It was a demonstration of economic strength that China’s Premier Li Keqiang combined with the announcement at the start of the National People’s Congress on Friday that the country’s domestic product will increase by at least six percent this year. This was followed on Sunday by the foreign minister’s demonstration of his geopolitical claim to power. In no uncertain terms, Wang Yi forbade any form of interference in “internal affairs”, whether it be Hong Kong or Taiwan. Frank Sieren summarizes the essential details of the annual press conference.
The announced economic growth and military spending plans, you, as a reader of China.Table, already know about since Friday morning. Felix Lee and Christiane Kühl now analyze the background in this briefing.
China is by far the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide and it stands to reason that the international community is watching Beijing’s ambitious plans to cut emissions with the greatest interest. In the 14th Five-Year Plan, which the National People’s Congress is debating this week, one is hard-pressed to find specific references to this. The only exception: nuclear power projects, as Finn Mayer-Kuckuk writes. China wants to add twenty gigawatts by 2035.
Wishing you a successful start to the week,
China’s military budget is seen as a barometer of how determined the country is to strengthen its military. And that is particularly significant in these times of growing uncertainty: The US and Europe increasingly see China as a strategic rival and are watching Beijing’s activities in the South China Sea – one of the busiest international sea lanes – and along the Taiwan Strait with a wary eye. At the beginning of the National People’s Congress (NPC), the Chinese Ministry of Finance announced that the military budget would increase this year by 6.8 percent to around ¥1.35 trillion (the equivalent of $208 billion or €175 billion).
The planned increase is thus slightly more than the economic growth of “over six percent” targeted by Premier Li Keqiang in his speech, also on Friday. Last year, China raised defense spending by 6.6 percent despite the COVID-19 pandemic, and by 7.5 percent two years ago. So the growth rate has not changed much.
Experts in the West assume, however, that the annual official budget does not include all defense spending because some military items are allocated to other budgets. Some of these items are quite banal – according to research by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), for example, money for the paramilitary People’s Armed Police, as well as for military-related research, construction projects, or pensions. Unlike in the past, according to SIPRI, arms purchases abroad, such as in Russia, are now included in the official budget.
Nevertheless, there are larger sums involved that do not appear in the military budget. The respected trade journal Janes estimates that actual spending in 2021 will be around 25 percent higher than the official budget – the equivalent of around $262 billion.
It is indisputable that China has been working for years to modernize its military. The number of active soldiers has been reduced from six to two million over the past 40 years. At the same time, Beijing has increasingly focused on technology and modern weapons systems. In recent years, for example, China has been developing advanced sixth-generation fighter jets, as well as laser rifles, quantum radar systems, new stealth materials, autonomous combat robots, orbital spacecraft, and biological technologies such as powered exoskeletons, according to reports in the South China Morning Post. China’s J-20 stealth bomber, which entered service in 2017, is being compared to the US F-22 5th generation fighter jet.
China now has two aircraft carriers; two more are under construction. The number of nuclear warheads is estimated at 200-300 – about as many as France or Britain. In 2017, China also established a military base in Djibouti, strategically located in the Horn of Africa.
Premier Li Keqiang announced in his speech on Friday that China will improve military training and overall preparedness for emergencies. “We will improve the military’s strategic capability to protect our country’s sovereignty, security, and development interests,” Li said. China will improve defense-related science, technology, and industry, as well as the system for mobilization in case of defense.
The 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2026) says China will accelerate the transition from “mechanization” to “informationization” and “intelligentization” of the People’s Liberation Army (VBA). “This indicates a shift from the modernization of military platforms to the introduction of digital and networked systems, as well as an integration of ‘intelligent’ systems using technologies such as artificial intelligence,” Janes writes.
All of this fits with President Xi Jinping’s plan to transform the VBA into a modern military force by 2027 – its 100th founding year. China’s long-term goal is to create forces on par with the US military. This buildup of military power “is not directed against other nations and poses no threat to them,” NPC spokesman Zheng Yesui said Friday. China always stresses that its military is solely for defense. The 2019 defense white paper states that “China favors partnerships rather than alliances and does not join any military bloc”.
Nevertheless, tensions in the region are rising, as some neighbors see China’s behavior as increasingly aggressive. There are territorial disputes with Vietnam and the Philippines in the South China Sea, for example. China and Taiwan claim the uninhabited Senkaku group of islands controlled by Japan. China’s border with India in the Himalayas has seen repeated skirmishes since May 2020.
