Masks, rubber gloves, disposable protective suits, test swabs – pandemic control has unexpected side effects here and there: Today, Ning Wang looks at waste. In China, the prevailing belief is that the virus can be transmitted on surfaces or through food. That’s why deliveries to homes are wrapped in plastic three times. Add the fact that billions of rapid tests must be disposed of as hazardous medical waste. The result is a 40-fold increase in the daily volume of waste. China’s otherwise clean boom metropolises choke under mountains of garbage. But a wider problem is emerging: Government plans to reduce plastic are being set back years.
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping is taking a step forward in defense strategy. In the future, he will allow more military operations abroad. The prerequisite is that it be a “non-war” operation. In fact, not every army deployment is the same as a war, and China has already participated in many peacekeeping missions. But in light of Russia’s sprawling “special operation” in Ukraine, an uneasy feeling creeps into this choice of words, writes Michael Radunski.
Xi Jinping, in his capacity as Chairman of the Central Military Commission, has approved a series of new plans that will allow China’s armed forces to conduct military operations abroad in the future. However, only under the condition that they are “military operations other than war”. Military operations other than war (MOOTW) are missions abroad such as disaster relief, humanitarian assistance, or even peacekeeping operations. “Organizing and conducting military non-war operations are of great importance to effectively fulfill the military’s missions and tasks in the new era,” the People’s Daily reports, summing up: With this step, Xi Jinping is consistently implementing his own thoughts on strengthening the military.
Xi’s directive covers 6 chapters and 59 articles. Although the exact contents have not been published, it is clear that the consequences are far-reaching. According to a report in the Global Times, the People’s Liberation Army troops could from now on protect China from spillover effects of regional instabilities, secure important transport routes for strategic materials such as oil, and defend China’s foreign investments, projects and personnel.
It quickly becomes clear that Xi’s directive creates the legal basis for the People’s Liberation Army to effectively protect China’s national sovereignty, security and development interests abroad. The Global Times emphasizes that there are only good intentions behind this: China’s armed forces engaged in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, and played an important role in saving lives during natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods.
A Chinese expert is quoted as saying: Foreign countries have increasingly benefited from disaster relief and humanitarian aid from China’s armed forces – countries that have, for example, received medical equipment and COVID-19 vaccines. He cites Tonga as an example, which was hit hard this year by a volcanic eruption and a tsunami.
All of these points are factually correct: China participates in numerous international missions – from humanitarian missions to anti-terrorist operations in the Gulf of Aden. China recently deployed more than 2200 soldiers to UN peacekeeping missions abroad. By comparison, Germany only deployed 638 individuals. And only the USA contributes more financially to these peace missions than the People’s Republic.
And yet, the term “military operations other than war” is raising eyebrows these days. The Chinese phrasing (军队非战争军事行动 jūnduì fēi zhànzhēng jūnshì xíngdòng) is unmistakably reminiscent of Russia’s current narrative. Whenever the Kremlin or representatives of the government in Moscow currently speak about the Russian attack on Ukraine, there is never any mention of war here either. Instead, there is only talk of a “special military operation”.
In the opinion of many experts, there is another parallel in this area: What Ukraine is to Russia, Taiwan is to China. Accordingly, foreign reports about Xi’s new pretense are concerned: Beijing may be preparing to attack democratic Taiwan under the guise of a “special operation” that is not classified as war, writes Radio Free Asia, for example.
On closer inspection, the wording used in the directive indeed causes unease: It favors military operations that are not war but serve to secure national sovereignty. From Beijing’s point of view, an attack on Taiwan would be exactly that: An operation to secure national sovereignty – after all, the island is regarded as a renegade province that belongs inalienably to mainland China. According to this interpretation, it would be no attack on another country. The operation would be more like a police operation inside the country. The Communist Party even considers it a national duty to bring Taiwan back to the Motherland. Xi leaves no doubt about this.
