Having already imposed tariffs on electric cars and batteries from China, the US Department of Commerce has now also set its sights on the software and hardware in connected and autonomous vehicles. The government fears that Chinese cars could pass on sensitive data to China.
The ban could effectively exclude Chinese car brands from the American market and accelerate a development that will also pose a challenge for European manufacturers: The emergence of several large, independent tech stacks in autonomous driving in the USA, China and Europe. Car manufacturers will then have to localize strongly. The autonomous driving market will become increasingly fragmented. If it does not keep an eye on developments, Germany’s automotive industry could fall even further behind here, too, while China and the US make even bigger strides.
China’s Confucius Institutes have a reputation for being the long arm of the state, especially in the West. Less well known are Beijing’s so-called Luban Institutes, also named after a quasi-mythical figure in Chinese history. Luban was a craftsman who is said to have lived from 507 to 444 BC and is revered in his homeland as a kind of Chinese Da Vinci.
Luban Institutes are overseas vocational schools where China trains specialists in areas such as mechatronics and new energy, particularly in emerging countries. They aim to provide urgently needed experts for Chinese companies overseas. In this way, Beijing also aims to establish its innovations and norms as international standards. And on top of that, China is also scoring soft power points with them. Johnny Erling took a closer look at these educational institutions based on the German model.
Tariffs of 100 percent on electric cars and electric vehicle batteries from China are already in place. The US also wants to ban software and hardware for connected vehicles and autonomous driving. The US Department of Commerce cited safety concerns as the reason on Monday. The US fears that such cars will gather data on US drivers and infrastructure and pass it on to China. There are also concerns regarding the possible manipulation of networked vehicles and navigation systems.
Another reason is probably to protect the domestic automotive industry from strong competition from China, as the ban would effectively exclude Chinese brands from the American market. Cars from German and other international manufacturers could be affected if they use hardware or software that falls under the regulation.
However, the potential US ban also points to another development that experts have been observing for some time: The emergence of at least three large autonomous driving tech stacks centered around Waymo in the US, Mobileye in Europe and Baidu and other companies in China.
A development with tangible consequences for car manufacturers. “Due to the different technologies, companies like Mercedes and Volkswagen will basically have to localize everything,” predicts Tu Le, China car expert at consulting firm Sino Auto Insights. “The split will mean that companies will have to make decisions more quickly and take greater risks.”
Ansgar Baums, Senior Advisor at Sinolytics and author of the book “Tech Cold War,” sees connectivity as a particular driver of the divide. The Chinese government is advancing a cloud-based autonomous vehicle ecosystem to tackle urban city traffic problems more effectively. “Mercedes and Volkswagen have decided to stay in China and are being pulled further and further into this Chinese connectivity world. They have to invest a lot of money in Chinese technology – Chinese standards, encryption algorithms, data formats: It’s all being defined in China for China.”
In other words, if companies want to continue selling in China, they must be and become part of this infrastructure. On the other hand, Europe and America will also have their own connectivity standards that companies must invest in, says Baums. “In the future, every euro spent on development will have to decide whether it is better invested in China or the West. This is a dilemma for companies that play on both sides.”
At some point, Europe might also impose a similar ban to that currently being discussed in the USA. Professor Herrmann from the Institute for Mobility at the University of St. Gallen points to the debate in Germany about Huawei. If Chinese cars gradually come to Europe, at some point, the question will be: What data do these cars actually collect, where does it go, and what happens to it?
To prepare for such a situation, Professor Herrmann urges Germany to also provide more funding and investment in autonomous driving R&D. “We need a consolidation of funds to specifically promote large-scale projects. For example, an entire city or region could be geared towards autonomous driving so that all manufacturers can come together and develop there.”
China already has such designated areas where automated driving can be tested. China is heavily promoting autonomous driving. The Chinese Society of Automotive Engineers predicts that by 2030, 20 percent of all vehicles will be able to drive fully autonomously at level 5 and 70 percent will be equipped with at least advanced assistance systems.
In June, nine manufacturers – albeit initially exclusively Chinese – were granted permission to operate their cars on public roads with level 3 highly automated driving. This means that the cars essentially take over the driving task autonomously, a driver may type on their cell phone or watch a movie while behind the wheel, but must be able to intervene at any time within a few seconds if the car issues a warning. And all this in normal – often chaotic – road traffic.