At the same time, China is increasing the pressure on Taiwan, which is regarded as a renegade province, for example, through maneuvers or by invading Taiwanese airspace. Beijing reserves the right to conquer Taiwan by force and has stationed a massive missile arsenal on the coast opposite the island. But so far, the strength of the US presence in East Asia has stood in the way of such plans. Even in 2021, US military spending will be well over $700 billion, many times that of China.
“China will continue to invest in more sophisticated technologies and weapons to deter and potentially defeat a superior group of adversaries – the United States and its allies,” said Bates Gill, professor of Asia. Pacific Security Studies at Australia’s Macquarie University, to the Bloomberg news agency.
But it’s not just about technology. It’s also about modernizing military theories, formations, personnel, and strategic management, as Central Military Commission Vice Chairman Xu Qiliang wrote in an official manual on military plans through 2025. The VBA needs to “be more proactive in shaping how war is waged” rather than just reacting to conflict, Xu said.
The fact that the armed forces are now also responsible for – as Li Keqiang put it – protecting China’s “development interests” is new and is in the amendment to the Defence Law that came into force in early January. “This suggests that China now considers all its investments and economic activities at home and abroad as worthy of military protection,” Christian Le Miere, founder of strategy consultancy Archipel, wrote recently in the South China Morning Post. It is now conceivable that Chinese troops could be sent to Pakistan to protect Belt and Road projects from attacks by local separatists, for example, or that Chinese warships could escort cargo ships in the Persian Gulf.
Most economists had actually assumed that China’s leadership would not set a growth target this year either. This was the approach taken by the Chinese Communist Party cadres last year on the grounds that there were too many imponderables in a pandemic year; expectations could hardly be met. With rigorous measures, however, China succeeded in containing the pandemic last summer.
After a severe slump in the first quarter of 2020, the Chinese economy was already picking up again in the summer. By the end of the year, China was the only major economy to have achieved significant growth, at 2.3 percent. While Europe and other regions continue to wrestle with the pandemic, China’s head of government Li Keqiang has now announced a growth target of “more than six percent” for this year, to the surprise of experts at the National People’s Congress.
This target is still considered conservative. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) even reckons with 8.1 percent. That’s still a far cry from the noughties when growth rates were consistently in double digits for several years. But it would be the highest growth since 2014. “There’s no question about it,” Markus Taube, professor of East Asian economics at the Mercator School of Management in Duisburg, said last week in a lecture on economic policy. “The Chinese economy is booming again.”
China’s export economy, in particular, is taking off: Since the beginning of the year, it has jumped by 60.6 percent year-on-year, the customs administration announced in Beijing on Sunday. This extremely high strong growth is admittedly also due to the low comparative value of the two previous months. China was the first country to be hit by the COVID outbreak in early 2020. The leadership then had factories shut down in large parts of the country and also halted travel almost entirely for weeks. But China’s exports were also already up 18.1 percent year-on-year in December. The export boom is, therefore, more than just compensation for the slump in the first quarter of 2020. “All indicators that are important are pointing upwards,” says China economist Tauber.
The new five-year plan, which some 3,000 delegates are expected to approve at the National People’s Congress in the coming days, does not include a specific growth figure for the entire period from 2021 to 2025, but government leader Li Keqiang merely announced in his speech that average growth would be kept within a “reasonable” range. However, it was obvious that growth would be above six percent, government adviser Yao Jingyuan told Reuters news agency. The new five-year plan calls for investment in technology and infrastructure of between ¥10 and ¥17.5 trillion by 2025, equivalent to about €1.3 to €2.3 trillion.
Those close to the government also point out that the leadership is deliberately keeping a low profile. They are concerned with stability and not with promoting expectations of an impetuous upswing. These could eventually lead to higher debt and risk-taking. “The intention is to tell people that we should focus on higher-quality growth,” government adviser Yao said.
However, although officials like Yao are downplaying the six percent figure, exactly what the leadership fears could still happen: growth overshooting. The risk of the Chinese economy overheating is certainly there. Chinese stock markets are currently very highly valued, as are property prices in many major cities. The growth rate had declined steadily from its former double-digit levels in the noughties to around six percent in the years before the pandemic. Western media at the time had highlighted that these were the lowest growth figures in more than 30 years. They were right to do so. But they forget that a six percent increase for a large, highly developed economy is a much larger increase than ten percent for the much poorer China of 2010.
