of factory closures and component shortages. “When the supply for just a small part fails, production elsewhere could come to a standstill,” says Klaus-Juergen Gern, an economist at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW). “After many ups and downs, the signs have now turned back to escalation.” And even where production is still up and running, goods often don’t make it to their destination due to a lack of truck capacity.
Meanwhile, the industry tries to keep the production outages as low as possible. Volkswagen partner Saic Motor started up the assembly lines again on Monday under difficult conditions. US carmaker Tesla plans to follow suit on Tuesday, according to Reuters. Both companies have recalled as many workers as possible to their factories.
Managers and economic policymakers are extremely nervous, because supply disruptions inevitably replicate themselves globally in highly developed economies. As a result, production disruptions in China will almost certainly drive prices up further in Germany. “A production disruption in Shanghai means that we have less supply in a market that is already plagued by shortages,” Gern explains. Dealers in Germany would therefore simply raise prices in response to supply problems. The reason is simple: “Demand fights over fewer goods.” But this is already creating the next problem: The already rapid inflation will gain further momentum.
Economist Rodrigo Zeidan of the Shanghai campus of New York University (NYU) has already warned of a new container traffic jam. Contrary to the Shanghai city government’s assurances that everything is running reasonably smoothly at the port, Zeidan registers considerable disruptions in container logistics. This, he says, threatens a return of supply-side inflation. “It will take a while for things to normalize,” Zeidan writes. He expects a turning point in mid-May at the earliest. And after that, it would take another while for supply chains to recover from the disruptions.
This will repeat problems that the global economy already struggled with in 2020 and 2021 (China.Table reported): Containers sitting around on ships outside ports will be unavailable in other parts of the world where, according to schedule, they have long been expected. The interruptions in trade thus spread around the globe. On top of that, parts from China are not only missing in Germany, but in all other economies as well, which means that the supply of preliminary products from other parts of the world is also interrupted.
Zeidan debunks a rumor that currently spreads on social media: China is using the lockdown to harm the EU and the US on behalf of Russia. Apart from the fact that the virus is real, and China’s lockdowns follow the government’s established strategy for dealing with the pandemic, the theory also makes no economic sense. After all, China would be hurting itself first and foremost. What’s more, if it were just a matter of sabotaging its trading partners, a port shutdown would be the best course of action. “Local authorities are desperately trying to keep it open. The port is one exception to the harshest lockdown in the world.”
And so central banks are also finding themselves in a dilemma. In fact, they should be lowering interest rates to stimulate growth. But at the same time, they would have to raise interest rates to fight inflation. So there is no longer a proper monetary policy. And this makes it very difficult for economic policymakers to find their way out of this situation.
The situation in China tends to reinforce the risk of a particularly unfavorable development in Europe: Stagflation is the term economists use to describe a situation in which rapidly rising prices clash with poor growth. As China’s role as an economic powerhouse is no longer as strong and global supply chains are also slowing down, both trends are being compounded.
The US, for example, experienced stagflation in the mid-1970s. “At that time, the oil price shock had led to a shock on the supply side,” says Gern. Goods became scarce and expensive, while the central bank printed a lot of money. This situation is remarkably similar to today’s situation. Loose monetary policy since the euro and Covid crisis meets high oil and gas prices in the wake of the Ukraine war.
Now, on top of that, there is a never-ending series of lockdowns in China. ” Therefore, we are currently in an extremely tense situation,” says IfW economist Gern. However, China still has the opportunity to support its own economy in the process. Since the troubles at Evergrande (China.Table reported), the real estate market and construction activity have been slowing. “There is still an opportunity here to expand employment again,” says Gern. But there is also a danger here: Covid could lead to production stops for building materials. In that case, the attempt to boost demand would simply lead to a further price spike.
China’s central bankers are obviously also aware of potential stagflation. So far, the People’s Bank of China has abstained from easing monetary policy. When commodities are in short supply, increased liquidity is not a harmless panacea. Instead, the central bank presented a catalog of stimulus options for regions, industries and entrepreneurs.
Volkswagen China has to accept a sharp decline in sales in the first quarter of 2022. In the year’s first three months, VW and its Chinese joint ventures shipped a total of 754,000 vehicles in China. That is a drop of nearly 24 percent, the German automaker announced in Beijing. VW is the leader in the world’s largest car market, accounting for about 40 percent of the group’s total sales.
Volkswagen cited the pandemic restrictions imposed by China’s zero-covid policy as one of the reasons for the poor performance in China. The current Covid wave affects mainly regions such as the northeastern province of Jilin, the Yangtze River Delta or the provinces of Shandong and Hebei, where VW typically sells a lot of cars, the group said in a statement. Due to the current lockdowns in China, VW had to suspend operations at its Shanghai and Changchun plants, among others (China.Table reported).
