Will you get vaccinated against Covid-19 with a vaccine from the Chinese company Sinopharm? The question is now on the table. Before today’s vaccination summit of the Chancellor, it is clear: If the European regulatory authority approves, the Health Minister intends to use the vaccine. By the way, Hungary is not waiting for it; the vaccination chaos in Brussels in recent weeks has prompted the EU neighbor to order millions of doses from Sinopharm.
It becomes increasingly clear: The rigid focus on the 50th incidence borders on self-delusion. The pandemic will not disappear in the near future; long-term strategies are needed. Resentment and self-centredness will only get in the way. Asian countries, democracies as well as autocracies have long since shown that zero-Covid strategies can successfully contain the spread of the virus. This means: consistent regional lockdowns, even at the lowest case numbers, and digital tracking of the infection chains. We will have to open up to Asian solutions. Rejecting them on the grounds that they cannot be used in our liberal societies will get us nowhere.
Allow me to add a note on my own behalf. So that we, of the China.Table team, know even better what you are interested in, please take a few minutes for some questions.
Thank you and have a successful week,
China’s Belt and Road Initiative is considered a project of the century. The Chinese leadership brings out the big guns: The new Silk Road is to connect continents with new infrastructure and penetrate the Arctic and cyberspace. Critics, on the other hand, see imperial efforts by China and debt-trap diplomacy. China would “cunningly and strategically march into the future” and drive dozens of countries into dependency.
In his book “The Emperor’s New Road – China and the Project of the Century”, Jonathan E. Hillman, Director of the Reconnecting Asia Project of the think tank Center for Strategic & International Relations, shows: The New Silk Road must be accompanied critically. But a centrally controlled master plan to subjugate the world is not discernible. Rather, there are diverging interests that jeopardize the success of the New Silk Road. Chinese companies – including seven of the ten largest global construction companies – use the New Silk Road to conquer foreign markets. They paid no attention to the financial consequences for host countries nor to the advice of Chinese embassies to refrain from unprofitable projects.
Within China, the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs fought over influence on the Silk Road – the former with economic interests, the latter with political interests. And China’s state-owned banks were using the New Silk Road to finance exports. The highly inefficient lending practices of banks within China do not bode well for the project’s success, Hillman said. Additionally: It is not uncommon for partner countries to be ruled by autocrats who use glitzy large-scale projects to mobilize their supporters and boost their prestige. It is not uncommon for projects they push to be unprofitable.
Through all these factors, China is contributing significantly to the increase in the debt of its partner countries. But there is no plan behind this to transfer infrastructure into Chinese ownership. The frequently cited example of alleged debt-trap diplomacy – the Hambantota port in Sri Lanka – is rather an evidence of poor planning and divergent interests.
Sri Lanka’s political leaders pushed ahead with the expensive port project without pursuing a larger development plan for the country, even though the port in the capital, Colombo, was underutilized and better located. Chinese construction companies saw the opportunity for a quick profit. And officials in China did not stop the unprofitable port project for fear of losing prestige. Sri Lanka’s over-indebtedness led China to take over the port for a 99-year lease. But Hilmann said it was wrong to interpret this as a victory for China and to believe that China always wins even if the New Silk Road projects fail. Rather, he said, the Hambantota port becomes a warning of what can happen to both project partners if project planning is poor.
A World Bank analysis found that in one-third to 50 percent of all Silk Road transportation projects in Eurasia, costs exceeded revenues. China is also venturing into many markets that other countries tend to avoid. Many Silk Road projects are concluded with corrupt regimes and states with very poor or no credit ratings. This increases the risk of credit defaults for China.
Hillman names Pakistan as an example. China seems to be repeating the mistakes of previous great powers: Pakistan does not have a stringent development plan. China is not pushing for reforms, which Hillman, however, sees as the basis for the success of infrastructure projects. Chinese companies implementing New Silk Road projects in Pakistan, on the other hand, complain about corruption, delays and a poor payment record of Pakistani partners. But China’s partners are not always corrupt or at the mercy of the great power. For Southeast Asian countries, Hillman shows that smaller states often succeed in playing off large partner countries such as Japan and China against each other and thus negotiating good credit and project conditions.