Should China’s economy actually grow by more than eight percent or more, there is the threat of real overheating, as was the case after the Chinese leadership’s gigantic economic stimulus programs in response to the global financial crisis of 2009. Overcapacities, especially in state-owned enterprises, were the result. Some of the consequences of these misguided developments have still not been overcome.
Ten years after Fukushima: while Germany congratulates itself on its decision to abandon nuclear power, China wants to really get going again. In the figures for the 14th Five-Year Plan published so far, comparatively precise figures are given for reactor expansion, while other goals are still rather vaguely formulated.
According to the report, by 2035 there will be 70 gigawatts of capacity in nuclear power plants across the country. Since the current status according to the latest statistics report is just under 50 gigawatts, an expansion in the order of 20 gigawatts is planned for the next decade and a half. The country also wants to act internationally as a reactor builder – with its own technology.
The targeted build-up of 20 gigawatts of new capacity is equivalent to about 20 new reactors in the size class currently in use in China, or about 15 Biblis-type reactors. Thus, the world’s largest nuclear program is accelerating again. During the previous five-year plan, 16 reactors were completed, so the planners are stepping up the pace again with about 20 units for the new five-year plan.
The Fukushima disaster also temporarily put a damper on China’s nuclear ambitions and triggered hectic safety reviews. Before Fukushima, there was brief talk of 130 gigawatts of installed capacity by 2030, so the current plan is still ambitious but well behind the extreme plans of the past. This is enormously important to the Politburo. After all, the Chornobyl disaster was widely believed to have contributed greatly to the demise of the Soviet Union: a nuclear accident as a KP killer? However, the engineers of the state nuclear conglomerates were able to convince the leadership that there was no real danger of an accident.
Nuclear power is now once again seen by the technocrats at the top as the solution to several problems. The shift to electromobility and other energy systems that don’t emit particulate matter and carbon dioxide is boosting demand for electricity enormously. The shift to a hydrogen economy will put enormous pressure on supply once again, according to government projections. The efficiency of hydrogen production is poor. So there is a high input of raw energy at the beginning of the chain. Even though the expansion of wind and solar power is proceeding at a tremendous pace, they are not expected to be able to meet the demand. After all, the overall economy should continue to grow unhindered. China has its own uranium deposits, so nuclear power also strengthens energy security.
To the confusion of German observers, China counts nuclear power in its statistics as an alternative, ecological energy source – i.e. in the same category as solar, wind, and water. After all, no carbon dioxide is produced during the actual generation of electricity. The fact that – unlike with wind and sun – a disposal problem remains afterward does not seem to be a priority here.
Like Germany in the past and Japan still today, China is basically aiming for a largely closed fuel cycle. The reprocessing facilities already in operation are located mainly in the bitterly poor, remote province of Gansu – here well-paid industrial jobs are highly welcome, while the population density is low. Spent fuel rods here are turned into dirtier but usable new fuel rods. Other large plants are scheduled to open in rapid succession during the 14th Five-Year Plan. Because of the shorter transport routes, they are now also planned on the coast. In Jiangsu province, however, a project has been on hold for some time following citizen protests. The population still remembers Fukushima.
In addition, a proportion of waste remains despite all the processing. Some of it is currently stored in a facility 25 kilometers north of the provincial capital Lanzhou, while others await disposal at power plants and reprocessing facilities. Even China has yet to identify a geologically safe deep repository – although the authoritarian regime has a different way of dealing with popular reservations and despite its highly diverse geography. The current plan is to pour the waste into solid containers and store it 500 meters below the surface in granite formations. A site in the Gobi Desert is considered a hot candidate. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2040.
In the documents of the National People’s Congress (NPC), the leadership now prescribes to itself “to advance nuclear power in an orderly manner and in compliance with strict safety requirements”. In fact, China’s new reactors are several generations more advanced than the reactors at Fukushima or Biblis – and thus objectively much safer. Further planning relies primarily on the Hualong-1 and CAP1400 models. They are derived from Western technology and are now being marketed internationally as Chinese proprietary developments. They have all the things that were missing at Fukushima: passive cooling that no longer relies on power supply; a true side-by-side system that can stand in for each other; double containment; and a ceramic core catcher that should prevent the worst even in the event of a meltdown. Artificial intelligence in the process control computers can help compensate for human error. Critics, however, also consider all the new technology to be only inadequate insurance against accidents – after all, a scenario can also occur that simply no one has thought of yet.