Robot cabs are already being tested in certain city districts. Mercedes-Benz also recently became the first German manufacturer to receive approval in China to carry out tests with fully automated driving at level 4 on designated roads and highways in Beijing. This will allow the company to test multi-sensor perception and system performance for advanced autonomous driving systems. The cars navigate independently. Even sleeping is permitted at level 4.
However, in Germany, this is still a distant dream. This is shown by a trial run with the most innovative system currently available in Germany. The Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot, available for the S-Class, is highly automated at speeds of up to 95 km/h at level 3. The manufacturer calls the system particularly safe because it uses numerous cameras as well as radar and lidar to detect its surroundings.
Even if it is a fascinating feeling to let the car do its thing and not have to look at the road at 95 km/h, there are still numerous restrictions the manufacturer must comply with. Drive Pilot can only be used in the right-hand lane and when another vehicle is driving ahead the S-Class can follow. The car in front must have the correct shape; some trucks and trailers were not recognized in the test. And even a few rain droplets caused the system to switch off – for safety reasons.
Professor Andreas Herrmann sees this as a sign of how far behind development in Germany is. “In China, I drove autonomously in the worst weather, that was no problem at all. The autonomous cabs in San Francisco can do it, too. We just can’t do it yet, because the automotive industry made serious mistakes 10-15 years ago – they underestimated the dynamism with which the car industry is changing. We are currently trying to catch up with electromobility. And once we’ve done that, we’ll soon realize that we’re completely behind in autonomous and connected driving.”
Beijing calls them its Luban workshops 鲁班工坊, the new overseas vocational schools where the People’s Republic has so far mainly educated and trained Africans in high-tech industrial fields. Foreign observers mockingly refer to them as “Confucius Institutes 2.0.” Others see Beijing’s sudden emergence as an active provider in the international education market as a kind of specialized technical reincarnation. Or, depending on one’s point of view, a simple replica. After all, China itself was a recipient country for more than 40 years of German vocational training expertise funded and promoted primarily by development policy through companies such as GTZ (now GIZ) with its diverse technical cooperation projects.
Beijing has now turned the tables and is acting as a development aid worker and high-tech trainer in countries of the Global South. Since 2016, the People’s Republic has established so-called Luban large-scale workshops and training centers in 29 countries in Africa and 33 in Central Asia – largely unnoticed in Europe until now. Thousands of skilled workers have reportedly been successfully trained and hired by China’s companies along the Silk Road. Luo Zhaohui, head of China’s international development cooperation, calls the Luban workshops “China’s golden business cards” overseas.
Beijing wants even more of these business cards. President Xi Jinping has now prioritized China’s vocational school exports. At his Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in September, he promised ten more Luban workshops for Africa, which would create 60,000 training positions. This was Xi’s third support package. In addition to individual bilateral agreements, he had already pledged to build ten Luban workshops back at the 2018 China-Africa Summit. In 2021, he agreed to create ten Luban workshops in Central Asia at a summit with the Shanghai SCO Conference.
This is a prestige project for Xi. He attaches strategic importance to the establishment of Luban vocational training schools with a Chinese curriculum, equipment and seconded specialist teachers. Speaking to his Politburo, Xi mentioned a “dramatic change” in vocational training. China once sourced it from abroad. Today, it exports China’s training projects – “职业教育实现从 ‘引进来 ‘到 ‘走出去 ‘的巨变”. The party leader put the issue on the agenda of his Politburo at the end of May 2023. He declared the goal of making “China an important education center with strong influence in the world.” A few weeks later, at a conference on China’s Silk Road Initiative (BRI) in October, he emphasized “the important role” that the Luban workshops should play in this.
Beijing does not just want to help the Global South with technical training for altruistic reasons. It also wants to help its companies that have problems finding skilled local workers for their “Go Global” foreign investments. Above all, China’s vocational training is to help establish China’s innovations, patents and standards as international standards in partner countries by providing training in new technologies. This gives the People’s Republic economic strength in international competition and allows it to gain new soft power.
