Following pressure from major investors, human rights activists and politicians, Volkswagen is expected to announce an independent audit of its plant in Xinjiang in the near future. At its annual general meeting in May, the company still pointed out that such an independent investigation was impossible.
In the meantime, investors believe the carmaker will have to change its position, as Marcel Grzanna has learned. Whether VW has actually managed to convince its joint venture partner SAIC to do so could become clear on June 21.
China made a big promise to international investment banks in early 2020. Beijing promised to open up its financial sector to foreign institutions finally. But as it turns out, no foreign financial service provider is really gaining ground in the People’s Republic. Joern Petring took a closer look at which problems foreign banks are facing.
The People’s Republic has fundamentally changed its stance on satire and comedy in recent years. As Johnny Erling writes “there is nothing to laugh about in China”. As popular as the cultural genre has become – especially among the younger generation, and lucrative for investors – as harshly it is now being regulated. Even jokes could result in jail time.
At the annual general meeting on May 10, Volkswagen still stressed that it was not in a position to launch an independent inspection of the VW plant in Xinjiang. The company’s leadership cited contractual obligations to its joint venture partner SAIC as the reason. The Chinese state-owned manufacturer would have to support such a decision. Moreover, Volkswagen only takes the passenger seat in the partnership with SAIC when it comes to political matters.
But Volkswagen wants to counter the continuing loss of reputation. The company may soon announce an independent audit of its Xinjiang plant. Then an internationally accredited company could audit the highly criticized plant in northwest China. Whether Volkswagen has actually managed to convince SAIC of the urgency of such an investigation will presumably become clear on June 21. The company could use its Capital Markets Day at the Hockenheimring as an opportunity to make the announcement.
By conducting an audit, Volkswagen would meet the demands of numerous large investors and gain some breathing room amid increasing pressure from investors, human rights activists and politicians. At the annual general meeting in May, several investment companies and Uyghur representatives demanded reliable evidence that Volkswagen was not profiting from forced labor in Xinjiang.
The VW plant in Xinjiang is generally considered a political concession by the company to the authoritarian ruling Communist Party. Although the company publicly stresses the economic logic behind the investment, the remote plant is, in fact, of little significance for Volkswagen’s sales in the People’s Republic. In 2021, a few hundred employees built only 5,355 vehicles at the factory.
At the general meeting, China head Ralf Brandstaetter commented on the accusations of possible human rights violations. In order to meet the cultural needs of the workforce, the plant has created a “good working environment” that “respects religious persuasions and diverse cultures.” For example, the company canteen would serve halal dishes for Muslims.
The investment company Deka has already removed Volkswagen stocks from its sustainability program because the group is unable to disprove the accusations conclusively. Deka’s decision was a reaction to the maximum downgrade in the social category by the rating agency MSCI. This so-called red flag warning was enough for Deka to classify Volkswagen as “no longer investable” in the sustainability segment.
The evaluation process at Union Investment is still ongoing. “My big hope is that the human rights risks will be fully clarified,” says Janne Werning, Head of ESG Capital Markets & Stewardship. Union Investment could also exclude Volkswagen from its sustainable funds if the Wolfsburg-based company fails to credibly distance itself from forced labor.
Given the growing relevance of sustainability products on financial markets, it is increasingly important for Volkswagen shares to stay in Union Investment’s ESG program, especially as the categorization as “not investable” by another investment company could very quickly trigger a domino effect.
The sustainable rating of companies is a complex matter. The ESG standards of environmental and social compatibility and corporate governance are weighed against each other. As a car manufacturer that produces internal combustion engines, Volkswagen benefits from the fact that the company strives for sustainability in electromobility and the associated production of batteries. However, environmentalists and human rights organizations consider this evaluation type inconsistent.
Jamie Dimon, arguably the world’s most famous banker, visited China this week for the first time since the end of the pandemic. The billionaire and head of JPMorgan tried to spread good vibes in Shanghai. But in reality, he probably is not pleased with how his bank is doing in the People’s Republic.
China made a big promise to international investment banks at the beginning of 2020. Beijing pledged to finally open its financial sector wide to foreign institutions. The biggest change: For the first time, regulators no longer require banks to operate in tandem as a joint venture with a Chinese partner. Instead, they are now allowed to set up independent subsidiaries. But apparently, banks have overestimated the new opportunities by far.
