The Japanese government’s decision to release treated water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant into the sea is followed with concern by some countries in the region. In China, nationalists are using the process to stir up a new wave of anti-Japanese sentiment. The situation is so volatile that the Japanese embassy in Beijing is now warning its citizens not to speak loudly in Japanese needlessly.
Fabian Peltsch shows that anti-Japanese sentiments repeatedly flare up in China. The current atmosphere is charged, as it was most recently in 2012 during the dispute over the Senkaku-Diaoyu Islands. The paradox is that the ties between the two countries are centuries old and go deeper than many protesters might realize.
Meanwhile, the trial against 47 opposition members in Hong Kong is drawing to a close. The main issue is whether the defendants conspired to undermine the functioning of the Hong Kong government.
Marcel Grzanna follows the trial and explains that its course shows how the National Security Law is applied in Hong Kong courtrooms. His conclusion is sobering: The selection of judges and the way the trial was conducted give little hope that the rule of law will play a role in the verdict.
Resentment against everything Japanese: Reservations against the unpopular neighbor are flaring up again in China. This time, the new wave of anti-Japanese sentiment is triggered by the release of treated water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant into the East China Sea. This was followed by attacks with rocks and eggs against Japanese schools and the Japanese embassy in Beijing. In the meantime, the Japanese embassy warns its citizens in China “not speaking Japanese loudly unnecessarily.”
The atmosphere is heated, just as in 2012 when the two countries quarreled over sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands, which are called Diaoyu in China. Back then, thousands marched past the Japanese embassy, throwing water bottles, fruit and eggs. Japanese-made cars were smashed. There were calls for boycotting Japanese products and services.
Now, it is water from Fukushima. China’s state media call Japan a “devastator” and a “destroyer.” Yet both the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) consider the discharge harmless.
But rationality is not a category in which China’s nationalists think. Instead, they count on emotionality as a tried and tested strategy. Nationalism creates a sense of belonging and distracts from home-made problems. And patriotic protest can be quickly ignited, especially against Japan.
The country has committed atrocious war crimes in China. The Nanjing Massacre, which killed over 200,000 people, is a recurring theme in school curricula and pop culture. The Chinese narrative that Japan has never officially apologized keeps the outrage alive. In reality, however, several Japanese prime ministers have expressed regret in the past. Not emphatically and sincerely enough, many Chinese say. The hashtag #历史会记住日本政府这一笔# – “history will remember this act of the Japanese government” – has been shared thousands of times on China’s social media recently.
Interestingly, there have been heated discussions in China in recent years about chemical weapons left behind by Japan after its occupation of China in the Second World War, which continue to endanger the health and environment of the population today. The wastewater from Fukushima now adds new conflict material to the neighborly feud.
The oil-rich East China Sea, which Beijing now claims Japan uses as a personal cesspool, separates the two countries by 3,136 kilometers at its shortest point. Nevertheless, Japanese and Chinese cultures have been closely intertwined for at least 2,000 years. Many things we associate with Japan today actually come from China, from bonsai over matcha to Zen Buddhism. At the same time, modern China is unthinkable without the modernization of Japan.
Japan opened itself up to Western achievements in the military and legal systems earlier, which in turn inspired Chinese reformers like the founder of the republic, Sun Yat-sen, to overthrow what he saw as the outdated dynastic system. After China’s opening in the late 1970s, Japanese companies were the first to pump money into the Chinese growth market, which was difficult to assess at the time. Today, China, Japan’s main trading partner, takes about a quarter of Japan’s exports. And more than any other G7 country, Japan relies on consumer goods or rare earth elements from China.
Despite the close economic ties, both sides perceive each other as a growing threat. In December, Tokyo announced the biggest rearmament program since World War II. The country’s defense budget, which has been constitutionally committed to pacifism for 70 years, will double by 2027. Above all, this is Tokyo’s response to the growing Chinese military presence in the South China Sea and the deteriorating situation around Taiwan, which recently reached Japan’s exclusive economic zone for the first time in the form of Chinese military exercises.