“We have been hit hard by Covid-19 outbreaks since mid-March, which means that we are temporarily unable to meet high customer demand,” said VW China CEO Stephan Woellenstein. However, he did express confidence that the group would be able to overcome the current challenges. There is a clear plan to get back on track, Woellenstein said. “We hope that the situation will calm down soon and that we will be able to compensate for the delays in production in the coming months.”
On the other hand, VW posted strong sales in the electric segment, selling a total of 38,700 NEV units in China (+67.3%), including more than 27,000 ID models. Volkswagen thus continues its race to catch up in the high-potential field of electric mobility (China.Table reported). In addition, Volkswagen’s Jetta sub-brand grew by 16.9% in the first quarter, delivering 42,500 vehicles to customers in China. rad
After nearly 183 days in space , three Chinese space travelers have landed safely back on Earth. The capsule carrying taikonaut Wang Yaping and her two male colleagues Zhai Zhigang and Ye Guangfu landed in the Gobi Desert in northwest China on Saturday morning (local time). As reported by state broadcaster CCTV, this marked the end of the country’s longest manned space mission to date.
The crew’s return flight from the space station, which orbits about 400 kilometers above Earth, took a little more than nine hours. “We thank all the Chinese people for their support and encouragement,” 55-year-old commander Zhai said in a live broadcast on state television.
The taikonauts had spent half a year on board the core module of the future Chinese space station “Tiangong”. During their stay in space, the taikonauts undertook two spacewalks. They conducted numerous experiments and also prepared for the future expansion of the Tiangong. Wang Yaping, 41, was the first Chinese woman to be aboard the Tianhe core module. She also completed a task outside the station (China.Table reported).
It was the second of four manned missions to complete construction of the space station, which had only begun last April. According to Chinese plans, Tiangong will be fully operational this year. China then plans to permanently maintain a manned outpost there.
The space station underlines China’s aspiration to become a space power and catch up with the leading space nations, the USA and Russia. China is excluded from the International Space Station (ISS). The Chinese space program is run by the military, which is why the US refuses cooperation. rad
Called the “Ten-Thousand Mile Long Wall” (万里长城) in Chinese, the Great Wall was meant to serve as an impregnable bulwark for all dynasties to repel invaders for more than 2,000 years. It was rebuilt many times, most recently during the Ming period. In the meantime, the People’s Republic has discovered it as a national symbol of its imperial grandeur, and uses it as a soft power symbol for true strength and recognition of its global claim to the outside world.
Beijing’s most famous section of the wall, Badaling, has long since become an international catwalk. Until the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, 520 heads of state and government from around the world paraded on Beijing’s wall, competing to see who could climb higher on its steps.
On the night of February 24, 1972, there was heavy snowfall in Beijing. At around 9:30 PM, Premier Zhou Enlai abruptly stood up in the sports stadium. He left his guest of honor, US President Richard Nixon, without a word. Not long after, Zhou came back and watched the end of the matches with Mr. and Mrs. Nixon. Afterward, he had them both driven to the Diaoyutai State Guest House.
50 years later, Hong Kong TV channel Phoenix revealed why the prime minister disappeared so suddenly at that time. He instructed Beijing’s authorities to mobilize all forces so that Nixon could visit the Great Wall at Badaling Pass the next morning.
Until the early morning, legions of helpers cleared and swept all access roads from the state guesthouse 80 kilometers away to the Wall free of ice and snow. The city leadership rounded up 800,000 men for the operation. Nixon was so impressed by the organizational power of Mao’s Communists that he warned in his memoirs that the US would have to “cultivate China during the next few decades while it is still learning to develop its national strength and potential. Otherwise we will one day be confronted with the most formidable enemy that ever existed in the history of the world.” (Richard Nixon, Memoirs, Ullstein 1981. p. 594.)
Today, there is a heated debate in Washington about whether such and similar assumptions contributed to a naïve US-China strategy that turned the People’s Republic into the adversary that once was feared it could become.
Host Mao Zedong approached the USA in 1972 because he wanted to win them over as a counterweight to the increasingly menacing Soviet Union. He therefore pulled out all the stops of Chinese hospitality for Nixon. The trip to the Great Wall crowned the elaborate visit program. Mao himself did not understand the Western enthusiasm for the dilapidated, weathered ruins and remnants of feudalistic times. No photograph shows him with or on the Wall. In 1952, however, he was persuaded by his friend, the polymath and culture minister Guo Moruo, to have at least part of this bulwark renovated as a place of interest.