Most recently, China’s defense minister made it unmistakably clear how determined his country is on the Taiwan issue (China.Table reported). Speaking at the Shangri-La Forum in Singapore, China’s top military official said, “If anyone dares to secede Taiwan from China, we will not hesitate to fight,” the minister warned. “We will fight at all costs. We will fight to the very end.” No one should underestimate the determination and capability of the Chinese armed forces to preserve the territorial integrity of the People’s Republic. Of note: He speaks of fighting to the end, not war.
Meanwhile, at the same security conference, America’s Secretary of Defense pointed out that China was becoming increasingly aggressive in trying to assert its territorial claims. Lloyd Austin was referring in particular to Beijing’s behavior toward Taiwan, such as its regular military flights. Only a few days ago, 30 Chinese aircraft had entered Taiwan’s so-called Air Defense Identification Zone; according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense, this included more than 20 fighter jets (China.Table reported).
Fittingly, Beijing has begun to change its terminology on the Taiwan Strait in recent weeks. US diplomats and government officials have reportedly been informed at several levels that the roughly 160-kilometer-wide strait is not “international waters”.
“It is a false claim when certain countries call the Taiwan Strait ‘international waters’ to find a pretext to manipulate Taiwan-related matters,” said Wang Wenbin, the foreign ministry spokesman in Beijing. And since the Taiwan Strait is part of China’s maritime territory from Beijing’s perspective, there is also no longer a “center line” in the strait that is used to help keep Chinese and Taiwanese military jets apart.
It is this description of Taiwan as a renegade province that would allow the leaders in Beijing to speak not of war in the classical sense between states, but of a MOOTW, a military operation that is not a war. According to this definition, it is a mere internal conflict. For Beijing, it would be the end of the civil war against the Kuomintang Party.
China’s metropolises, such as Beijing and Shanghai, had become cleaner in recent decades. Corners, where trash lied around for weeks, had almost completely disappeared from the inner city landscape. Until the latest round of Covid curfews. During the lockdowns, floods of trash not only strain the sometimes overwhelmed waste disposal system, but also jeopardize the government’s recycling goals.
Back in April, some 373 million people in 45 Chinese metropolitan areas were in or partially affected by the lockdown, according to economists at Japanese securities firm Nomura. Shanghai, a metropolis of 25 million people, is still stuck in lockdown after two months. Because of the restrictions, all those people have ordered more online. Accordingly, from food to diapers, much more packaging was used than usual, partly because there is still a persistent misconception that the virus can also be transmitted via surfaces (China.Table reported). Many Chinese believe that more packaging equals more hygiene, which is why deliveries are sometimes double- and triple-wrapped in plastic bags. That’s not rational, but pandemic control isn’t always rational either.
In Shanghai alone, for example, more than 3,300 tons of household waste were generated every day during the lockdown. As recently as February, before the lockdown, just 73 tons of household waste were generated daily, according to the state-run People’s Daily newspaper. That’s an increase by a factor of 44. No waste infrastructure in the world could easily handle that.
Mass testing, which was introduced during the lockdown and is now being reintroduced for all 25 million residents, also generates enormous amounts of medical waste. The Shanghai municipal government has now had to commission three new waste disposal facilities just for medical waste to increase capacity in the area to 1,500 tons a day.
However, it is primarily plastic bags and single-use plastic packaging that environmentalists are concerned about. This is because single-use plastics are produced almost exclusively from fossil fuels. As a result, they not only leave a large carbon footprint during production, but also cause further damage in landfills. Even when buried there, they do not decompose for years. Their incineration would harm the air and the environment.
Even without Covid pollution, the country had produced a particularly large amount of plastic. According to the China National Resources Recycling Association, China produced about 60 million tons of plastic waste in 2020, of which only about 16 million tons were recycled. No wonder: In China, it is still common to use plastic bags when shopping. Often apples, carrots and potatoes are also packed in their own disposable plastic bags.