Hillman shows China is building up overcapacity with many New Silk Road projects. It seems that China is proceeding with the Silk Road similarly to its own country. Chinese growth is projected onto partner countries. Oversized projects are assumed to become profitable in the future. But this seems a fallacy and leads to a high debt risk.
China is also threatened with a loss of reputation if inadequate labor and environmental standards lead to conflicts in the partner country. Hillman cites the port of Piraeus, which was extremely profitable under Chinese management. After the takeover, however, labor standards fell, leading to resentment among Greek workers.
Hillman concludes that China can learn from failures and make the New Silk Road a resounding success if China launches multilateral projects and applies higher standards for lending and project selection. However, it is more likely that China’s “New Silk Road failures will shake the world,” Hillman writes. This is because China’s New Silk Road partners would need to achieve consistently high growth to repay their significant debts.
Unfortunately, Hillman’s analysis does not address how a massive credit default would affect China’s economy and subsequently the global economy. What is also missing in Hillman’s book is a look at successful Silk Road projects and whether China draws conclusions from them. Nor does Hillman address China’s massive funding of fossil fuel projects abroad and what future conflicts might emerge as a result. Despite these shortcomings, Hillman’s book provides much food for thought that is all too often overlooked in the German debate on the New Silk Road.
After years of aggressive expansion, the southern Chinese travel conglomerate and major investor HNA has filed for insolvency. HNA announced on WeChat that a court in Hainan had ordered a restructuring. The group is no longer able to service its debts. The exact amount of liabilities is yet to be determined. The most recent available information is from 2019, when the company reported its debt at ¥707 billion (€90 billion). During the course of the coronavirus crisis, this already high amount is likely to have significantly increased. In 2019, several state-owned banks, including the Bank of China, Agricultural Bank and ICBC, joined forces to provide a major support credit. Now, the patience of the government and its financial actors has reached its limit. The surviving subsidiary companies are expected to become independent in the near future.
The group’s best-known brand is Hainan Airlines, which German travelers know as the provider of an important direct connection from Berlin to Beijing. HNA Group is best known in Germany as the buyer of Hahn Airport. It was also a shareholder in Deutsche Bank from 2017 to 2019 and a short-term employer of former Minister Philipp Roesler. Since the turn of the millennium, the company has attracted attention with its increasingly expensive and aggressive expansion strategy over time. With funds from Chinese banks and international bond investors, it intended to buy a global tourism conglomerate.
For example, HNA acquired significant stakes in the Hilton hotel chain and airline service providers Swissport and Gategroup. In total, business services have registered acquisitions worth $50 billion. However, the group did not focus on its core business, where the acquired companies might have cooperated in the long run, making analysts critical from the start. Instead, the management has also taken hold of many holdings that have nothing to do with travel – for example, Deutsche Bank. The Chinese group also bought New York entrepreneur Anthony Scaramucci’s finance firm so he could serve as spokesman for US President Donald Trump in the White House. Both parts of the deal turn out to be spectacular miscalculations. Scaramucci failed in his role as spokesman; HNA could not use the shares.
The rumbling already started three years ago. Rumors began to spread that HNA had been asking several banks to extend loans and needed higher and higher credit lines to roll over its old debts. Managers at Ningbo Commerce Bank, for example, became suspicious when they realized that HNA had submitted the same securities as collateral for two different loans. Since then, the bad news did not subside. Covid has now finished the group of companies. The insolvency thus comes as little surprise.
Airport operator Flughafen Frankfurt-Hahn GmbH said on Saturday that the insolvency of the parent company would not affect the German site. “Nothing will change in our cooperation with all airlines, customers, authorities, and partners.” The dpa news agency reported that the state of Rhineland-Palatinate wants to contact the Chinese consulate general in Frankfurt for more details.