Patriotic discharges are a constant source of uncertainty for the more than 100,000 Japanese living in China. And not only for them: A new draft law to ban clothing that “hurt the feelings of the Chinese nation” could soon also criminalize the wearing of Japanese kimonos in China. These are particularly popular with young Chinese manga fans.
Despite all the hysteria, it is still only a tiny minority that really has something against Japanese, says Lui Kimishima. The media manager from Tokyo lived in Beijing for more than ten years and witnessed the protests over the Senkaku Diaoyu Islands. In taxis and at the hairdresser’s, he took the precaution of claiming to be Korean or from Singapore to avoid being drawn into “emotional political discussions.”
“I think it suits the Chinese government to use Japan as a scapegoat so that the Chinese people can take out their anger on outside forces instead of looking inward,” Kimishima says. Overall, however, he has never been openly antagonized during his time in China, the 42-year-old says. He also sees the Japanese side as having a responsibility in the conflict. “Maybe Japan could have adopted the German model for dealing with the past, but that train has sailed.”
After 115 days of hearings, the trial against 47 Hong Kong opposition members enters a several-month break. The defendants have testified, witnesses have been heard, and evidence has been reviewed. Finally, at the end of November, the prosecution and the defense will give their closing arguments.
On the surface, the question is whether the defendants conspired to undermine the functioning of the Hong Kong government. In reality, however, it is a question of whether the city’s constitution, the Basic Law, which came into force when Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, is still of any reliable significance. Or has the central government in Beijing finally taken control by introducing the National Security Law in 2020?
The odds are against the defendants. Only about a third of them have even invoked their constitutional rights under the Basic Law since the start of the trial in February – namely, the right to block the city’s budget through a democratic majority in parliament and to replace the head of government in new elections. Even before the trial began, Beijing representatives in the city had already declared the opposition’s political intentions an illegal conspiracy.
Specifically, the trial is about organizing primaries of the Democratic camp in mid-2020, which were supposed to find the most promising candidates for the parliamentary elections. This process was a thorn in Beijing’s side. The National Security Law was hastily implemented in the midst of those elections. This allowed the primaries to be prosecuted for violating the law.
31 defendants who had run as candidates in the primaries preemptively pleaded guilty – probably out of fear of political influence on the judiciary – hoping to mitigate their sentences. After all, the defendants face life sentences.
“I believe there is a very high probability that all defendants will be convicted,” says Australian lawyer Kevin Yam, who works for the Center for Asian Law at Georgetown University in Washington, among others. Yam is unable to leave Australia for security reasons after the Hong Kong government put a bounty of one million HK dollars on him for his political activism and issued an international warrant for his arrest.
Yam says it is painful for him to see that the verdicts have apparently been handed down long ago. In his opinion, the three judges in the West Kowloon courthouse on the Hong Kong mainland left no other impression. “They pompously lectured the defendants on political issues concerning Western democracies. That is not really the issue of the trial,” Yam explains.
And while the three judges were able to examine vast amounts of video footage of Democratic camp press conferences from 2020 early on, the prosecution’s request to present more footage as evidence was rejected curtly by the chair. There was no need to “waste any more time.”
The National Security Law empowers Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, John Lee, to appoint judges for such cases personally. Lee may also dismiss judges if he sees national security threatened. However, the criteria for this are not specified. “This is like a US president appointing judges to decide on a national abortion law,” says Yam.
Because of the unusual practice, Lee has already received mail from the United Nations Special Rapporteurs on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers. In their letter, they expressed concern about Hong Kong’s appointment practice because they believe it could “undermine the independence of the judiciary.” The UN recommends in its Basic Principles that judges be appointed for life and that “all disciplinary, suspension or removal proceedings shall be determined in accordance with established standards of judicial conduct.”
Lee’s stance is well known. Before his political career, he served as Hong Kong’s chief of police. Under his leadership, the city’s security forces cracked down on protesters in the 2019 mass protests. Lee is considered a stiff technocrat installed as head of government by Beijing mainly because of this past. That the opposition receives little consideration under his direction is hardly surprising.
The trial against the 47 activists was initially scheduled for 90 days, but dragged on considerably. This also has implications for the trial against publisher Jimmy Lai, who is facing a separate trial due to his prominence. His trial is also based on alleged violations of the National Security Law. Because Judge Alex Lee has been appointed for both cases, Lai’s trial will likely be delayed until December.