This also applies to the vocational training model developed in China at the Luban workshops. Yang Jianjing from the Center for Modern Vocational Education of Zhejiang Province proudly wrote: “China’s model, its equipment, standards and solutions have already been incorporated into the national academic education systems in many partner countries.” The Luban workshop concepts were conceived in Beijing’s neighboring port metropolis of Tianjin. It is the main hub for all vocational training planning, programs and logistics.
For decades, the industrial city has been a center for Sino-German vocational training projects and training institutes under the direction of GTZ (now GIZ) since the beginning of the reform era. In the 1980s, the Tianjin Sino-German Vocational Technical College was founded, the first-ever vocational training project. The wide range of Sino-German vocational and training assistance also included centrally and regionally organized concept institutes for dual vocational training (ZIPP/RIPP) and dozens of modern training projects in many disciplines. The final assessment of this extensive and correspondingly expensive development cooperation and what remains of it has not yet been made.
Beijing has now taken the reins. Tianjin’s idea of developing a vocational training course tailored to China’s needs overseas as a regional initiative was born in 2015. One year later, the first foreign Luban workshop was opened in Thailand with Thai partner institutes and companies. Today, their curricula include modern subjects such as mechatronics, new energy vehicles (NEVs) and maintenance training for high-speed trains, which China is also building all over Africa. Other Luban workshops have specialized in industrial robotics, artificial intelligence, cloud computing or green energy.
The latest white paper published by the State Council in late 2023 on the development of China’s Silk Road initiative includes a chapter on the Luban workshops for the first time. Their curricula reportedly now include 70 specializations, ranging from working with new materials, smart technologies, the Internet of Things and traditional Chinese medicine. The white paper calls the Luban workshops “an important innovation in the international development of China’s vocational training and a key project to serve the construction of China’s Silk Road.” According to the white paper, China’s focus is on countries in “ASEAN, SCO and Africa.” Luban graduates are in high demand. However, the workshops are only the visible part of “a larger offensive” of more than 200 other Chinese vocational training institutes operating in 70 countries. Other sources cite even higher figures.
The idea of the Luban workshops was born around the same time as Beijing’s failed attempt at exerting influence – particularly in the USA and Western Europe – through a cultural soft power offensive involving flooding the world with Confucius language institutes. Nearly all the over 100 Confucius Institutes in the US alone were abruptly discontinued. The annual Confucius Institutes report lists 496 active institutes as of late 2023, including 183 in Europe (19 in Germany), 143 in Asia and 67 in Africa.
Part of their success was their name. The Confucius Institutes made the ancient Chinese sage their patron saint. The Luban workshops also made a legendary figure the symbol of vocational training. Luban (魯班) is said to have lived from 507 to 444 BC and was almost a contemporary of Confucius (551-479 BC) and, like him, came from the state of Lu. Countless legends surround the life and work of this ingenious master craftsman, inventor of tools of all kinds, innovative engineer, carpenter and woodworker. To this day, he is regarded as the Daoist patron saint of all wood craftsmen. The myths paint him as a Chinese Archimedes or Leonardo da Vinci.
China’s patriotic newspapers, like the Global Times, triumphantly commented on the success of the Luban workshops for “winning the hearts of the Global South for China.” Allegedly because China does not attach any political conditions to its vocational training aid and cooperates with the recipient countries on an equal footing.
A recent, particularly comprehensive defense policy study by political scientists and sinologists entitled “How China influences power constellations in the 21st century,” however, warns “not to underestimate the importance of China’s educational initiatives, especially in the soft power sector.” One of its authors, Doris Vogl, analyzes the Luban workshops as a new part of China’s education and immigration strategies. She lists some of the workshops in Djibouti, Kenya, South Africa and Ethiopia as case studies. China’s strategy behind such initiatives is to “achieve a leading position in setting future international industry standards.”
The two pandas, An An and Ke Ke, were shipped to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region with a farewell ceremony in Sichuan. Raised at the China Conservation and Research Centre for the Giant Panda in Dujiangyan in 2019, the pair are an unusual gift to Hong Kong – the animals are normally only loaned. Observers see this as a diplomatic gesture to mark the People’s Republic’s 75th anniversary in October. The rationale: pandas strengthen patriotism. Before they arrive in Hong Kong’s Ocean Park, however, the animals must first go into quarantine for 30 days.