In conversation with Sigrun Abels, one immediately senses her fascination for the Chinese language and culture. She quickly talks about the challenge of always developing an attitude towards China and its politics. “I am very interested in a balanced image of China,” says the sinologist. She neither belongs to the group of “China supporters”, nor does she want to “bash China”. She sees herself firmly in the middle. “And that is a difficult task.”
The 50-year-old has headed the China Center at TU Berlin for five years. One of the main tasks of the 16-member team and numerous lecturers is to impart China’s expertise. Abels calls the offer “Sinology for non-sinologists”, which is used by very different people – from chemists to art historians to start-up entrepreneurs.
At the same time, the Duisburg native is the head of the German office of the Chinese-German University College (CDHK) at Tongji University Shanghai. The CDHK trains German and Chinese students bilingually in master’s degree programs in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, automotive engineering, and economics. Every year, Abels offers a summer school at the CDHK in Shanghai – unless a pandemic intervenes.
When she enrolled in Bochum in 1989, she didn’t expect that studying sinology would offer her solid career prospects. “No one thought that you could really earn money with it later,” she says. Abels spent an academic year in Nanjing – deliberately not in Beijing or Shanghai, where many other exchange students were. A formative figure in her studies was Helmut Martin, her later doctoral supervisor. The sinologist, who died in 1999, maintained close ties with supporters of the democracy movement in mainland China and Taiwan. “We were permanent, as students already, in contact with Chinese dissidents,” says Abels.
After graduating, she worked as a journalist at Deutsche Welle. She also traveled to China as a media trainer for the Deutsche Welle Academy. For her doctorate, she returned to the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Her topic: The role of the media in China since 1979. She has been researching the Chinese media system until today and has added the Chinese science system as a research focus.
Both areas are “explosive topics”, says Abels. When she writes an article on the situation of the media in China, for example, it is impossible to ignore the fact that China is one of the last countries in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom ranking. Abels was part of the working group that developed guiding questions on university cooperation with the People’s Republic for the German Rectors’ Conference. “Acquiring an attitude” is what she calls this effort to find a balanced approach to cooperation with China. Sarah Schaefer
It was a demonstration of economic strength that China’s Premier Li Keqiang combined with the announcement at the start of the National People’s Congress on Friday that the country’s domestic product will increase by at least six percent this year. This was followed on Sunday by the foreign minister’s demonstration of his geopolitical claim to power. In no uncertain terms, Wang Yi forbade any form of interference in “internal affairs”, whether it be Hong Kong or Taiwan. Frank Sieren summarizes the essential details of the annual press conference.
The announced economic growth and military spending plans, you, as a reader of China.Table, already know about since Friday morning. Felix Lee and Christiane Kühl now analyze the background in this briefing.
China is by far the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide and it stands to reason that the international community is watching Beijing’s ambitious plans to cut emissions with the greatest interest. In the 14th Five-Year Plan, which the National People’s Congress is debating this week, one is hard-pressed to find specific references to this. The only exception: nuclear power projects, as Finn Mayer-Kuckuk writes. China wants to add twenty gigawatts by 2035.
Wishing you a successful start to the week,
China’s military budget is seen as a barometer of how determined the country is to strengthen its military. And that is particularly significant in these times of growing uncertainty: The US and Europe increasingly see China as a strategic rival and are watching Beijing’s activities in the South China Sea – one of the busiest international sea lanes – and along the Taiwan Strait with a wary eye. At the beginning of the National People’s Congress (NPC), the Chinese Ministry of Finance announced that the military budget would increase this year by 6.8 percent to around ¥1.35 trillion (the equivalent of $208 billion or €175 billion).
The planned increase is thus slightly more than the economic growth of “over six percent” targeted by Premier Li Keqiang in his speech, also on Friday. Last year, China raised defense spending by 6.6 percent despite the COVID-19 pandemic, and by 7.5 percent two years ago. So the growth rate has not changed much.
Experts in the West assume, however, that the annual official budget does not include all defense spending because some military items are allocated to other budgets. Some of these items are quite banal – according to research by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), for example, money for the paramilitary People’s Armed Police, as well as for military-related research, construction projects, or pensions. Unlike in the past, according to SIPRI, arms purchases abroad, such as in Russia, are now included in the official budget.