Because of Lee’s dual duty, the verdicts against the 47 may not be handed down until the summer of next year.
The former CEO of Alibaba, Daniel Zhang, is leaving the Chinese tech company in a surprise move. Zhang was only replaced as head of Alibaba in June, but was supposed to remain a board member and focus primarily on the cloud computing division.
The official departure was simple. “The board of our company expresses its deepest appreciation to Mr Zhang for his contributions to Alibaba Group over the past 16 years,” the group’s written statement said. Eddie Wu will succeed Zhang in his role as CEO of the cloud division.
Wu already replaced Zhang as group CEO in September. At that time, Zhang was supposed to separate cloud computing from the Alibaba Group as part of an extensive restructuring. The head office now says that Zhang’s departure will not change the plans to separate cloud computing.
Zhang spent eight years at the helm of Alibaba and was largely responsible for the rise of the former online retailer from Hangzhou in eastern China to one of China’s largest and most diversified IT groups. Recently, however, Alibaba has suffered from weakened consumer sentiment in the country. In addition, the Chinese government took decisive action against the influential tech industry. rad
China plans to invest several billion euros in a copper and gold mine in eastern Serbia. This emerges from an agreement signed by the two countries over the weekend. According to the agreement, the Chinese state-owned company Zijin Mining will invest around 3.5 billion euros in a mine near the town of Bor. In addition, the Chinese company will provide 200 million US dollars for the development of a 300 MW solar power plant project.
Serbia’s Minister of Mines and Energy, Dubravka Handanović, signed the relevant memoranda of understanding at the “One China, One Serbia” investment forum in Xiamen over the weekend. The forum was part of the 23rd China International Fair for Investment & Trade, where Serbia was this year’s guest of honor.
In 2018, Zijin bought Serbia’s only copper and gold complex when the government in Belgrade auctioned off the debt-ridden company to save thousands of jobs in an impoverished mining region. The acquisition in Serbia – and further investments in Congo and Tibet – made Zijin one of the world’s largest copper mining companies alongside Western producers such as Rio Tinto, Anglo American and Antofagasta. The company aims to produce about 1.2 million tons of copper by 2025. This would be a sixfold increase compared to 2017. rad
What would an invasion of Taiwan mean for the powerful financial hub of the USA? This is the question that representatives of the China Committee of the US House of Representatives are exploring in New York on Tuesday. The “Taiwan war game” with leaders from financial and business circles, as the Financial Times calls it, aims to highlight American awareness of systemic risks of China investments. The simulation will be live-streamed and headed by Mark Gallagher. The 39-year-old Republican has chaired the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party since February. The Biden administration set up the new committee.
An ex-soldier and security expert, he found his China focus in a rather roundabout way. Before being elected to Congress, Gallagher served in the US Marine Corps as an intelligence officer for seven years, from 2006 to 2013. He served two combat tours in Iraq’s Al-Anbar province and was part of Centcom, the regional command for the Middle East and Central Asia. In his role as a counterintelligence officer, he assessed US military strategy in the Middle East.
In addition to his military service, Gallagher has earned several university degrees: In 2006, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at the elite Princeton University. After his first deployment to Iraq, he studied Science in Strategic Intelligence at the National Intelligence University and graduated in 2010. Additional degrees from the prestigious Georgetown University followed in 2012 and 2013, and he earned his PhD in international relations in 2015.
He then worked as the lead Republican staffer for the Middle East and Counterterrorism on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was a foreign policy adviser to the governor of his home state of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. It ultimately went to Donald Trump. When Wisconsin’s then-incumbent representative in the House of Representatives did not run for re-election, Gallagher chose to run. Since 2017, he has represented the 8th district of the Midwest state in the US House of Representatives.
Through his studies and previous career, Gallagher has a focus on foreign policy and security issues. Since the beginning of his term, he has increasingly turned his attention to China issues. He publicly condemned the arrest of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and was instrumental in drafting legislation banning US agencies and medical services from buying drugs manufactured in China.