As an evaluation by the Financial Times published in May shows, no foreign financial services provider is really gaining ground in China. Last year, the seven largest international institutions, including JPMorgan, generated only 0.1 percent of the 395 billion yuan (52 billion euros) earned by the 140 investment banks in China last year. Foreign banks now have more freedom. But what good does that do when local competitors have long since divided up the market amongst themselves?
In addition, the previous revenue guarantors for foreign investment banks no longer work in China. For a long time, they were the gateway for Chinese companies to go public on Wall Street. Especially US banks like JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley made enormous profits.
But against the backdrop of their tensions, both Washington and Beijing have made it clear that they dislike Chinese companies flocking to Wall Street. Instead, Chinese companies prefer to go public directly in Shanghai or Hong Kong. But US banks are on the defensive even in the former British crown colony. As an insider recently told the Financial Times, Chinese banks increasingly try to “sneak in” by urging their clients to use not only an international but also a mainland bank for an IPO in Hong Kong.
International banks are faced with other negative factors in China:
US banks are already drawing staffing consequences: According to Bloomberg, JPMorgan cut about 30 highly paid investment banking jobs in the Asia-Pacific region at the end of February, most of them in Greater China. Morgan Stanley plans to withdraw 40 bankers from the region.
Dimon had caused a stir in November 2021 with a surprisingly offhand remark. At the bank’s 100th anniversary celebration in Boston, he said, referring to the Communist Party, which was also founded in 1921: “I’ll make you a bet we last longer.” This earned him a lot of chuckles in the US. Beijing was less amused – and could prove Dimon wrong.
The Chinese word for “humor” – yōumò (幽默) – was adopted from English 100 years ago. In 1924, the essayist Lin Yutang (林语堂) coined the term. He saw humor and satire as driving forces of literary-cultural reform after 1919 to change Confucian-influenced society.
The People’s Republic is still struggling with this. Systemically humorless party leaders persecute satirists who made them and their socialist dictatorship lose face. Mao took revenge in his anti-right-wing campaigns and with the Cultural Revolution on all those who dared to hold up a mirror to him.
Still, cartoonists and comedians of all kinds dared to use satire, utilizing traditional stage arts such as local spoken theater (滑稽戏), sketches (相声), jokes (段子), or essays (小品). Whenever they went too far, the rulers literally silenced them.
After a generation of social opening since Mao’s death, the CP is again tightening the reins with its “new era of socialism.” And China is no laughing matter under Xi. In order to intimidate all satirists, Beijing made an example of star comedian Li Haoshi (李昊石). Loosely based on the Chinese idiom: Kill the chicken to scare the monkey. For making a joke, Li was banned from performing and is in jail. His stage agency “Xiaoguo Wenhua” (笑果文化), has to pay millions in fines.
The comedian embodies a genre that originated in the USA and has only been conquering China’s urban culture for a few years: stand-up comedy. Its Chinese name, tuōkǒuxiù (脱口秀), sounds like the English word “talk show.” One-person stage performances in variety shows draw Generation Z as the new hangout. Young Chinese turn them into havens to escape their daily ideological and, more recently, pandemic contamination. China’s venture capital is betting on this business model with billion of investments. Startled, Beijing reacted with a heavy hand. Some bloggers believe to see the signs of a “Cultural Revolution 2.0”.
In Beijing’s Century Theater (世纪剧院), comedian Li Haoshi, who has become an icon among new comedians under his stage name “House” (derived from the surname “Haoshi”), cracked one too many jokes. He chatted about his two dogs, whom he adopted from Shanghai’s streets. When he saw his two dogs chasing a squirrel he said he was reminded of the slogan “fine style of work, capable of winning battles.” (作风优良，能打胜仗).
The audience laughed at the slogan, which party leader Xi Jinping has been constantly repeating since 2013 to whip China’s army into shape. One of the audience members denounced Li online. He accused him of slandering China’s military with his dog comparison. The accusation made nationalist waves on social media.
Everything came crashing down on 31-year-old Li. Despite self-criticism and public apologies, he, his Xiaoguo agency and the parent company “Shanghai Xiaoguo Entertainment Group” were punished, and Li was suspended. Beijing officials found nothing funny about his gag. China’s performing arts industry association called on all members to never let Li on a stage again and urged them to be more disciplined.