The use and production of plastic bags in China’s so-called first-tier cities was supposed to be stopped by the end of this year. However, this measure adopted by the government in January 2020 coincided exactly with the pandemic season. In Wuhan alone, over six million single-use plastic bags were used to distribute food to the population during the first lockdown. This was from January to April 2020, when more than eleven million people were confined to their homes for over two months.
Scientists calculated that the plastic bags used in Wuhan at the time would cover an area equivalent to 51 soccer fields. If the disposable packaging from food deliveries were added up within this period, the stacked “lunch boxes” from Wuhan alone would be about 31 times the height of Mount Everest. And China has 19 cities in that category. So the first Lockdown has also already set the precedent for the mountains of garbage.
The government has been fighting plastic pollution for decades. With 60 million tons of plastic produced annually, the People’s Republic is currently one of the world’s largest plastic producers. Until 2017, China was also the world’s largest importer of plastics, as it was cheaper and more energy-efficient to obtain them from recyclable waste than to produce them itself.
Among the many Western European countries that sent their plastic waste to China, Germany topped the list with about 390,000 tons per year, according to Martina Igini of environmental news and data platform Earth.org in Hong Kong. These imports contributed to another 10 to 13 percent of the huge amount of plastic waste China has had to deal with in recent years. In addition, about one-third of the world’s single-use plastic production facilities are located in China. With about 5.3 million tons produced in 2019, state-owned oil and gas company Sinopec is the world’s third-largest producer of single-use plastic waste, according to Australia’s Minderoo Foundation.
The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s central economic planner, published a five-year action plan to reduce plastic waste on its website last September. Jointly issued by the NDRC and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the plan for 2021 to 2025 aims to “further improve the management of the entire plastic pollution chain,” the South China Morning Post reported.
The plan includes detailed measures and specific targets to reduce the production and use of plastics. These include:
“Plastic pollution has become a key environmental issue of concern worldwide,” said Zhang Deyuan, Deputy Director of the NDRC’s research institute. “The core to controlling plastic pollution is to build strong dams against plastic leakage into the environment.”
As is so often the case, not only one government agency has been entrusted with implementation, but responsibilities have been assigned to several government agencies at once. For example, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has to ensure that the production of ultra-thin disposable plastic shopping bags is phased out. The production of products containing plastic microbeads, which are harmful to the environment and health, is also to decrease.
Meanwhile, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) is responsible for monitoring and restricting the excessive packaging of goods. The plan calls for industries such as retail, e-commerce and express package delivery to eliminate the “unreasonable” use of single-use plastics by 2025.
However, neither the MIIT nor SAMR saw the lockdowns coming, and with them, the explosion of the packaging craze. The government’s action plan from 2019 is now likely to have come under enormous pressure. It has probably long been abandoned. After all, the goals formulated in it for the period up to 2025 can hardly be achieved.
China has commissioned offshore wind power plants with a capacity of almost 17 gigawatts in 2021. This makes the People’s Republic the world leader. It has installed more than 80 percent of the world’s new offshore capacity of 21 gigawatts. Total global installed capacity is 57 gigawatts, Nikkei Asia reports.
According to the report, one reason for China’s rapid expansion is expiring subsidies. Power plant operators had to connect the plants to the grid by the end of 2021 if they wanted to benefit from subsidized electricity rates. Subsidies will continue to be cut back in the coming years. In addition, many provinces are competing to build wind power supply chains.
China is home to the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturers. Half of the wind turbine components manufactured worldwide come from Chinese production. Six of the ten largest manufacturers come from the People’s Republic. The manufacturers are increasingly pushing onto the world market. But unlike in the solar industry, experts do not expect Western producers to be pushed out by exports (China.Table reported). nib
The war in Ukraine has made us painfully aware of how dangerous it is to become dependent “in good times” on regimes whose basic philosophy we do not share. With open eyes, we have become unduly dependent on Moscow for energy, even though there have been enough warnings about President Putin’s goals.