In February, he was elected chair of the China committee. He also chairs the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and is a member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Gallagher, however, does not see himself as a career politician: “I treat this like a deployment,” he told the Wisconsin regional station of US broadcaster NBC. “I think this is a pivotal moment right now when we have to get a few big things right in order to beat China, in order to prevent a war in the short term, and beat China in the long term.”
Gallagher is seen as a rising star with promising career prospects in the Republican Party. The election as committee chair has given the 39-year-old a prime opportunity to distinguish himself in a particular field, says Craig Gilbert, former Washington Bureau chief for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who has followed Gallagher’s career for some time. He says Gallagher has now found his niche with China.
By his own account, Gallagher still sees a lack of urgency in the US debate about the competition with the People’s Republic in US politics. “I think that’s part of my job as chairman of the select committee on China, is to inject a sense of urgency into this competition. To wake my colleagues up,” he says. He made headlines with his demand to ban TikTok. “The issue with TikTok is that it’s not just highly addictive for kids which it is, and it’s increasing depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation among young kids. That’s why I call it digital fentanyl.”
China could also retrieve users’ locations and gather other data through the app application. In his view, this leaves US citizens vulnerable to Beijing. “It’s as if in the Cold War, we would have allowed the KGB to buy ABC, NBC, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and that probably would understate the scope of the problem.”
Gallagher also sees the beginning of a new Cold War in the current tensions between the two superpowers. “What makes this Cold War so difficult and so complex than for the better part of three decades now we have been integrating China into the global economy and in many cases, we have become conjoined twins with China economically so we’re trying to figure out where and how we separate.”
Gallagher’s statements apparently strike a chord in the otherwise divided US political scene. He is receiving praise from Republicans and Democrats in the House of Representatives. However, his foreign policy focus has drawn criticism from political opponents in Wisconsin. Observers do not rule out that Gallagher would also like to move toward the Senate in the future with his China focus. Amelie Richter
China’s agriculture not only produces huge amounts of rice, but also picturesque landscapes like here in Liuzhou in the southern Chinese province of Guangxi.
The Japanese government’s decision to release treated water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant into the sea is followed with concern by some countries in the region. In China, nationalists are using the process to stir up a new wave of anti-Japanese sentiment. The situation is so volatile that the Japanese embassy in Beijing is now warning its citizens not to speak loudly in Japanese needlessly.
Fabian Peltsch shows that anti-Japanese sentiments repeatedly flare up in China. The current atmosphere is charged, as it was most recently in 2012 during the dispute over the Senkaku-Diaoyu Islands. The paradox is that the ties between the two countries are centuries old and go deeper than many protesters might realize.
Meanwhile, the trial against 47 opposition members in Hong Kong is drawing to a close. The main issue is whether the defendants conspired to undermine the functioning of the Hong Kong government.
Marcel Grzanna follows the trial and explains that its course shows how the National Security Law is applied in Hong Kong courtrooms. His conclusion is sobering: The selection of judges and the way the trial was conducted give little hope that the rule of law will play a role in the verdict.
Resentment against everything Japanese: Reservations against the unpopular neighbor are flaring up again in China. This time, the new wave of anti-Japanese sentiment is triggered by the release of treated water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant into the East China Sea. This was followed by attacks with rocks and eggs against Japanese schools and the Japanese embassy in Beijing. In the meantime, the Japanese embassy warns its citizens in China “not speaking Japanese loudly unnecessarily.”
The atmosphere is heated, just as in 2012 when the two countries quarreled over sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands, which are called Diaoyu in China. Back then, thousands marched past the Japanese embassy, throwing water bottles, fruit and eggs. Japanese-made cars were smashed. There were calls for boycotting Japanese products and services.
Now, it is water from Fukushima. China’s state media call Japan a “devastator” and a “destroyer.” Yet both the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) consider the discharge harmless.
But rationality is not a category in which China’s nationalists think. Instead, they count on emotionality as a tried and tested strategy. Nationalism creates a sense of belonging and distracts from home-made problems. And patriotic protest can be quickly ignited, especially against Japan.