The Hainan Airlines brand is likely to be preserved; after all, it is well-established in the aviation market. But if the parent company goes bust during the biggest crisis in air travel since World War II, of all times, a hard time is guaranteed. The local government doesn’t seem to keep a protective hand over the company at the moment either. Last summer, it engineered the creation of a local rival airline, Sanya International Airlines.
One piece of advice that Henry Kissinger gave Joe Biden is to do everything possible to avoid war with China. This would mean a catastrophe on the scale of the First World War. What is the likelihood of a military conflict between the US and China, and what role should Europe play?
When President Nixon and Henry Kissinger pursued rapprochement with China in the early 1970s against the backdrop of the Cold War, the country was on the brink of the abyss: Its share of the global gross national product was less than 5 percent, in world trade China was still insignificant, it was completely isolated internationally and technologically far behind.
The reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 made the country the world’s second-largest economic power within a generation. Today, President Xi Jinping’s stated goal is to catch up to or even overtake the US by 2049, give China its rightful place at the center of the world stage and realize the renewal of the Chinese dream.
Economic development has been accompanied by an increase in military power that has led China to take geostrategic initiatives that are perfectly legitimate from China’s point of view but seen by the US as a threat to its status. Beijing claims large parts of the South China Sea, it has built a military base in Djibouti, which is still small but is seen as a base for further expansion, and it has created dependencies with the Belt and Road Initiative, based on which its own vision of the world is supported.
According to historian Graham Allison, today’s dispute between the US and China mirrors many historical conflicts between the great powers. Allison has studied 16 cases over the past 500 years in which a newly emerging power challenged the status quo of an existing power. In twelve of these cases, war ensued, and in only four cases avoided.
China, as the second largest and, in the foreseeable future, even the largest economic power in the world, sees itself as entitled to demand a realignment of the international order that takes its core interests into account. It has entered into a competition of systems and wants to contribute its own social order. At the same time, it seeks revenge for the humiliation inflicted by colonization in the 19th century and is sensitive to a lack of respect to a degree that often arouses astonishment.
The US accuses China of ingratitude for its support in economic construction and claims that Beijing wants to change the world order to achieve authoritarian goals and its claim to hegemony. It also says China is investing large sums in developing world-class armed forces to outperform the US. Thus, it poses a significant threat to world peace and freedom.
Allison’s research shows that however unlikely and undesirable a military conflict may be, and however disastrous its foreseeable consequences, this has not prevented war in the past and is likely to continue to do so today. The prerequisite for military conflict is not the intentions of the emerging power. It is the potential threat to the established power and the incompatibility of that threat with the status quo. It doesn’t take ‘big occasions’ for war to break out. Disagreements on side issues have often enough escalated into war.
Among the important geostrategic challenges of our time is the pressure that the emergence of a nation with a millennia-old civilization and a population of 1.4 billion is exerting on the established international order. Never before has a country advanced so rapidly into so many dimensions of power, imposing a new balance on the world with its sheer size. It can be assumed that the Middle Kingdom has the self-image and the ambition to be the leading nation, not only in Asia but worldwide, and to replace the USA in this role.
From a historical perspective, a military conflict between the two powers is not only possible but even more likely than a peaceful outcome. How the US and China manage the tension between competition and cooperation will be crucial in the current decade. A difference to historical events is the global problems of our time. The resulting interdependencies and trust that should emerge in the joint search for solutions are positive factors. A central role in avoiding war is the lines of communication between the governments of the two countries. Here, President Biden must ensure resilient structures. Europe must avoid becoming a pawn in the game of powers. It is unequivocally on the side of the United States and would be dragged into a war. Europe’s role is to take its rightful place between the US and China based on increased competitiveness, to bring its good relations with the Middle Kingdom to bear and to act as a mediator between the adversaries.
Dr Gerhard Hinterhaeuser is a partner at the management consulting firm Bingmann Pflueger International. He lives in Asia and Germany and was a member of the management board of the state-owned company PICC Asset Management Co. Ltd. in Shanghai from 2006 to 2014.