Having already imposed tariffs on electric cars and batteries from China, the US Department of Commerce has now also set its sights on the software and hardware in connected and autonomous vehicles. The government fears that Chinese cars could pass on sensitive data to China.
The ban could effectively exclude Chinese car brands from the American market and accelerate a development that will also pose a challenge for European manufacturers: The emergence of several large, independent tech stacks in autonomous driving in the USA, China and Europe. Car manufacturers will then have to localize strongly. The autonomous driving market will become increasingly fragmented. If it does not keep an eye on developments, Germany’s automotive industry could fall even further behind here, too, while China and the US make even bigger strides.
China’s Confucius Institutes have a reputation for being the long arm of the state, especially in the West. Less well known are Beijing’s so-called Luban Institutes, also named after a quasi-mythical figure in Chinese history. Luban was a craftsman who is said to have lived from 507 to 444 BC and is revered in his homeland as a kind of Chinese Da Vinci.
Luban Institutes are overseas vocational schools where China trains specialists in areas such as mechatronics and new energy, particularly in emerging countries. They aim to provide urgently needed experts for Chinese companies overseas. In this way, Beijing also aims to establish its innovations and norms as international standards. And on top of that, China is also scoring soft power points with them. Johnny Erling took a closer look at these educational institutions based on the German model.
Tariffs of 100 percent on electric cars and electric vehicle batteries from China are already in place. The US also wants to ban software and hardware for connected vehicles and autonomous driving. The US Department of Commerce cited safety concerns as the reason on Monday. The US fears that such cars will gather data on US drivers and infrastructure and pass it on to China. There are also concerns regarding the possible manipulation of networked vehicles and navigation systems.
Another reason is probably to protect the domestic automotive industry from strong competition from China, as the ban would effectively exclude Chinese brands from the American market. Cars from German and other international manufacturers could be affected if they use hardware or software that falls under the regulation.
However, the potential US ban also points to another development that experts have been observing for some time: The emergence of at least three large autonomous driving tech stacks centered around Waymo in the US, Mobileye in Europe and Baidu and other companies in China.
A development with tangible consequences for car manufacturers. “Due to the different technologies, companies like Mercedes and Volkswagen will basically have to localize everything,” predicts Tu Le, China car expert at consulting firm Sino Auto Insights. “The split will mean that companies will have to make decisions more quickly and take greater risks.”
Ansgar Baums, Senior Advisor at Sinolytics and author of the book “Tech Cold War,” sees connectivity as a particular driver of the divide. The Chinese government is advancing a cloud-based autonomous vehicle ecosystem to tackle urban city traffic problems more effectively. “Mercedes and Volkswagen have decided to stay in China and are being pulled further and further into this Chinese connectivity world. They have to invest a lot of money in Chinese technology – Chinese standards, encryption algorithms, data formats: It’s all being defined in China for China.”
In other words, if companies want to continue selling in China, they must be and become part of this infrastructure. On the other hand, Europe and America will also have their own connectivity standards that companies must invest in, says Baums. “In the future, every euro spent on development will have to decide whether it is better invested in China or the West. This is a dilemma for companies that play on both sides.”
At some point, Europe might also impose a similar ban to that currently being discussed in the USA. Professor Herrmann from the Institute for Mobility at the University of St. Gallen points to the debate in Germany about Huawei. If Chinese cars gradually come to Europe, at some point, the question will be: What data do these cars actually collect, where does it go, and what happens to it?
To prepare for such a situation, Professor Herrmann urges Germany to also provide more funding and investment in autonomous driving R&D. “We need a consolidation of funds to specifically promote large-scale projects. For example, an entire city or region could be geared towards autonomous driving so that all manufacturers can come together and develop there.”
China already has such designated areas where automated driving can be tested. China is heavily promoting autonomous driving. The Chinese Society of Automotive Engineers predicts that by 2030, 20 percent of all vehicles will be able to drive fully autonomously at level 5 and 70 percent will be equipped with at least advanced assistance systems.
In June, nine manufacturers – albeit initially exclusively Chinese – were granted permission to operate their cars on public roads with level 3 highly automated driving. This means that the cars essentially take over the driving task autonomously, a driver may type on their cell phone or watch a movie while behind the wheel, but must be able to intervene at any time within a few seconds if the car issues a warning. And all this in normal – often chaotic – road traffic.