The country has committed atrocious war crimes in China. The Nanjing Massacre, which killed over 200,000 people, is a recurring theme in school curricula and pop culture. The Chinese narrative that Japan has never officially apologized keeps the outrage alive. In reality, however, several Japanese prime ministers have expressed regret in the past. Not emphatically and sincerely enough, many Chinese say. The hashtag #历史会记住日本政府这一笔# – “history will remember this act of the Japanese government” – has been shared thousands of times on China’s social media recently.
Interestingly, there have been heated discussions in China in recent years about chemical weapons left behind by Japan after its occupation of China in the Second World War, which continue to endanger the health and environment of the population today. The wastewater from Fukushima now adds new conflict material to the neighborly feud.
The oil-rich East China Sea, which Beijing now claims Japan uses as a personal cesspool, separates the two countries by 3,136 kilometers at its shortest point. Nevertheless, Japanese and Chinese cultures have been closely intertwined for at least 2,000 years. Many things we associate with Japan today actually come from China, from bonsai over matcha to Zen Buddhism. At the same time, modern China is unthinkable without the modernization of Japan.
Japan opened itself up to Western achievements in the military and legal systems earlier, which in turn inspired Chinese reformers like the founder of the republic, Sun Yat-sen, to overthrow what he saw as the outdated dynastic system. After China’s opening in the late 1970s, Japanese companies were the first to pump money into the Chinese growth market, which was difficult to assess at the time. Today, China, Japan’s main trading partner, takes about a quarter of Japan’s exports. And more than any other G7 country, Japan relies on consumer goods or rare earth elements from China.
Despite the close economic ties, both sides perceive each other as a growing threat. In December, Tokyo announced the biggest rearmament program since World War II. The country’s defense budget, which has been constitutionally committed to pacifism for 70 years, will double by 2027. Above all, this is Tokyo’s response to the growing Chinese military presence in the South China Sea and the deteriorating situation around Taiwan, which recently reached Japan’s exclusive economic zone for the first time in the form of Chinese military exercises.
Patriotic discharges are a constant source of uncertainty for the more than 100,000 Japanese living in China. And not only for them: A new draft law to ban clothing that “hurt the feelings of the Chinese nation” could soon also criminalize the wearing of Japanese kimonos in China. These are particularly popular with young Chinese manga fans.
Despite all the hysteria, it is still only a tiny minority that really has something against Japanese, says Lui Kimishima. The media manager from Tokyo lived in Beijing for more than ten years and witnessed the protests over the Senkaku Diaoyu Islands. In taxis and at the hairdresser’s, he took the precaution of claiming to be Korean or from Singapore to avoid being drawn into “emotional political discussions.”
“I think it suits the Chinese government to use Japan as a scapegoat so that the Chinese people can take out their anger on outside forces instead of looking inward,” Kimishima says. Overall, however, he has never been openly antagonized during his time in China, the 42-year-old says. He also sees the Japanese side as having a responsibility in the conflict. “Maybe Japan could have adopted the German model for dealing with the past, but that train has sailed.”
After 115 days of hearings, the trial against 47 Hong Kong opposition members enters a several-month break. The defendants have testified, witnesses have been heard, and evidence has been reviewed. Finally, at the end of November, the prosecution and the defense will give their closing arguments.
On the surface, the question is whether the defendants conspired to undermine the functioning of the Hong Kong government. In reality, however, it is a question of whether the city’s constitution, the Basic Law, which came into force when Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, is still of any reliable significance. Or has the central government in Beijing finally taken control by introducing the National Security Law in 2020?
The odds are against the defendants. Only about a third of them have even invoked their constitutional rights under the Basic Law since the start of the trial in February – namely, the right to block the city’s budget through a democratic majority in parliament and to replace the head of government in new elections. Even before the trial began, Beijing representatives in the city had already declared the opposition’s political intentions an illegal conspiracy.
Specifically, the trial is about organizing primaries of the Democratic camp in mid-2020, which were supposed to find the most promising candidates for the parliamentary elections. This process was a thorn in Beijing’s side. The National Security Law was hastily implemented in the midst of those elections. This allowed the primaries to be prosecuted for violating the law.