Thomas Heberer has traveled to China every year for field research for more than four decades. The political scientist and East Asian scholar, holding a senior professorship at the University of Duisburg-Essen, is considered one of the most distinguished China experts in the world. He gained his knowledge and intuition for the people of China through his many research trips, often lasting months, across the entire country. This gives him a differentiated inside view of this vast, rapidly changing world power.
The Covid pandemic is now preventing Heberer’s visits to China. “There is so much happening in the People’s Republic at the moment,” he says, “but, unfortunately, I catch little of the mood of the people in the country.” He would be keen to hear what people say about China’s pandemic management, Hong Kong or Xinjiang. However, since he can only maintain contact with his network in China via digital channels, communication is severely limited.
One of Thomas Heberer’s current research focuses is how the Chinese state tries to socially discipline its people as part of a great modernization process. Measures such as the social credit system, detailed rules of conduct, surveillance of the Internet and public places are ultimately part of this attempt to control not only the economy and society but also the thinking and behavior of the people. Whereas in Europe, religion and the church, along with states, have historically played a significant role in this, it is only the state that imposes discipline from the top down in China, says Heberer. “China wants to create an all-encompassing, modern polity and a world power by 2050, on a par with the US.”
Thomas Heberer could have retired as early as 2013. “But I don’t feel like it yet,” he says. He is too fascinated by research in this country that is so difficult to understand. Enigmatic China caught his eye as a child after his mother gave him a geography book. “I still have that book today,” he says.
Thomas Heberer first traveled to China as a doctoral student in 1975, the time of the Cultural Revolution. Two years later, he became an editor and translator at the Publishing House for Foreign Language Literature in Beijing. As a contemporary witness, he experienced the early phase of China’s reform and opening-up policy under Deng Xiaoping firsthand. “All of a sudden, an enormous economic driving force unfolded,” he says. “And, suddenly, people also opened up and began to talk.”
The experience has had a significant impact on him. Understanding how the different people in China think and feel, unraveling this society and nation that is difficult for outsiders to understand – still drives him. Adrian Meyer
Will you get vaccinated against Covid-19 with a vaccine from the Chinese company Sinopharm? The question is now on the table. Before today’s vaccination summit of the Chancellor, it is clear: If the European regulatory authority approves, the Health Minister intends to use the vaccine. By the way, Hungary is not waiting for it; the vaccination chaos in Brussels in recent weeks has prompted the EU neighbor to order millions of doses from Sinopharm.
It becomes increasingly clear: The rigid focus on the 50th incidence borders on self-delusion. The pandemic will not disappear in the near future; long-term strategies are needed. Resentment and self-centredness will only get in the way. Asian countries, democracies as well as autocracies have long since shown that zero-Covid strategies can successfully contain the spread of the virus. This means: consistent regional lockdowns, even at the lowest case numbers, and digital tracking of the infection chains. We will have to open up to Asian solutions. Rejecting them on the grounds that they cannot be used in our liberal societies will get us nowhere.
Allow me to add a note on my own behalf. So that we, of the China.Table team, know even better what you are interested in, please take a few minutes for some questions.
Thank you and have a successful week,
China’s Belt and Road Initiative is considered a project of the century. The Chinese leadership brings out the big guns: The new Silk Road is to connect continents with new infrastructure and penetrate the Arctic and cyberspace. Critics, on the other hand, see imperial efforts by China and debt-trap diplomacy. China would “cunningly and strategically march into the future” and drive dozens of countries into dependency.
In his book “The Emperor’s New Road – China and the Project of the Century”, Jonathan E. Hillman, Director of the Reconnecting Asia Project of the think tank Center for Strategic & International Relations, shows: The New Silk Road must be accompanied critically. But a centrally controlled master plan to subjugate the world is not discernible. Rather, there are diverging interests that jeopardize the success of the New Silk Road. Chinese companies – including seven of the ten largest global construction companies – use the New Silk Road to conquer foreign markets. They paid no attention to the financial consequences for host countries nor to the advice of Chinese embassies to refrain from unprofitable projects.