Premier Zhou shouldered the task. From 1952 to 1958, he had the best-preserved Beijing Pass near Badaling restored to a length of 3,741 meters. In October 1954, he accompanied India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru as the first foreign visitor to the wall. During the 1950s, Beijing would arrange trips to the Wall for only three dignitaries. Nine were added in the 1960s. It was not until Nixon’s visit and the start of reforms and liberalization in 1978 that the great run on the Wall began, and it became a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1987.
To better promote the structure, Mao, of all people, provided China’s propagandists with a catchy advertising slogan. “He who has never been to the Great Wall is not a true man” (不到长城非好汉) Mao had once poetized. From then on, it became a must for international leaders to climb the Badaling Wall and receive a Mao facsimile as recognition that they were “true men”.
More than 520 leading politicians (including six US presidents and nearly ten German chancellors and presidents) climbed the Badaling Wall after Nixon, China’s cultural authority announced in February 2022 at the launch of a series of short videos, “外国领导人登长城.” Wall expert Xie Jiuzhong, author of official chronicles on “China’s State Guests and the Wall,” kept a record of the illustrious visitors. Badaling had become an “eternal monument in China’s diplomatic history.”
The names say it all: In the 1970s, the first to make a pilgrimage to China were the representatives of diplomatic newcomers: the heads of state of Japan, Western Europe and the USA climbed the wall. In the second half of the 1980s, after the end of the schism between Beijing and Moscow, the leaders of the still socialist Eastern Bloc went hiking. Poland’s Jaruzelski and East Germany’s Erich Honnecker (1986), the Czechs Štrougal and Husák and Bulgaria’s Todor Zhivkov – they all climbed the Wall. It was the last appearance of “true men” of real socialism. At the end, when the fall of the other wall built in 1962 was already imminent, Gorbachev and his Raissa climbed the structure on May 17, 1989.
China loved them all, and they loved China’s Wall: tyrants, democrats, emperors (Japan’s Akihito) or kings (Elizabeth II): On December 3, 2002, Vladimir Putin posed on the Great Wall with his then-wife Lyudmila Putina. In February, George W. Bush and his wife had already posed there, and a year earlier Joe Biden, then chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. All three received the prestigious trophy for being “true men”.
However, Mao’s praise was not meant for them at all. It came from his poem written in October 1935, when he had crossed the Liupan Shan mountain range in China’s northwest Ningxia on the Long March. The guerrilla leader wanted to inspire his exhausted troops. They would not be far from northern China, where the Great Wall runs. They would have to make it there if they were true men.
At the end of 1978, the magazine “Cultural Goods of the Revolution” (革命文物) published Mao’s 1961 calligraphic copy of his poem. The line about the true men took on a life of its own and became a popular saying. US President Bush felt inspired in February 2002. The Texan climbed up to behind the third watchtower. Before that, he kept asking how far Richard Nixon had once climbed, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman recalled. When they reached the spot where Nixon ran out of breath at elevation 760 on February 24, 1972, Bush rejoiced, “Now I’m going farther.”
There was also competition among Germans, for example between SPD Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and his opponent, CSU leader Franz Josef Strauß, China’s former ambassador to Bonn Wang Shu, who accompanied them both, told me. Schmidt had asked him during the climb in late October 1975 how far Strauß (who had climbed the Wall in January 1975) had gotten. When Wang pointed to the spot, the Hamburg native and his wife Loki continued to struggle up the wall. “For me, there is no other choice. I have to get higher.”
Nowadays, China’s Great Wall has become a beaten path of mass tourism. “For the first time, the enemy is coming from within,” lamented British historian and author Willam Lindesay, who lives in China. Since 1987, he has devoted himself to exploring and, above all, protecting the Great Wall from littering and environmental degradation.
On long excursions, he explored the course of the Great Wall through a dozen Chinese provinces. From 2009 onwards, geologists and researchers began to systematically survey the course of the wall using GPS, infrared and high-resolution surface photos. They discovered buried ancient precursors and border ramparts. Instead of the official length of 8,851.8 kilometers for the Ming-era rebuilt wall, they now calculate an original length of 21,196.18 kilometers. ” 16 out of the 66 dynasties in China’s history built walls to defend themselves,” Lindesay discovered.
Beijing’s current rulers do things differently. Since the early 1980s, they have used the Great Wall as a new synonym for China. After taking office in 2013, President Xi Jinping even promoted it to a national icon and symbol of China’s power, which is now expanding outward. During his televised New Year’s speeches, he always sits in front of the state flag and the painting of the Great Wall. Its original meaning has since been reversed.
Peaches from Pinggu are not just a delicacy in nearby Beijing. However, it will still be a while before they can be picked. But even before that, the district in northeastern Beijing is worth a visit. At the moment, the peach blossoms are beckoning in pale pink, as these two children know how to enjoy.