31 defendants who had run as candidates in the primaries preemptively pleaded guilty – probably out of fear of political influence on the judiciary – hoping to mitigate their sentences. After all, the defendants face life sentences.
“I believe there is a very high probability that all defendants will be convicted,” says Australian lawyer Kevin Yam, who works for the Center for Asian Law at Georgetown University in Washington, among others. Yam is unable to leave Australia for security reasons after the Hong Kong government put a bounty of one million HK dollars on him for his political activism and issued an international warrant for his arrest.
Yam says it is painful for him to see that the verdicts have apparently been handed down long ago. In his opinion, the three judges in the West Kowloon courthouse on the Hong Kong mainland left no other impression. “They pompously lectured the defendants on political issues concerning Western democracies. That is not really the issue of the trial,” Yam explains.
And while the three judges were able to examine vast amounts of video footage of Democratic camp press conferences from 2020 early on, the prosecution’s request to present more footage as evidence was rejected curtly by the chair. There was no need to “waste any more time.”
The National Security Law empowers Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, John Lee, to appoint judges for such cases personally. Lee may also dismiss judges if he sees national security threatened. However, the criteria for this are not specified. “This is like a US president appointing judges to decide on a national abortion law,” says Yam.
Because of the unusual practice, Lee has already received mail from the United Nations Special Rapporteurs on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers. In their letter, they expressed concern about Hong Kong’s appointment practice because they believe it could “undermine the independence of the judiciary.” The UN recommends in its Basic Principles that judges be appointed for life and that “all disciplinary, suspension or removal proceedings shall be determined in accordance with established standards of judicial conduct.”
Lee’s stance is well known. Before his political career, he served as Hong Kong’s chief of police. Under his leadership, the city’s security forces cracked down on protesters in the 2019 mass protests. Lee is considered a stiff technocrat installed as head of government by Beijing mainly because of this past. That the opposition receives little consideration under his direction is hardly surprising.
The trial against the 47 activists was initially scheduled for 90 days, but dragged on considerably. This also has implications for the trial against publisher Jimmy Lai, who is facing a separate trial due to his prominence. His trial is also based on alleged violations of the National Security Law. Because Judge Alex Lee has been appointed for both cases, Lai’s trial will likely be delayed until December.
Because of Lee’s dual duty, the verdicts against the 47 may not be handed down until the summer of next year.
The former CEO of Alibaba, Daniel Zhang, is leaving the Chinese tech company in a surprise move. Zhang was only replaced as head of Alibaba in June, but was supposed to remain a board member and focus primarily on the cloud computing division.
The official departure was simple. “The board of our company expresses its deepest appreciation to Mr Zhang for his contributions to Alibaba Group over the past 16 years,” the group’s written statement said. Eddie Wu will succeed Zhang in his role as CEO of the cloud division.
Wu already replaced Zhang as group CEO in September. At that time, Zhang was supposed to separate cloud computing from the Alibaba Group as part of an extensive restructuring. The head office now says that Zhang’s departure will not change the plans to separate cloud computing.
Zhang spent eight years at the helm of Alibaba and was largely responsible for the rise of the former online retailer from Hangzhou in eastern China to one of China’s largest and most diversified IT groups. Recently, however, Alibaba has suffered from weakened consumer sentiment in the country. In addition, the Chinese government took decisive action against the influential tech industry. rad
China plans to invest several billion euros in a copper and gold mine in eastern Serbia. This emerges from an agreement signed by the two countries over the weekend. According to the agreement, the Chinese state-owned company Zijin Mining will invest around 3.5 billion euros in a mine near the town of Bor. In addition, the Chinese company will provide 200 million US dollars for the development of a 300 MW solar power plant project.
Serbia’s Minister of Mines and Energy, Dubravka Handanović, signed the relevant memoranda of understanding at the “One China, One Serbia” investment forum in Xiamen over the weekend. The forum was part of the 23rd China International Fair for Investment & Trade, where Serbia was this year’s guest of honor.