Robot cabs are already being tested in certain city districts. Mercedes-Benz also recently became the first German manufacturer to receive approval in China to carry out tests with fully automated driving at level 4 on designated roads and highways in Beijing. This will allow the company to test multi-sensor perception and system performance for advanced autonomous driving systems. The cars navigate independently. Even sleeping is permitted at level 4.
However, in Germany, this is still a distant dream. This is shown by a trial run with the most innovative system currently available in Germany. The Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot, available for the S-Class, is highly automated at speeds of up to 95 km/h at level 3. The manufacturer calls the system particularly safe because it uses numerous cameras as well as radar and lidar to detect its surroundings.
Even if it is a fascinating feeling to let the car do its thing and not have to look at the road at 95 km/h, there are still numerous restrictions the manufacturer must comply with. Drive Pilot can only be used in the right-hand lane and when another vehicle is driving ahead the S-Class can follow. The car in front must have the correct shape; some trucks and trailers were not recognized in the test. And even a few rain droplets caused the system to switch off – for safety reasons.
Professor Andreas Herrmann sees this as a sign of how far behind development in Germany is. “In China, I drove autonomously in the worst weather, that was no problem at all. The autonomous cabs in San Francisco can do it, too. We just can’t do it yet, because the automotive industry made serious mistakes 10-15 years ago – they underestimated the dynamism with which the car industry is changing. We are currently trying to catch up with electromobility. And once we’ve done that, we’ll soon realize that we’re completely behind in autonomous and connected driving.”
Beijing calls them its Luban workshops 鲁班工坊, the new overseas vocational schools where the People’s Republic has so far mainly educated and trained Africans in high-tech industrial fields. Foreign observers mockingly refer to them as “Confucius Institutes 2.0.” Others see Beijing’s sudden emergence as an active provider in the international education market as a kind of specialized technical reincarnation. Or, depending on one’s point of view, a simple replica. After all, China itself was a recipient country for more than 40 years of German vocational training expertise funded and promoted primarily by development policy through companies such as GTZ (now GIZ) with its diverse technical cooperation projects.
Beijing has now turned the tables and is acting as a development aid worker and high-tech trainer in countries of the Global South. Since 2016, the People’s Republic has established so-called Luban large-scale workshops and training centers in 29 countries in Africa and 33 in Central Asia – largely unnoticed in Europe until now. Thousands of skilled workers have reportedly been successfully trained and hired by China’s companies along the Silk Road. Luo Zhaohui, head of China’s international development cooperation, calls the Luban workshops “China’s golden business cards” overseas.
Beijing wants even more of these business cards. President Xi Jinping has now prioritized China’s vocational school exports. At his Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in September, he promised ten more Luban workshops for Africa, which would create 60,000 training positions. This was Xi’s third support package. In addition to individual bilateral agreements, he had already pledged to build ten Luban workshops back at the 2018 China-Africa Summit. In 2021, he agreed to create ten Luban workshops in Central Asia at a summit with the Shanghai SCO Conference.
This is a prestige project for Xi. He attaches strategic importance to the establishment of Luban vocational training schools with a Chinese curriculum, equipment and seconded specialist teachers. Speaking to his Politburo, Xi mentioned a “dramatic change” in vocational training. China once sourced it from abroad. Today, it exports China’s training projects – “职业教育实现从 ‘引进来 ‘到 ‘走出去 ‘的巨变”. The party leader put the issue on the agenda of his Politburo at the end of May 2023. He declared the goal of making “China an important education center with strong influence in the world.” A few weeks later, at a conference on China’s Silk Road Initiative (BRI) in October, he emphasized “the important role” that the Luban workshops should play in this.
Beijing does not just want to help the Global South with technical training for altruistic reasons. It also wants to help its companies that have problems finding skilled local workers for their “Go Global” foreign investments. Above all, China’s vocational training is to help establish China’s innovations, patents and standards as international standards in partner countries by providing training in new technologies. This gives the People’s Republic economic strength in international competition and allows it to gain new soft power.