Now the world is looking to China, where the problem is potentially much greater. Again in good faith, we have become critically dependent on China as a sales market as well as a central link in global supply chains. The dependence on China as a sales market is particularly evident in the automotive industry. Volkswagen generates 40 percent of its sales there. The dependence on China in the context of global supply chains is also evident in products that are of key importance for the desired energy transition: More than 80 percent of all solar cells are manufactured in China today. The country dominates the market for many of the industrial metals required: rare earth elements. In the past, it has used this to assert its political interests. Similarly, up to 90 percent of the precursors for antibiotics come from China. As consumers, we only have to look back a few months, when the fight against the Covid pandemic was jeopardized by the lack of FFP2 masks from China.
Yet China has consistently established itself as an unrelenting systemic rival in recent years. The latest study by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik) even speaks of a Chinese attack on the liberal-democratic international order. Against this background, at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, according to the remarks of a participant from the consulting firm McKinsey, there was talk of “China-free supply chains”.
Of course, this idea is neither practicable nor desirable. But it is just as undoubtedly true that we must consistently and significantly reduce our high dependencies on China. Taking political considerations into account in the strategic positioning of the economy is the order of the day.
Here, it would be desirable that we acquire a collective memory that goes back more than just a few short years. We remember traveling back to China with flying colors and unhesitating optimism as early as 1992, just three years after the suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen uprising. The moral indignation against what we saw as the regime’s unthinkable actions quickly faded and was forgotten in light of unparalleled market potential.
Reducing dependencies on China, however, does not mean living past the world’s second-largest economy. China now manufactures products that are in some cases of a higher technological standard than our own, and this trend will only continue. Disengaging from this development not only reduces our standard of living, it also cuts us off from technological progress and impairs our comprehensive knowledge of our strongest systemic rival.
So it is not a question of thinking up China-free supply chains, but of rethinking and reordering relations with China in the context of global supply chains. In the coming years, the task will be to bring more of the production now made in China back to our own countries, and to reconfigure supply chains in such a way that Chinese companies begin to shift production to Europe. This kind of division of labor is new in the case of China, but already well established elsewhere. For example, in the wake of the steady rise of the yen against the US dollar, Japanese companies consistently moved production abroad years ago, and German industrial companies have also been successfully producing in many parts of the world for years, as is well known.
This will not only reduce our dependence on China, it will also facilitate the supply of critical raw materials such as rare earth elements, which Chinese companies will bring to Europe to manufacture their products. Of course, it will also create value and employment in our countries.
The first strategic partnerships of this kind are already being initiated. Spectacular corporate acquisitions like that of Kuka in 2016 are not desired as part of this strategy. Rather, it aims to find suitable local partners with whom the market can be jointly developed. Possible Chinese solo ventures should be approached with caution.
As with other initiatives with China, there is a question of depth of knowledge about potential Chinese partners. In this context belongs the proposal of building an open-source database to effectively collect necessary information on China and distribute it to governments, the private sector, and other interested parties.
The extraordinary dependencies on China have developed over decades. Reducing them is a multifaceted and comprehensive process that will challenge us for a long time to come. The development of production in countries with a similar value framework, which is referred to by the word “friendshoring,” is certainly one of the appropriate measures.
The relocation of production by China to Europe, in turn, makes it possible to reduce dependencies based on our own governance. It meets the justified demand for a balance between political and economic priorities. Today, this trend is still negligible in terms of volume. But it is foreseeable that the development of European manufacturing capacities by Chinese companies will represent an important alternative.
Dr. Gerhard Hinterhaeuser is a partner at the management consulting firm Strategic Minds Company. He lives in Asia and Germany and was a member of the management board of the investment house PICC Asset Management in Shanghai from 2006 to 2014. His professional stations in Asia included Deutsche Bank, Hypovereinsbank and Munich Re.
A full double rainbow over the Great Wall on Thursday. The sight is rare – after all, it doesn’t rain much in northern China.