Beijing subsequently ordered Li to be arrested by the police. He faces three years in prison for insulting the People’s Liberation Army. Since June 2021, this has been considered a criminal offense. The Xiaoguo show’s revenue of 1.32 million yuan was confiscated as “illegal” profits. The parent company must cough up 13.35 million yuan in fines; that is nearly two million euros combined. According to Beijing Municipal Culture and Tourism Bureau, Li had “intentionally” changed the script to insult the military, with “adverse social consequences.” He reportedly was not the first such case. Six stand-up comedians from the Xiaoguo Cultural Group have been punished for inappropriate behavior in the past three years.
For Beijing’s party, the incident was a convenient opportunity to gain control over the city’s burgeoning vaudeville arts and prevent potentially subversive threats. This explains the grotesque punishment handed to comedian Li for cracking a joke. A 34-year-old blogger from the city of Dalian, who expressed solidarity with Li online, was also severely punished. Police arrested her for insulting the army and made her case public as a deterrent. The Global Times illustrated her with a photo of handcuffs.
The year before, the party newspaper had praised the new wave of stand-up comedians since 2010 as a sign of vibrant cultural life and one of the “biggest and most popular forms of entertainment in Chinese cities in the future.”
But after dozens of Chinese stand-up artists performed their first US gig this spring, and some performed critical comedy, Beijing’s tone changed. After the scandal involving comedian Li, it called stand-up comedy an imported show which must have “red lines.” “Jokes must have limits, even in the US.”
The People’s Republic has been at war with satire since its founding. In the 1950s, cartoonists were required to exert a positive influence and educate the people, otherwise they would have nothing to laugh about. Only enemies and opposing foreign countries were allowed to ridicule them. Today, Party leader Xi Jinping requires socialist art and culture to generate “positive energy” (正能量), Li has now been criticized: “Humor can bring positive energy to life, but not when expressed through disrespectful words and actions.”
It is hard to make comparisons – but China’s comedians could learn from the legendary German cabaret artist Werner Finck (1902-1978). In his essay “Melde mich zurück,” published in 1947, Finck gave reasons why he continued to perform on stage in Nazi Germany and lived. Even after 1933, he performed in the “catacomb” he helped found. He mocked the regime with his performance style, full of double meanings and unfinished sentences (anacoluthon). Initially, the spies among the audience allowed him to continue because – as Finck believed – they did not understand the joke: “Over the jester’s cap of the wordless joke I even pulled the cloak of the telling pause. That made the tip of the attack invisible. Only the gleeful laughter of my friends, who thus – without wanting to – became my enemies, made them suspicious.
In 1935, and after sketches such as “Anprobe beim Schneider” (Fitting at the Tailor’s), when Finck implied the Hitler salute with his right arm raised and called it “Aufgehobene Rechte” (Rights Raised), his cabaret was closed. He ended up in the Esterwegen concentration camp, but was released after six months due to fortunate circumstances and continued on a new stage: “Yesterday we were closed, today we are open. If we are too open today, we will be closed again tomorrow.” Then, in 1939, it was over for good when the Reich Chamber of Culture expelled him. Finck avoided arrest by enlisting for the front. In 1947, he asked himself, “Was I now a hesitant hero? Or a courageous coward?” Because “I never went further than the extreme limit of what was barely allowed.”
China’s satirists are also constantly testing the limits. Shanghai comedian Zhou Libo (周立波) became the pioneer of today’s stand-up comedians after 2007 with his one-person stage show “Shanghai Style Small Talk” (海派清口). His shows sold out even though he only promised the audience to show them “one man, his mouth, and that for 120 minutes.” They cheered him when he praised the megacity of Shanghai for its exemplary solution to traffic problems: “Thanks to the Transrapid, for which we paid billions, we can now travel 30 kilometers.”
The party, more receptive to criticism before 2012 than today, tolerated Zhou’s motto: “All are equal in laughter.” But he let his audience know that he was walking a fine line as a comedian. In Finck fashion, he said, “If I continue, I’ll probably be taken away soon.” Today, he lives in the US.