In 2018, Zijin bought Serbia’s only copper and gold complex when the government in Belgrade auctioned off the debt-ridden company to save thousands of jobs in an impoverished mining region. The acquisition in Serbia – and further investments in Congo and Tibet – made Zijin one of the world’s largest copper mining companies alongside Western producers such as Rio Tinto, Anglo American and Antofagasta. The company aims to produce about 1.2 million tons of copper by 2025. This would be a sixfold increase compared to 2017. rad
What would an invasion of Taiwan mean for the powerful financial hub of the USA? This is the question that representatives of the China Committee of the US House of Representatives are exploring in New York on Tuesday. The “Taiwan war game” with leaders from financial and business circles, as the Financial Times calls it, aims to highlight American awareness of systemic risks of China investments. The simulation will be live-streamed and headed by Mark Gallagher. The 39-year-old Republican has chaired the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party since February. The Biden administration set up the new committee.
An ex-soldier and security expert, he found his China focus in a rather roundabout way. Before being elected to Congress, Gallagher served in the US Marine Corps as an intelligence officer for seven years, from 2006 to 2013. He served two combat tours in Iraq’s Al-Anbar province and was part of Centcom, the regional command for the Middle East and Central Asia. In his role as a counterintelligence officer, he assessed US military strategy in the Middle East.
In addition to his military service, Gallagher has earned several university degrees: In 2006, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at the elite Princeton University. After his first deployment to Iraq, he studied Science in Strategic Intelligence at the National Intelligence University and graduated in 2010. Additional degrees from the prestigious Georgetown University followed in 2012 and 2013, and he earned his PhD in international relations in 2015.
He then worked as the lead Republican staffer for the Middle East and Counterterrorism on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was a foreign policy adviser to the governor of his home state of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. It ultimately went to Donald Trump. When Wisconsin’s then-incumbent representative in the House of Representatives did not run for re-election, Gallagher chose to run. Since 2017, he has represented the 8th district of the Midwest state in the US House of Representatives.
Through his studies and previous career, Gallagher has a focus on foreign policy and security issues. Since the beginning of his term, he has increasingly turned his attention to China issues. He publicly condemned the arrest of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and was instrumental in drafting legislation banning US agencies and medical services from buying drugs manufactured in China.
In February, he was elected chair of the China committee. He also chairs the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and is a member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Gallagher, however, does not see himself as a career politician: “I treat this like a deployment,” he told the Wisconsin regional station of US broadcaster NBC. “I think this is a pivotal moment right now when we have to get a few big things right in order to beat China, in order to prevent a war in the short term, and beat China in the long term.”
Gallagher is seen as a rising star with promising career prospects in the Republican Party. The election as committee chair has given the 39-year-old a prime opportunity to distinguish himself in a particular field, says Craig Gilbert, former Washington Bureau chief for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who has followed Gallagher’s career for some time. He says Gallagher has now found his niche with China.
By his own account, Gallagher still sees a lack of urgency in the US debate about the competition with the People’s Republic in US politics. “I think that’s part of my job as chairman of the select committee on China, is to inject a sense of urgency into this competition. To wake my colleagues up,” he says. He made headlines with his demand to ban TikTok. “The issue with TikTok is that it’s not just highly addictive for kids which it is, and it’s increasing depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation among young kids. That’s why I call it digital fentanyl.”
China could also retrieve users’ locations and gather other data through the app application. In his view, this leaves US citizens vulnerable to Beijing. “It’s as if in the Cold War, we would have allowed the KGB to buy ABC, NBC, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and that probably would understate the scope of the problem.”
Gallagher also sees the beginning of a new Cold War in the current tensions between the two superpowers. “What makes this Cold War so difficult and so complex than for the better part of three decades now we have been integrating China into the global economy and in many cases, we have become conjoined twins with China economically so we’re trying to figure out where and how we separate.”
Gallagher’s statements apparently strike a chord in the otherwise divided US political scene. He is receiving praise from Republicans and Democrats in the House of Representatives. However, his foreign policy focus has drawn criticism from political opponents in Wisconsin. Observers do not rule out that Gallagher would also like to move toward the Senate in the future with his China focus. Amelie Richter
China’s agriculture not only produces huge amounts of rice, but also picturesque landscapes like here in Liuzhou in the southern Chinese province of Guangxi.