Within China, the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs fought over influence on the Silk Road – the former with economic interests, the latter with political interests. And China’s state-owned banks were using the New Silk Road to finance exports. The highly inefficient lending practices of banks within China do not bode well for the project’s success, Hillman said. Additionally: It is not uncommon for partner countries to be ruled by autocrats who use glitzy large-scale projects to mobilize their supporters and boost their prestige. It is not uncommon for projects they push to be unprofitable.
Through all these factors, China is contributing significantly to the increase in the debt of its partner countries. But there is no plan behind this to transfer infrastructure into Chinese ownership. The frequently cited example of alleged debt-trap diplomacy – the Hambantota port in Sri Lanka – is rather an evidence of poor planning and divergent interests.
Sri Lanka’s political leaders pushed ahead with the expensive port project without pursuing a larger development plan for the country, even though the port in the capital, Colombo, was underutilized and better located. Chinese construction companies saw the opportunity for a quick profit. And officials in China did not stop the unprofitable port project for fear of losing prestige. Sri Lanka’s over-indebtedness led China to take over the port for a 99-year lease. But Hilmann said it was wrong to interpret this as a victory for China and to believe that China always wins even if the New Silk Road projects fail. Rather, he said, the Hambantota port becomes a warning of what can happen to both project partners if project planning is poor.
A World Bank analysis found that in one-third to 50 percent of all Silk Road transportation projects in Eurasia, costs exceeded revenues. China is also venturing into many markets that other countries tend to avoid. Many Silk Road projects are concluded with corrupt regimes and states with very poor or no credit ratings. This increases the risk of credit defaults for China.
Hillman names Pakistan as an example. China seems to be repeating the mistakes of previous great powers: Pakistan does not have a stringent development plan. China is not pushing for reforms, which Hillman, however, sees as the basis for the success of infrastructure projects. Chinese companies implementing New Silk Road projects in Pakistan, on the other hand, complain about corruption, delays and a poor payment record of Pakistani partners. But China’s partners are not always corrupt or at the mercy of the great power. For Southeast Asian countries, Hillman shows that smaller states often succeed in playing off large partner countries such as Japan and China against each other and thus negotiating good credit and project conditions.
Hillman shows China is building up overcapacity with many New Silk Road projects. It seems that China is proceeding with the Silk Road similarly to its own country. Chinese growth is projected onto partner countries. Oversized projects are assumed to become profitable in the future. But this seems a fallacy and leads to a high debt risk.
China is also threatened with a loss of reputation if inadequate labor and environmental standards lead to conflicts in the partner country. Hillman cites the port of Piraeus, which was extremely profitable under Chinese management. After the takeover, however, labor standards fell, leading to resentment among Greek workers.
Hillman concludes that China can learn from failures and make the New Silk Road a resounding success if China launches multilateral projects and applies higher standards for lending and project selection. However, it is more likely that China’s “New Silk Road failures will shake the world,” Hillman writes. This is because China’s New Silk Road partners would need to achieve consistently high growth to repay their significant debts.
Unfortunately, Hillman’s analysis does not address how a massive credit default would affect China’s economy and subsequently the global economy. What is also missing in Hillman’s book is a look at successful Silk Road projects and whether China draws conclusions from them. Nor does Hillman address China’s massive funding of fossil fuel projects abroad and what future conflicts might emerge as a result. Despite these shortcomings, Hillman’s book provides much food for thought that is all too often overlooked in the German debate on the New Silk Road.
After years of aggressive expansion, the southern Chinese travel conglomerate and major investor HNA has filed for insolvency. HNA announced on WeChat that a court in Hainan had ordered a restructuring. The group is no longer able to service its debts. The exact amount of liabilities is yet to be determined. The most recent available information is from 2019, when the company reported its debt at ¥707 billion (€90 billion). During the course of the coronavirus crisis, this already high amount is likely to have significantly increased. In 2019, several state-owned banks, including the Bank of China, Agricultural Bank and ICBC, joined forces to provide a major support credit. Now, the patience of the government and its financial actors has reached its limit. The surviving subsidiary companies are expected to become independent in the near future.