But despite stricter censorship, away from the increasingly ideology-driven state culture and TV programs, almost unnoticed and regarded as hidden gems, stand-up comedy initiatives first emerged spontaneously – in the bars and cafés of Beijing and Shanghai. Today, China’s leading stand-up company “Shanghai Xiaoguo Culture Media Co.”, which employed comedian Li, was founded in 2014 with a starting capital of 2 million yuan. It has grown rapidly since then. In 2021, its comedians performed 1,500 stage shows on guest tours in 25 cities in China. China’s Generation Z, children born after 2000, became the audience.
China’s venture capitalists, former ideology watchdogs and control freaks of the CP, sensed the potential of the wildly growing comedy business. According to a new investigation by the shareholder newspaper “Kechuangban Daily” (科创板日报), “Xiaoguo Culture” became a “favorite mascot for risk capital” (笑果文化也成为了备受资本青睐的宠儿) between 2016 and 2021. Gigantic venture money flowed to Xiaoguo in eight rounds of funding. After the entry of IT giant Tencent in March 2021, Xiaoguo Culture is now estimated to have a market value of more than four billion yuan, which is now at stake after Beijing’s crackdown on comedian Li. Not only there. Since 2015, investors have invested in more than nine other talk shows and comedy companies. Last year, China’s first 30-page investor industry report on the stand-up comedy business boom was published.
However, investors overlook the political vulnerability of the stage and entertainment arts in socialist China. For the party, “every joke is a tiny revolution,” realized George Orwell in December 1944, a visionary when it comes to dictatorships. In a piece for London’s Leader Magazine, included in his Collected Essays, Volume 3, (Penguin), Orwell wrote: “A thing is funny when – in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening – it upsets the established order.” And that’s precisely what Beijing is wary of once again.
The sandy stretches of the Taklamakan Desert in Xinjiang hold a treasure: oil. On the Tarim oil field, China National Petroleum Corporation has started to drill boreholes that will reach a depth of 10,000 meters within 457 days, penetrating more than ten continental layers. This will reach the Cretaceous formation in the Earth’s crust – and with it, rock that is about 145 million years old. The project will provide data on the Earth’s internal structure and test technologies for deep drilling. The world’s deepest borehole has been located in Russia since 1989, at a depth of 12,262 meters – work on it took 20 years.
Following pressure from major investors, human rights activists and politicians, Volkswagen is expected to announce an independent audit of its plant in Xinjiang in the near future. At its annual general meeting in May, the company still pointed out that such an independent investigation was impossible.
In the meantime, investors believe the carmaker will have to change its position, as Marcel Grzanna has learned. Whether VW has actually managed to convince its joint venture partner SAIC to do so could become clear on June 21.
China made a big promise to international investment banks in early 2020. Beijing promised to open up its financial sector to foreign institutions finally. But as it turns out, no foreign financial service provider is really gaining ground in the People’s Republic. Joern Petring took a closer look at which problems foreign banks are facing.
The People’s Republic has fundamentally changed its stance on satire and comedy in recent years. As Johnny Erling writes “there is nothing to laugh about in China”. As popular as the cultural genre has become – especially among the younger generation, and lucrative for investors – as harshly it is now being regulated. Even jokes could result in jail time.
At the annual general meeting on May 10, Volkswagen still stressed that it was not in a position to launch an independent inspection of the VW plant in Xinjiang. The company’s leadership cited contractual obligations to its joint venture partner SAIC as the reason. The Chinese state-owned manufacturer would have to support such a decision. Moreover, Volkswagen only takes the passenger seat in the partnership with SAIC when it comes to political matters.
But Volkswagen wants to counter the continuing loss of reputation. The company may soon announce an independent audit of its Xinjiang plant. Then an internationally accredited company could audit the highly criticized plant in northwest China. Whether Volkswagen has actually managed to convince SAIC of the urgency of such an investigation will presumably become clear on June 21. The company could use its Capital Markets Day at the Hockenheimring as an opportunity to make the announcement.
By conducting an audit, Volkswagen would meet the demands of numerous large investors and gain some breathing room amid increasing pressure from investors, human rights activists and politicians. At the annual general meeting in May, several investment companies and Uyghur representatives demanded reliable evidence that Volkswagen was not profiting from forced labor in Xinjiang.
The VW plant in Xinjiang is generally considered a political concession by the company to the authoritarian ruling Communist Party. Although the company publicly stresses the economic logic behind the investment, the remote plant is, in fact, of little significance for Volkswagen’s sales in the People’s Republic. In 2021, a few hundred employees built only 5,355 vehicles at the factory.