Masks, rubber gloves, disposable protective suits, test swabs – pandemic control has unexpected side effects here and there: Today, Ning Wang looks at waste. In China, the prevailing belief is that the virus can be transmitted on surfaces or through food. That’s why deliveries to homes are wrapped in plastic three times. Add the fact that billions of rapid tests must be disposed of as hazardous medical waste. The result is a 40-fold increase in the daily volume of waste. China’s otherwise clean boom metropolises choke under mountains of garbage. But a wider problem is emerging: Government plans to reduce plastic are being set back years.
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping is taking a step forward in defense strategy. In the future, he will allow more military operations abroad. The prerequisite is that it be a “non-war” operation. In fact, not every army deployment is the same as a war, and China has already participated in many peacekeeping missions. But in light of Russia’s sprawling “special operation” in Ukraine, an uneasy feeling creeps into this choice of words, writes Michael Radunski.
Xi Jinping, in his capacity as Chairman of the Central Military Commission, has approved a series of new plans that will allow China’s armed forces to conduct military operations abroad in the future. However, only under the condition that they are “military operations other than war”. Military operations other than war (MOOTW) are missions abroad such as disaster relief, humanitarian assistance, or even peacekeeping operations. “Organizing and conducting military non-war operations are of great importance to effectively fulfill the military’s missions and tasks in the new era,” the People’s Daily reports, summing up: With this step, Xi Jinping is consistently implementing his own thoughts on strengthening the military.
Xi’s directive covers 6 chapters and 59 articles. Although the exact contents have not been published, it is clear that the consequences are far-reaching. According to a report in the Global Times, the People’s Liberation Army troops could from now on protect China from spillover effects of regional instabilities, secure important transport routes for strategic materials such as oil, and defend China’s foreign investments, projects and personnel.
It quickly becomes clear that Xi’s directive creates the legal basis for the People’s Liberation Army to effectively protect China’s national sovereignty, security and development interests abroad. The Global Times emphasizes that there are only good intentions behind this: China’s armed forces engaged in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, and played an important role in saving lives during natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods.
A Chinese expert is quoted as saying: Foreign countries have increasingly benefited from disaster relief and humanitarian aid from China’s armed forces – countries that have, for example, received medical equipment and COVID-19 vaccines. He cites Tonga as an example, which was hit hard this year by a volcanic eruption and a tsunami.
All of these points are factually correct: China participates in numerous international missions – from humanitarian missions to anti-terrorist operations in the Gulf of Aden. China recently deployed more than 2200 soldiers to UN peacekeeping missions abroad. By comparison, Germany only deployed 638 individuals. And only the USA contributes more financially to these peace missions than the People’s Republic.
And yet, the term “military operations other than war” is raising eyebrows these days. The Chinese phrasing (军队非战争军事行动 jūnduì fēi zhànzhēng jūnshì xíngdòng) is unmistakably reminiscent of Russia’s current narrative. Whenever the Kremlin or representatives of the government in Moscow currently speak about the Russian attack on Ukraine, there is never any mention of war here either. Instead, there is only talk of a “special military operation”.
In the opinion of many experts, there is another parallel in this area: What Ukraine is to Russia, Taiwan is to China. Accordingly, foreign reports about Xi’s new pretense are concerned: Beijing may be preparing to attack democratic Taiwan under the guise of a “special operation” that is not classified as war, writes Radio Free Asia, for example.
On closer inspection, the wording used in the directive indeed causes unease: It favors military operations that are not war but serve to secure national sovereignty. From Beijing’s point of view, an attack on Taiwan would be exactly that: An operation to secure national sovereignty – after all, the island is regarded as a renegade province that belongs inalienably to mainland China. According to this interpretation, it would be no attack on another country. The operation would be more like a police operation inside the country. The Communist Party even considers it a national duty to bring Taiwan back to the Motherland. Xi leaves no doubt about this.