The group’s best-known brand is Hainan Airlines, which German travelers know as the provider of an important direct connection from Berlin to Beijing. HNA Group is best known in Germany as the buyer of Hahn Airport. It was also a shareholder in Deutsche Bank from 2017 to 2019 and a short-term employer of former Minister Philipp Roesler. Since the turn of the millennium, the company has attracted attention with its increasingly expensive and aggressive expansion strategy over time. With funds from Chinese banks and international bond investors, it intended to buy a global tourism conglomerate.
For example, HNA acquired significant stakes in the Hilton hotel chain and airline service providers Swissport and Gategroup. In total, business services have registered acquisitions worth $50 billion. However, the group did not focus on its core business, where the acquired companies might have cooperated in the long run, making analysts critical from the start. Instead, the management has also taken hold of many holdings that have nothing to do with travel – for example, Deutsche Bank. The Chinese group also bought New York entrepreneur Anthony Scaramucci’s finance firm so he could serve as spokesman for US President Donald Trump in the White House. Both parts of the deal turn out to be spectacular miscalculations. Scaramucci failed in his role as spokesman; HNA could not use the shares.
The rumbling already started three years ago. Rumors began to spread that HNA had been asking several banks to extend loans and needed higher and higher credit lines to roll over its old debts. Managers at Ningbo Commerce Bank, for example, became suspicious when they realized that HNA had submitted the same securities as collateral for two different loans. Since then, the bad news did not subside. Covid has now finished the group of companies. The insolvency thus comes as little surprise.
Airport operator Flughafen Frankfurt-Hahn GmbH said on Saturday that the insolvency of the parent company would not affect the German site. “Nothing will change in our cooperation with all airlines, customers, authorities, and partners.” The dpa news agency reported that the state of Rhineland-Palatinate wants to contact the Chinese consulate general in Frankfurt for more details.
The Hainan Airlines brand is likely to be preserved; after all, it is well-established in the aviation market. But if the parent company goes bust during the biggest crisis in air travel since World War II, of all times, a hard time is guaranteed. The local government doesn’t seem to keep a protective hand over the company at the moment either. Last summer, it engineered the creation of a local rival airline, Sanya International Airlines.
One piece of advice that Henry Kissinger gave Joe Biden is to do everything possible to avoid war with China. This would mean a catastrophe on the scale of the First World War. What is the likelihood of a military conflict between the US and China, and what role should Europe play?
When President Nixon and Henry Kissinger pursued rapprochement with China in the early 1970s against the backdrop of the Cold War, the country was on the brink of the abyss: Its share of the global gross national product was less than 5 percent, in world trade China was still insignificant, it was completely isolated internationally and technologically far behind.
The reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 made the country the world’s second-largest economic power within a generation. Today, President Xi Jinping’s stated goal is to catch up to or even overtake the US by 2049, give China its rightful place at the center of the world stage and realize the renewal of the Chinese dream.
Economic development has been accompanied by an increase in military power that has led China to take geostrategic initiatives that are perfectly legitimate from China’s point of view but seen by the US as a threat to its status. Beijing claims large parts of the South China Sea, it has built a military base in Djibouti, which is still small but is seen as a base for further expansion, and it has created dependencies with the Belt and Road Initiative, based on which its own vision of the world is supported.
According to historian Graham Allison, today’s dispute between the US and China mirrors many historical conflicts between the great powers. Allison has studied 16 cases over the past 500 years in which a newly emerging power challenged the status quo of an existing power. In twelve of these cases, war ensued, and in only four cases avoided.
China, as the second largest and, in the foreseeable future, even the largest economic power in the world, sees itself as entitled to demand a realignment of the international order that takes its core interests into account. It has entered into a competition of systems and wants to contribute its own social order. At the same time, it seeks revenge for the humiliation inflicted by colonization in the 19th century and is sensitive to a lack of respect to a degree that often arouses astonishment.