At the general meeting, China head Ralf Brandstaetter commented on the accusations of possible human rights violations. In order to meet the cultural needs of the workforce, the plant has created a “good working environment” that “respects religious persuasions and diverse cultures.” For example, the company canteen would serve halal dishes for Muslims.
The investment company Deka has already removed Volkswagen stocks from its sustainability program because the group is unable to disprove the accusations conclusively. Deka’s decision was a reaction to the maximum downgrade in the social category by the rating agency MSCI. This so-called red flag warning was enough for Deka to classify Volkswagen as “no longer investable” in the sustainability segment.
The evaluation process at Union Investment is still ongoing. “My big hope is that the human rights risks will be fully clarified,” says Janne Werning, Head of ESG Capital Markets & Stewardship. Union Investment could also exclude Volkswagen from its sustainable funds if the Wolfsburg-based company fails to credibly distance itself from forced labor.
Given the growing relevance of sustainability products on financial markets, it is increasingly important for Volkswagen shares to stay in Union Investment’s ESG program, especially as the categorization as “not investable” by another investment company could very quickly trigger a domino effect.
The sustainable rating of companies is a complex matter. The ESG standards of environmental and social compatibility and corporate governance are weighed against each other. As a car manufacturer that produces internal combustion engines, Volkswagen benefits from the fact that the company strives for sustainability in electromobility and the associated production of batteries. However, environmentalists and human rights organizations consider this evaluation type inconsistent.
Jamie Dimon, arguably the world’s most famous banker, visited China this week for the first time since the end of the pandemic. The billionaire and head of JPMorgan tried to spread good vibes in Shanghai. But in reality, he probably is not pleased with how his bank is doing in the People’s Republic.
China made a big promise to international investment banks at the beginning of 2020. Beijing pledged to finally open its financial sector wide to foreign institutions. The biggest change: For the first time, regulators no longer require banks to operate in tandem as a joint venture with a Chinese partner. Instead, they are now allowed to set up independent subsidiaries. But apparently, banks have overestimated the new opportunities by far.
As an evaluation by the Financial Times published in May shows, no foreign financial services provider is really gaining ground in China. Last year, the seven largest international institutions, including JPMorgan, generated only 0.1 percent of the 395 billion yuan (52 billion euros) earned by the 140 investment banks in China last year. Foreign banks now have more freedom. But what good does that do when local competitors have long since divided up the market amongst themselves?
In addition, the previous revenue guarantors for foreign investment banks no longer work in China. For a long time, they were the gateway for Chinese companies to go public on Wall Street. Especially US banks like JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley made enormous profits.
But against the backdrop of their tensions, both Washington and Beijing have made it clear that they dislike Chinese companies flocking to Wall Street. Instead, Chinese companies prefer to go public directly in Shanghai or Hong Kong. But US banks are on the defensive even in the former British crown colony. As an insider recently told the Financial Times, Chinese banks increasingly try to “sneak in” by urging their clients to use not only an international but also a mainland bank for an IPO in Hong Kong.
International banks are faced with other negative factors in China:
US banks are already drawing staffing consequences: According to Bloomberg, JPMorgan cut about 30 highly paid investment banking jobs in the Asia-Pacific region at the end of February, most of them in Greater China. Morgan Stanley plans to withdraw 40 bankers from the region.
Dimon had caused a stir in November 2021 with a surprisingly offhand remark. At the bank’s 100th anniversary celebration in Boston, he said, referring to the Communist Party, which was also founded in 1921: “I’ll make you a bet we last longer.” This earned him a lot of chuckles in the US. Beijing was less amused – and could prove Dimon wrong.
The Chinese word for “humor” – yōumò (幽默) – was adopted from English 100 years ago. In 1924, the essayist Lin Yutang (林语堂) coined the term. He saw humor and satire as driving forces of literary-cultural reform after 1919 to change Confucian-influenced society.
The People’s Republic is still struggling with this. Systemically humorless party leaders persecute satirists who made them and their socialist dictatorship lose face. Mao took revenge in his anti-right-wing campaigns and with the Cultural Revolution on all those who dared to hold up a mirror to him.