Most recently, China’s defense minister made it unmistakably clear how determined his country is on the Taiwan issue (China.Table reported). Speaking at the Shangri-La Forum in Singapore, China’s top military official said, “If anyone dares to secede Taiwan from China, we will not hesitate to fight,” the minister warned. “We will fight at all costs. We will fight to the very end.” No one should underestimate the determination and capability of the Chinese armed forces to preserve the territorial integrity of the People’s Republic. Of note: He speaks of fighting to the end, not war.
Meanwhile, at the same security conference, America’s Secretary of Defense pointed out that China was becoming increasingly aggressive in trying to assert its territorial claims. Lloyd Austin was referring in particular to Beijing’s behavior toward Taiwan, such as its regular military flights. Only a few days ago, 30 Chinese aircraft had entered Taiwan’s so-called Air Defense Identification Zone; according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense, this included more than 20 fighter jets (China.Table reported).
Fittingly, Beijing has begun to change its terminology on the Taiwan Strait in recent weeks. US diplomats and government officials have reportedly been informed at several levels that the roughly 160-kilometer-wide strait is not “international waters”.
“It is a false claim when certain countries call the Taiwan Strait ‘international waters’ to find a pretext to manipulate Taiwan-related matters,” said Wang Wenbin, the foreign ministry spokesman in Beijing. And since the Taiwan Strait is part of China’s maritime territory from Beijing’s perspective, there is also no longer a “center line” in the strait that is used to help keep Chinese and Taiwanese military jets apart.
It is this description of Taiwan as a renegade province that would allow the leaders in Beijing to speak not of war in the classical sense between states, but of a MOOTW, a military operation that is not a war. According to this definition, it is a mere internal conflict. For Beijing, it would be the end of the civil war against the Kuomintang Party.
China’s metropolises, such as Beijing and Shanghai, had become cleaner in recent decades. Corners, where trash lied around for weeks, had almost completely disappeared from the inner city landscape. Until the latest round of Covid curfews. During the lockdowns, floods of trash not only strain the sometimes overwhelmed waste disposal system, but also jeopardize the government’s recycling goals.
Back in April, some 373 million people in 45 Chinese metropolitan areas were in or partially affected by the lockdown, according to economists at Japanese securities firm Nomura. Shanghai, a metropolis of 25 million people, is still stuck in lockdown after two months. Because of the restrictions, all those people have ordered more online. Accordingly, from food to diapers, much more packaging was used than usual, partly because there is still a persistent misconception that the virus can also be transmitted via surfaces (China.Table reported). Many Chinese believe that more packaging equals more hygiene, which is why deliveries are sometimes double- and triple-wrapped in plastic bags. That’s not rational, but pandemic control isn’t always rational either.
In Shanghai alone, for example, more than 3,300 tons of household waste were generated every day during the lockdown. As recently as February, before the lockdown, just 73 tons of household waste were generated daily, according to the state-run People’s Daily newspaper. That’s an increase by a factor of 44. No waste infrastructure in the world could easily handle that.
Mass testing, which was introduced during the lockdown and is now being reintroduced for all 25 million residents, also generates enormous amounts of medical waste. The Shanghai municipal government has now had to commission three new waste disposal facilities just for medical waste to increase capacity in the area to 1,500 tons a day.
However, it is primarily plastic bags and single-use plastic packaging that environmentalists are concerned about. This is because single-use plastics are produced almost exclusively from fossil fuels. As a result, they not only leave a large carbon footprint during production, but also cause further damage in landfills. Even when buried there, they do not decompose for years. Their incineration would harm the air and the environment.
Even without Covid pollution, the country had produced a particularly large amount of plastic. According to the China National Resources Recycling Association, China produced about 60 million tons of plastic waste in 2020, of which only about 16 million tons were recycled. No wonder: In China, it is still common to use plastic bags when shopping. Often apples, carrots and potatoes are also packed in their own disposable plastic bags.