The US accuses China of ingratitude for its support in economic construction and claims that Beijing wants to change the world order to achieve authoritarian goals and its claim to hegemony. It also says China is investing large sums in developing world-class armed forces to outperform the US. Thus, it poses a significant threat to world peace and freedom.
Allison’s research shows that however unlikely and undesirable a military conflict may be, and however disastrous its foreseeable consequences, this has not prevented war in the past and is likely to continue to do so today. The prerequisite for military conflict is not the intentions of the emerging power. It is the potential threat to the established power and the incompatibility of that threat with the status quo. It doesn’t take ‘big occasions’ for war to break out. Disagreements on side issues have often enough escalated into war.
Among the important geostrategic challenges of our time is the pressure that the emergence of a nation with a millennia-old civilization and a population of 1.4 billion is exerting on the established international order. Never before has a country advanced so rapidly into so many dimensions of power, imposing a new balance on the world with its sheer size. It can be assumed that the Middle Kingdom has the self-image and the ambition to be the leading nation, not only in Asia but worldwide, and to replace the USA in this role.
From a historical perspective, a military conflict between the two powers is not only possible but even more likely than a peaceful outcome. How the US and China manage the tension between competition and cooperation will be crucial in the current decade. A difference to historical events is the global problems of our time. The resulting interdependencies and trust that should emerge in the joint search for solutions are positive factors. A central role in avoiding war is the lines of communication between the governments of the two countries. Here, President Biden must ensure resilient structures. Europe must avoid becoming a pawn in the game of powers. It is unequivocally on the side of the United States and would be dragged into a war. Europe’s role is to take its rightful place between the US and China based on increased competitiveness, to bring its good relations with the Middle Kingdom to bear and to act as a mediator between the adversaries.
Dr Gerhard Hinterhaeuser is a partner at the management consulting firm Bingmann Pflueger International. He lives in Asia and Germany and was a member of the management board of the state-owned company PICC Asset Management Co. Ltd. in Shanghai from 2006 to 2014.
Thomas Heberer has traveled to China every year for field research for more than four decades. The political scientist and East Asian scholar, holding a senior professorship at the University of Duisburg-Essen, is considered one of the most distinguished China experts in the world. He gained his knowledge and intuition for the people of China through his many research trips, often lasting months, across the entire country. This gives him a differentiated inside view of this vast, rapidly changing world power.
The Covid pandemic is now preventing Heberer’s visits to China. “There is so much happening in the People’s Republic at the moment,” he says, “but, unfortunately, I catch little of the mood of the people in the country.” He would be keen to hear what people say about China’s pandemic management, Hong Kong or Xinjiang. However, since he can only maintain contact with his network in China via digital channels, communication is severely limited.
One of Thomas Heberer’s current research focuses is how the Chinese state tries to socially discipline its people as part of a great modernization process. Measures such as the social credit system, detailed rules of conduct, surveillance of the Internet and public places are ultimately part of this attempt to control not only the economy and society but also the thinking and behavior of the people. Whereas in Europe, religion and the church, along with states, have historically played a significant role in this, it is only the state that imposes discipline from the top down in China, says Heberer. “China wants to create an all-encompassing, modern polity and a world power by 2050, on a par with the US.”
Thomas Heberer could have retired as early as 2013. “But I don’t feel like it yet,” he says. He is too fascinated by research in this country that is so difficult to understand. Enigmatic China caught his eye as a child after his mother gave him a geography book. “I still have that book today,” he says.
Thomas Heberer first traveled to China as a doctoral student in 1975, the time of the Cultural Revolution. Two years later, he became an editor and translator at the Publishing House for Foreign Language Literature in Beijing. As a contemporary witness, he experienced the early phase of China’s reform and opening-up policy under Deng Xiaoping firsthand. “All of a sudden, an enormous economic driving force unfolded,” he says. “And, suddenly, people also opened up and began to talk.”
The experience has had a significant impact on him. Understanding how the different people in China think and feel, unraveling this society and nation that is difficult for outsiders to understand – still drives him. Adrian Meyer