Still, cartoonists and comedians of all kinds dared to use satire, utilizing traditional stage arts such as local spoken theater (滑稽戏), sketches (相声), jokes (段子), or essays (小品). Whenever they went too far, the rulers literally silenced them.
After a generation of social opening since Mao’s death, the CP is again tightening the reins with its “new era of socialism.” And China is no laughing matter under Xi. In order to intimidate all satirists, Beijing made an example of star comedian Li Haoshi (李昊石). Loosely based on the Chinese idiom: Kill the chicken to scare the monkey. For making a joke, Li was banned from performing and is in jail. His stage agency “Xiaoguo Wenhua” (笑果文化), has to pay millions in fines.
The comedian embodies a genre that originated in the USA and has only been conquering China’s urban culture for a few years: stand-up comedy. Its Chinese name, tuōkǒuxiù (脱口秀), sounds like the English word “talk show.” One-person stage performances in variety shows draw Generation Z as the new hangout. Young Chinese turn them into havens to escape their daily ideological and, more recently, pandemic contamination. China’s venture capital is betting on this business model with billion of investments. Startled, Beijing reacted with a heavy hand. Some bloggers believe to see the signs of a “Cultural Revolution 2.0”.
In Beijing’s Century Theater (世纪剧院), comedian Li Haoshi, who has become an icon among new comedians under his stage name “House” (derived from the surname “Haoshi”), cracked one too many jokes. He chatted about his two dogs, whom he adopted from Shanghai’s streets. When he saw his two dogs chasing a squirrel he said he was reminded of the slogan “fine style of work, capable of winning battles.” (作风优良，能打胜仗).
The audience laughed at the slogan, which party leader Xi Jinping has been constantly repeating since 2013 to whip China’s army into shape. One of the audience members denounced Li online. He accused him of slandering China’s military with his dog comparison. The accusation made nationalist waves on social media.
Everything came crashing down on 31-year-old Li. Despite self-criticism and public apologies, he, his Xiaoguo agency and the parent company “Shanghai Xiaoguo Entertainment Group” were punished, and Li was suspended. Beijing officials found nothing funny about his gag. China’s performing arts industry association called on all members to never let Li on a stage again and urged them to be more disciplined.
Beijing subsequently ordered Li to be arrested by the police. He faces three years in prison for insulting the People’s Liberation Army. Since June 2021, this has been considered a criminal offense. The Xiaoguo show’s revenue of 1.32 million yuan was confiscated as “illegal” profits. The parent company must cough up 13.35 million yuan in fines; that is nearly two million euros combined. According to Beijing Municipal Culture and Tourism Bureau, Li had “intentionally” changed the script to insult the military, with “adverse social consequences.” He reportedly was not the first such case. Six stand-up comedians from the Xiaoguo Cultural Group have been punished for inappropriate behavior in the past three years.
For Beijing’s party, the incident was a convenient opportunity to gain control over the city’s burgeoning vaudeville arts and prevent potentially subversive threats. This explains the grotesque punishment handed to comedian Li for cracking a joke. A 34-year-old blogger from the city of Dalian, who expressed solidarity with Li online, was also severely punished. Police arrested her for insulting the army and made her case public as a deterrent. The Global Times illustrated her with a photo of handcuffs.
The year before, the party newspaper had praised the new wave of stand-up comedians since 2010 as a sign of vibrant cultural life and one of the “biggest and most popular forms of entertainment in Chinese cities in the future.”
But after dozens of Chinese stand-up artists performed their first US gig this spring, and some performed critical comedy, Beijing’s tone changed. After the scandal involving comedian Li, it called stand-up comedy an imported show which must have “red lines.” “Jokes must have limits, even in the US.”
The People’s Republic has been at war with satire since its founding. In the 1950s, cartoonists were required to exert a positive influence and educate the people, otherwise they would have nothing to laugh about. Only enemies and opposing foreign countries were allowed to ridicule them. Today, Party leader Xi Jinping requires socialist art and culture to generate “positive energy” (正能量), Li has now been criticized: “Humor can bring positive energy to life, but not when expressed through disrespectful words and actions.”