The use and production of plastic bags in China’s so-called first-tier cities was supposed to be stopped by the end of this year. However, this measure adopted by the government in January 2020 coincided exactly with the pandemic season. In Wuhan alone, over six million single-use plastic bags were used to distribute food to the population during the first lockdown. This was from January to April 2020, when more than eleven million people were confined to their homes for over two months.
Scientists calculated that the plastic bags used in Wuhan at the time would cover an area equivalent to 51 soccer fields. If the disposable packaging from food deliveries were added up within this period, the stacked “lunch boxes” from Wuhan alone would be about 31 times the height of Mount Everest. And China has 19 cities in that category. So the first Lockdown has also already set the precedent for the mountains of garbage.
The government has been fighting plastic pollution for decades. With 60 million tons of plastic produced annually, the People’s Republic is currently one of the world’s largest plastic producers. Until 2017, China was also the world’s largest importer of plastics, as it was cheaper and more energy-efficient to obtain them from recyclable waste than to produce them itself.
Among the many Western European countries that sent their plastic waste to China, Germany topped the list with about 390,000 tons per year, according to Martina Igini of environmental news and data platform Earth.org in Hong Kong. These imports contributed to another 10 to 13 percent of the huge amount of plastic waste China has had to deal with in recent years. In addition, about one-third of the world’s single-use plastic production facilities are located in China. With about 5.3 million tons produced in 2019, state-owned oil and gas company Sinopec is the world’s third-largest producer of single-use plastic waste, according to Australia’s Minderoo Foundation.
The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s central economic planner, published a five-year action plan to reduce plastic waste on its website last September. Jointly issued by the NDRC and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the plan for 2021 to 2025 aims to “further improve the management of the entire plastic pollution chain,” the South China Morning Post reported.
The plan includes detailed measures and specific targets to reduce the production and use of plastics. These include:
“Plastic pollution has become a key environmental issue of concern worldwide,” said Zhang Deyuan, Deputy Director of the NDRC’s research institute. “The core to controlling plastic pollution is to build strong dams against plastic leakage into the environment.”
As is so often the case, not only one government agency has been entrusted with implementation, but responsibilities have been assigned to several government agencies at once. For example, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has to ensure that the production of ultra-thin disposable plastic shopping bags is phased out. The production of products containing plastic microbeads, which are harmful to the environment and health, is also to decrease.
Meanwhile, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) is responsible for monitoring and restricting the excessive packaging of goods. The plan calls for industries such as retail, e-commerce and express package delivery to eliminate the “unreasonable” use of single-use plastics by 2025.
However, neither the MIIT nor SAMR saw the lockdowns coming, and with them, the explosion of the packaging craze. The government’s action plan from 2019 is now likely to have come under enormous pressure. It has probably long been abandoned. After all, the goals formulated in it for the period up to 2025 can hardly be achieved.
China has commissioned offshore wind power plants with a capacity of almost 17 gigawatts in 2021. This makes the People’s Republic the world leader. It has installed more than 80 percent of the world’s new offshore capacity of 21 gigawatts. Total global installed capacity is 57 gigawatts, Nikkei Asia reports.
According to the report, one reason for China’s rapid expansion is expiring subsidies. Power plant operators had to connect the plants to the grid by the end of 2021 if they wanted to benefit from subsidized electricity rates. Subsidies will continue to be cut back in the coming years. In addition, many provinces are competing to build wind power supply chains.
China is home to the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturers. Half of the wind turbine components manufactured worldwide come from Chinese production. Six of the ten largest manufacturers come from the People’s Republic. The manufacturers are increasingly pushing onto the world market. But unlike in the solar industry, experts do not expect Western producers to be pushed out by exports (China.Table reported). nib
The war in Ukraine has made us painfully aware of how dangerous it is to become dependent “in good times” on regimes whose basic philosophy we do not share. With open eyes, we have become unduly dependent on Moscow for energy, even though there have been enough warnings about President Putin’s goals.