Nevertheless, there are larger sums involved that do not appear in the military budget. The respected trade journal Janes estimates that actual spending in 2021 will be around 25 percent higher than the official budget – the equivalent of around $262 billion.
It is indisputable that China has been working for years to modernize its military. The number of active soldiers has been reduced from six to two million over the past 40 years. At the same time, Beijing has increasingly focused on technology and modern weapons systems. In recent years, for example, China has been developing advanced sixth-generation fighter jets, as well as laser rifles, quantum radar systems, new stealth materials, autonomous combat robots, orbital spacecraft, and biological technologies such as powered exoskeletons, according to reports in the South China Morning Post. China’s J-20 stealth bomber, which entered service in 2017, is being compared to the US F-22 5th generation fighter jet.
China now has two aircraft carriers; two more are under construction. The number of nuclear warheads is estimated at 200-300 – about as many as France or Britain. In 2017, China also established a military base in Djibouti, strategically located in the Horn of Africa.
Premier Li Keqiang announced in his speech on Friday that China will improve military training and overall preparedness for emergencies. “We will improve the military’s strategic capability to protect our country’s sovereignty, security, and development interests,” Li said. China will improve defense-related science, technology, and industry, as well as the system for mobilization in case of defense.
The 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2026) says China will accelerate the transition from “mechanization” to “informationization” and “intelligentization” of the People’s Liberation Army (VBA). “This indicates a shift from the modernization of military platforms to the introduction of digital and networked systems, as well as an integration of ‘intelligent’ systems using technologies such as artificial intelligence,” Janes writes.
All of this fits with President Xi Jinping’s plan to transform the VBA into a modern military force by 2027 – its 100th founding year. China’s long-term goal is to create forces on par with the US military. This buildup of military power “is not directed against other nations and poses no threat to them,” NPC spokesman Zheng Yesui said Friday. China always stresses that its military is solely for defense. The 2019 defense white paper states that “China favors partnerships rather than alliances and does not join any military bloc”.
Nevertheless, tensions in the region are rising, as some neighbors see China’s behavior as increasingly aggressive. There are territorial disputes with Vietnam and the Philippines in the South China Sea, for example. China and Taiwan claim the uninhabited Senkaku group of islands controlled by Japan. China’s border with India in the Himalayas has seen repeated skirmishes since May 2020.
At the same time, China is increasing the pressure on Taiwan, which is regarded as a renegade province, for example, through maneuvers or by invading Taiwanese airspace. Beijing reserves the right to conquer Taiwan by force and has stationed a massive missile arsenal on the coast opposite the island. But so far, the strength of the US presence in East Asia has stood in the way of such plans. Even in 2021, US military spending will be well over $700 billion, many times that of China.
“China will continue to invest in more sophisticated technologies and weapons to deter and potentially defeat a superior group of adversaries – the United States and its allies,” said Bates Gill, professor of Asia. Pacific Security Studies at Australia’s Macquarie University, to the Bloomberg news agency.
But it’s not just about technology. It’s also about modernizing military theories, formations, personnel, and strategic management, as Central Military Commission Vice Chairman Xu Qiliang wrote in an official manual on military plans through 2025. The VBA needs to “be more proactive in shaping how war is waged” rather than just reacting to conflict, Xu said.
The fact that the armed forces are now also responsible for – as Li Keqiang put it – protecting China’s “development interests” is new and is in the amendment to the Defence Law that came into force in early January. “This suggests that China now considers all its investments and economic activities at home and abroad as worthy of military protection,” Christian Le Miere, founder of strategy consultancy Archipel, wrote recently in the South China Morning Post. It is now conceivable that Chinese troops could be sent to Pakistan to protect Belt and Road projects from attacks by local separatists, for example, or that Chinese warships could escort cargo ships in the Persian Gulf.
Most economists had actually assumed that China’s leadership would not set a growth target this year either. This was the approach taken by the Chinese Communist Party cadres last year on the grounds that there were too many imponderables in a pandemic year; expectations could hardly be met. With rigorous measures, however, China succeeded in containing the pandemic last summer.
After a severe slump in the first quarter of 2020, the Chinese economy was already picking up again in the summer. By the end of the year, China was the only major economy to have achieved significant growth, at 2.3 percent. While Europe and other regions continue to wrestle with the pandemic, China’s head of government Li Keqiang has now announced a growth target of “more than six percent” for this year, to the surprise of experts at the National People’s Congress.