It is hard to make comparisons – but China’s comedians could learn from the legendary German cabaret artist Werner Finck (1902-1978). In his essay “Melde mich zurück,” published in 1947, Finck gave reasons why he continued to perform on stage in Nazi Germany and lived. Even after 1933, he performed in the “catacomb” he helped found. He mocked the regime with his performance style, full of double meanings and unfinished sentences (anacoluthon). Initially, the spies among the audience allowed him to continue because – as Finck believed – they did not understand the joke: “Over the jester’s cap of the wordless joke I even pulled the cloak of the telling pause. That made the tip of the attack invisible. Only the gleeful laughter of my friends, who thus – without wanting to – became my enemies, made them suspicious.
In 1935, and after sketches such as “Anprobe beim Schneider” (Fitting at the Tailor’s), when Finck implied the Hitler salute with his right arm raised and called it “Aufgehobene Rechte” (Rights Raised), his cabaret was closed. He ended up in the Esterwegen concentration camp, but was released after six months due to fortunate circumstances and continued on a new stage: “Yesterday we were closed, today we are open. If we are too open today, we will be closed again tomorrow.” Then, in 1939, it was over for good when the Reich Chamber of Culture expelled him. Finck avoided arrest by enlisting for the front. In 1947, he asked himself, “Was I now a hesitant hero? Or a courageous coward?” Because “I never went further than the extreme limit of what was barely allowed.”
China’s satirists are also constantly testing the limits. Shanghai comedian Zhou Libo (周立波) became the pioneer of today’s stand-up comedians after 2007 with his one-person stage show “Shanghai Style Small Talk” (海派清口). His shows sold out even though he only promised the audience to show them “one man, his mouth, and that for 120 minutes.” They cheered him when he praised the megacity of Shanghai for its exemplary solution to traffic problems: “Thanks to the Transrapid, for which we paid billions, we can now travel 30 kilometers.”
The party, more receptive to criticism before 2012 than today, tolerated Zhou’s motto: “All are equal in laughter.” But he let his audience know that he was walking a fine line as a comedian. In Finck fashion, he said, “If I continue, I’ll probably be taken away soon.” Today, he lives in the US.
But despite stricter censorship, away from the increasingly ideology-driven state culture and TV programs, almost unnoticed and regarded as hidden gems, stand-up comedy initiatives first emerged spontaneously – in the bars and cafés of Beijing and Shanghai. Today, China’s leading stand-up company “Shanghai Xiaoguo Culture Media Co.”, which employed comedian Li, was founded in 2014 with a starting capital of 2 million yuan. It has grown rapidly since then. In 2021, its comedians performed 1,500 stage shows on guest tours in 25 cities in China. China’s Generation Z, children born after 2000, became the audience.
China’s venture capitalists, former ideology watchdogs and control freaks of the CP, sensed the potential of the wildly growing comedy business. According to a new investigation by the shareholder newspaper “Kechuangban Daily” (科创板日报), “Xiaoguo Culture” became a “favorite mascot for risk capital” (笑果文化也成为了备受资本青睐的宠儿) between 2016 and 2021. Gigantic venture money flowed to Xiaoguo in eight rounds of funding. After the entry of IT giant Tencent in March 2021, Xiaoguo Culture is now estimated to have a market value of more than four billion yuan, which is now at stake after Beijing’s crackdown on comedian Li. Not only there. Since 2015, investors have invested in more than nine other talk shows and comedy companies. Last year, China’s first 30-page investor industry report on the stand-up comedy business boom was published.
However, investors overlook the political vulnerability of the stage and entertainment arts in socialist China. For the party, “every joke is a tiny revolution,” realized George Orwell in December 1944, a visionary when it comes to dictatorships. In a piece for London’s Leader Magazine, included in his Collected Essays, Volume 3, (Penguin), Orwell wrote: “A thing is funny when – in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening – it upsets the established order.” And that’s precisely what Beijing is wary of once again.
The sandy stretches of the Taklamakan Desert in Xinjiang hold a treasure: oil. On the Tarim oil field, China National Petroleum Corporation has started to drill boreholes that will reach a depth of 10,000 meters within 457 days, penetrating more than ten continental layers. This will reach the Cretaceous formation in the Earth’s crust – and with it, rock that is about 145 million years old. The project will provide data on the Earth’s internal structure and test technologies for deep drilling. The world’s deepest borehole has been located in Russia since 1989, at a depth of 12,262 meters – work on it took 20 years.