Now the world is looking to China, where the problem is potentially much greater. Again in good faith, we have become critically dependent on China as a sales market as well as a central link in global supply chains. The dependence on China as a sales market is particularly evident in the automotive industry. Volkswagen generates 40 percent of its sales there. The dependence on China in the context of global supply chains is also evident in products that are of key importance for the desired energy transition: More than 80 percent of all solar cells are manufactured in China today. The country dominates the market for many of the industrial metals required: rare earth elements. In the past, it has used this to assert its political interests. Similarly, up to 90 percent of the precursors for antibiotics come from China. As consumers, we only have to look back a few months, when the fight against the Covid pandemic was jeopardized by the lack of FFP2 masks from China.
Yet China has consistently established itself as an unrelenting systemic rival in recent years. The latest study by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik) even speaks of a Chinese attack on the liberal-democratic international order. Against this background, at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, according to the remarks of a participant from the consulting firm McKinsey, there was talk of “China-free supply chains”.
Of course, this idea is neither practicable nor desirable. But it is just as undoubtedly true that we must consistently and significantly reduce our high dependencies on China. Taking political considerations into account in the strategic positioning of the economy is the order of the day.
Here, it would be desirable that we acquire a collective memory that goes back more than just a few short years. We remember traveling back to China with flying colors and unhesitating optimism as early as 1992, just three years after the suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen uprising. The moral indignation against what we saw as the regime’s unthinkable actions quickly faded and was forgotten in light of unparalleled market potential.
Reducing dependencies on China, however, does not mean living past the world’s second-largest economy. China now manufactures products that are in some cases of a higher technological standard than our own, and this trend will only continue. Disengaging from this development not only reduces our standard of living, it also cuts us off from technological progress and impairs our comprehensive knowledge of our strongest systemic rival.
So it is not a question of thinking up China-free supply chains, but of rethinking and reordering relations with China in the context of global supply chains. In the coming years, the task will be to bring more of the production now made in China back to our own countries, and to reconfigure supply chains in such a way that Chinese companies begin to shift production to Europe. This kind of division of labor is new in the case of China, but already well established elsewhere. For example, in the wake of the steady rise of the yen against the US dollar, Japanese companies consistently moved production abroad years ago, and German industrial companies have also been successfully producing in many parts of the world for years, as is well known.
This will not only reduce our dependence on China, it will also facilitate the supply of critical raw materials such as rare earth elements, which Chinese companies will bring to Europe to manufacture their products. Of course, it will also create value and employment in our countries.
The first strategic partnerships of this kind are already being initiated. Spectacular corporate acquisitions like that of Kuka in 2016 are not desired as part of this strategy. Rather, it aims to find suitable local partners with whom the market can be jointly developed. Possible Chinese solo ventures should be approached with caution.
As with other initiatives with China, there is a question of depth of knowledge about potential Chinese partners. In this context belongs the proposal of building an open-source database to effectively collect necessary information on China and distribute it to governments, the private sector, and other interested parties.
The extraordinary dependencies on China have developed over decades. Reducing them is a multifaceted and comprehensive process that will challenge us for a long time to come. The development of production in countries with a similar value framework, which is referred to by the word “friendshoring,” is certainly one of the appropriate measures.
The relocation of production by China to Europe, in turn, makes it possible to reduce dependencies based on our own governance. It meets the justified demand for a balance between political and economic priorities. Today, this trend is still negligible in terms of volume. But it is foreseeable that the development of European manufacturing capacities by Chinese companies will represent an important alternative.
Dr. Gerhard Hinterhaeuser is a partner at the management consulting firm Strategic Minds Company. He lives in Asia and Germany and was a member of the management board of the investment house PICC Asset Management in Shanghai from 2006 to 2014. His professional stations in Asia included Deutsche Bank, Hypovereinsbank and Munich Re.
A full double rainbow over the Great Wall on Thursday. The sight is rare – after all, it doesn’t rain much in northern China.