This target is still considered conservative. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) even reckons with 8.1 percent. That’s still a far cry from the noughties when growth rates were consistently in double digits for several years. But it would be the highest growth since 2014. “There’s no question about it,” Markus Taube, professor of East Asian economics at the Mercator School of Management in Duisburg, said last week in a lecture on economic policy. “The Chinese economy is booming again.”
China’s export economy, in particular, is taking off: Since the beginning of the year, it has jumped by 60.6 percent year-on-year, the customs administration announced in Beijing on Sunday. This extremely high strong growth is admittedly also due to the low comparative value of the two previous months. China was the first country to be hit by the COVID outbreak in early 2020. The leadership then had factories shut down in large parts of the country and also halted travel almost entirely for weeks. But China’s exports were also already up 18.1 percent year-on-year in December. The export boom is, therefore, more than just compensation for the slump in the first quarter of 2020. “All indicators that are important are pointing upwards,” says China economist Tauber.
The new five-year plan, which some 3,000 delegates are expected to approve at the National People’s Congress in the coming days, does not include a specific growth figure for the entire period from 2021 to 2025, but government leader Li Keqiang merely announced in his speech that average growth would be kept within a “reasonable” range. However, it was obvious that growth would be above six percent, government adviser Yao Jingyuan told Reuters news agency. The new five-year plan calls for investment in technology and infrastructure of between ¥10 and ¥17.5 trillion by 2025, equivalent to about €1.3 to €2.3 trillion.
Those close to the government also point out that the leadership is deliberately keeping a low profile. They are concerned with stability and not with promoting expectations of an impetuous upswing. These could eventually lead to higher debt and risk-taking. “The intention is to tell people that we should focus on higher-quality growth,” government adviser Yao said.
However, although officials like Yao are downplaying the six percent figure, exactly what the leadership fears could still happen: growth overshooting. The risk of the Chinese economy overheating is certainly there. Chinese stock markets are currently very highly valued, as are property prices in many major cities. The growth rate had declined steadily from its former double-digit levels in the noughties to around six percent in the years before the pandemic. Western media at the time had highlighted that these were the lowest growth figures in more than 30 years. They were right to do so. But they forget that a six percent increase for a large, highly developed economy is a much larger increase than ten percent for the much poorer China of 2010.
Should China’s economy actually grow by more than eight percent or more, there is the threat of real overheating, as was the case after the Chinese leadership’s gigantic economic stimulus programs in response to the global financial crisis of 2009. Overcapacities, especially in state-owned enterprises, were the result. Some of the consequences of these misguided developments have still not been overcome.
Ten years after Fukushima: while Germany congratulates itself on its decision to abandon nuclear power, China wants to really get going again. In the figures for the 14th Five-Year Plan published so far, comparatively precise figures are given for reactor expansion, while other goals are still rather vaguely formulated.
According to the report, by 2035 there will be 70 gigawatts of capacity in nuclear power plants across the country. Since the current status according to the latest statistics report is just under 50 gigawatts, an expansion in the order of 20 gigawatts is planned for the next decade and a half. The country also wants to act internationally as a reactor builder – with its own technology.
The targeted build-up of 20 gigawatts of new capacity is equivalent to about 20 new reactors in the size class currently in use in China, or about 15 Biblis-type reactors. Thus, the world’s largest nuclear program is accelerating again. During the previous five-year plan, 16 reactors were completed, so the planners are stepping up the pace again with about 20 units for the new five-year plan.
The Fukushima disaster also temporarily put a damper on China’s nuclear ambitions and triggered hectic safety reviews. Before Fukushima, there was brief talk of 130 gigawatts of installed capacity by 2030, so the current plan is still ambitious but well behind the extreme plans of the past. This is enormously important to the Politburo. After all, the Chornobyl disaster was widely believed to have contributed greatly to the demise of the Soviet Union: a nuclear accident as a KP killer? However, the engineers of the state nuclear conglomerates were able to convince the leadership that there was no real danger of an accident.
Nuclear power is now once again seen by the technocrats at the top as the solution to several problems. The shift to electromobility and other energy systems that don’t emit particulate matter and carbon dioxide is boosting demand for electricity enormously. The shift to a hydrogen economy will put enormous pressure on supply once again, according to government projections. The efficiency of hydrogen production is poor. So there is a high input of raw energy at the beginning of the chain. Even though the expansion of wind and solar power is proceeding at a tremendous pace, they are not expected to be able to meet the demand. After all, the overall economy should continue to grow unhindered. China has its own uranium deposits, so nuclear power also strengthens energy security.