This also applies to the vocational training model developed in China at the Luban workshops. Yang Jianjing from the Center for Modern Vocational Education of Zhejiang Province proudly wrote: “China’s model, its equipment, standards and solutions have already been incorporated into the national academic education systems in many partner countries.” The Luban workshop concepts were conceived in Beijing’s neighboring port metropolis of Tianjin. It is the main hub for all vocational training planning, programs and logistics.
For decades, the industrial city has been a center for Sino-German vocational training projects and training institutes under the direction of GTZ (now GIZ) since the beginning of the reform era. In the 1980s, the Tianjin Sino-German Vocational Technical College was founded, the first-ever vocational training project. The wide range of Sino-German vocational and training assistance also included centrally and regionally organized concept institutes for dual vocational training (ZIPP/RIPP) and dozens of modern training projects in many disciplines. The final assessment of this extensive and correspondingly expensive development cooperation and what remains of it has not yet been made.
Beijing has now taken the reins. Tianjin’s idea of developing a vocational training course tailored to China’s needs overseas as a regional initiative was born in 2015. One year later, the first foreign Luban workshop was opened in Thailand with Thai partner institutes and companies. Today, their curricula include modern subjects such as mechatronics, new energy vehicles (NEVs) and maintenance training for high-speed trains, which China is also building all over Africa. Other Luban workshops have specialized in industrial robotics, artificial intelligence, cloud computing or green energy.
The latest white paper published by the State Council in late 2023 on the development of China’s Silk Road initiative includes a chapter on the Luban workshops for the first time. Their curricula reportedly now include 70 specializations, ranging from working with new materials, smart technologies, the Internet of Things and traditional Chinese medicine. The white paper calls the Luban workshops “an important innovation in the international development of China’s vocational training and a key project to serve the construction of China’s Silk Road.” According to the white paper, China’s focus is on countries in “ASEAN, SCO and Africa.” Luban graduates are in high demand. However, the workshops are only the visible part of “a larger offensive” of more than 200 other Chinese vocational training institutes operating in 70 countries. Other sources cite even higher figures.
The idea of the Luban workshops was born around the same time as Beijing’s failed attempt at exerting influence – particularly in the USA and Western Europe – through a cultural soft power offensive involving flooding the world with Confucius language institutes. Nearly all the over 100 Confucius Institutes in the US alone were abruptly discontinued. The annual Confucius Institutes report lists 496 active institutes as of late 2023, including 183 in Europe (19 in Germany), 143 in Asia and 67 in Africa.
Part of their success was their name. The Confucius Institutes made the ancient Chinese sage their patron saint. The Luban workshops also made a legendary figure the symbol of vocational training. Luban (魯班) is said to have lived from 507 to 444 BC and was almost a contemporary of Confucius (551-479 BC) and, like him, came from the state of Lu. Countless legends surround the life and work of this ingenious master craftsman, inventor of tools of all kinds, innovative engineer, carpenter and woodworker. To this day, he is regarded as the Daoist patron saint of all wood craftsmen. The myths paint him as a Chinese Archimedes or Leonardo da Vinci.
China’s patriotic newspapers, like the Global Times, triumphantly commented on the success of the Luban workshops for “winning the hearts of the Global South for China.” Allegedly because China does not attach any political conditions to its vocational training aid and cooperates with the recipient countries on an equal footing.
A recent, particularly comprehensive defense policy study by political scientists and sinologists entitled “How China influences power constellations in the 21st century,” however, warns “not to underestimate the importance of China’s educational initiatives, especially in the soft power sector.” One of its authors, Doris Vogl, analyzes the Luban workshops as a new part of China’s education and immigration strategies. She lists some of the workshops in Djibouti, Kenya, South Africa and Ethiopia as case studies. China’s strategy behind such initiatives is to “achieve a leading position in setting future international industry standards.”
The two pandas, An An and Ke Ke, were shipped to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region with a farewell ceremony in Sichuan. Raised at the China Conservation and Research Centre for the Giant Panda in Dujiangyan in 2019, the pair are an unusual gift to Hong Kong – the animals are normally only loaned. Observers see this as a diplomatic gesture to mark the People’s Republic’s 75th anniversary in October. The rationale: pandas strengthen patriotism. Before they arrive in Hong Kong’s Ocean Park, however, the animals must first go into quarantine for 30 days.