To the confusion of German observers, China counts nuclear power in its statistics as an alternative, ecological energy source – i.e. in the same category as solar, wind, and water. After all, no carbon dioxide is produced during the actual generation of electricity. The fact that – unlike with wind and sun – a disposal problem remains afterward does not seem to be a priority here.
Like Germany in the past and Japan still today, China is basically aiming for a largely closed fuel cycle. The reprocessing facilities already in operation are located mainly in the bitterly poor, remote province of Gansu – here well-paid industrial jobs are highly welcome, while the population density is low. Spent fuel rods here are turned into dirtier but usable new fuel rods. Other large plants are scheduled to open in rapid succession during the 14th Five-Year Plan. Because of the shorter transport routes, they are now also planned on the coast. In Jiangsu province, however, a project has been on hold for some time following citizen protests. The population still remembers Fukushima.
In addition, a proportion of waste remains despite all the processing. Some of it is currently stored in a facility 25 kilometers north of the provincial capital Lanzhou, while others await disposal at power plants and reprocessing facilities. Even China has yet to identify a geologically safe deep repository – although the authoritarian regime has a different way of dealing with popular reservations and despite its highly diverse geography. The current plan is to pour the waste into solid containers and store it 500 meters below the surface in granite formations. A site in the Gobi Desert is considered a hot candidate. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2040.
In the documents of the National People’s Congress (NPC), the leadership now prescribes to itself “to advance nuclear power in an orderly manner and in compliance with strict safety requirements”. In fact, China’s new reactors are several generations more advanced than the reactors at Fukushima or Biblis – and thus objectively much safer. Further planning relies primarily on the Hualong-1 and CAP1400 models. They are derived from Western technology and are now being marketed internationally as Chinese proprietary developments. They have all the things that were missing at Fukushima: passive cooling that no longer relies on power supply; a true side-by-side system that can stand in for each other; double containment; and a ceramic core catcher that should prevent the worst even in the event of a meltdown. Artificial intelligence in the process control computers can help compensate for human error. Critics, however, also consider all the new technology to be only inadequate insurance against accidents – after all, a scenario can also occur that simply no one has thought of yet.
In conversation with Sigrun Abels, one immediately senses her fascination for the Chinese language and culture. She quickly talks about the challenge of always developing an attitude towards China and its politics. “I am very interested in a balanced image of China,” says the sinologist. She neither belongs to the group of “China supporters”, nor does she want to “bash China”. She sees herself firmly in the middle. “And that is a difficult task.”
The 50-year-old has headed the China Center at TU Berlin for five years. One of the main tasks of the 16-member team and numerous lecturers is to impart China’s expertise. Abels calls the offer “Sinology for non-sinologists”, which is used by very different people – from chemists to art historians to start-up entrepreneurs.
At the same time, the Duisburg native is the head of the German office of the Chinese-German University College (CDHK) at Tongji University Shanghai. The CDHK trains German and Chinese students bilingually in master’s degree programs in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, automotive engineering, and economics. Every year, Abels offers a summer school at the CDHK in Shanghai – unless a pandemic intervenes.
When she enrolled in Bochum in 1989, she didn’t expect that studying sinology would offer her solid career prospects. “No one thought that you could really earn money with it later,” she says. Abels spent an academic year in Nanjing – deliberately not in Beijing or Shanghai, where many other exchange students were. A formative figure in her studies was Helmut Martin, her later doctoral supervisor. The sinologist, who died in 1999, maintained close ties with supporters of the democracy movement in mainland China and Taiwan. “We were permanent, as students already, in contact with Chinese dissidents,” says Abels.
After graduating, she worked as a journalist at Deutsche Welle. She also traveled to China as a media trainer for the Deutsche Welle Academy. For her doctorate, she returned to the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Her topic: The role of the media in China since 1979. She has been researching the Chinese media system until today and has added the Chinese science system as a research focus.
Both areas are “explosive topics”, says Abels. When she writes an article on the situation of the media in China, for example, it is impossible to ignore the fact that China is one of the last countries in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom ranking. Abels was part of the working group that developed guiding questions on university cooperation with the People’s Republic for the German Rectors’ Conference. “Acquiring an attitude” is what she calls this effort to find a balanced approach to cooperation with China. Sarah Schaefer
