Is it naïve for the German city of Kiel to form a partnership with the Chinese port city of Qingdao? Or does it make sense in order to keep the dialogue going? The majority of the city assembly is in favor, whereas others, including the Christian Democrats and the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University, are opposed. There are over 100 city partnerships between Germany and China. But in the case of Kiel and Qingdao, there is a catch, as Christiane Kuehl analyzes. Because the capital of Schleswig-Holstein is – like Qingdao – a naval base. Submarines are also built there. Now a new city government is at the helm and must decide whether to advance the project.
What is certain is that extreme weather events will increase. They are the result of climate change, which will lead to record temperatures in China again this year. As in the past two years, the expected summer heatwave could cause electricity shortages and threaten economic development, writes Joern Petring. Among other things, because the water levels of hydropower plants are dropping and the demand for electricity by air conditioners is rising.
As of last Thursday, the German city of Kiel has a new mayor: Bettina Aust from the Green Party, who won the local elections in May. This means that a project that has been controversial for months is now on her desk: The planned city partnership with the Chinese port city of Qingdao. Just two days before the local elections, Kiel’s council assembly had once again voted to continue talks with Qingdao, at that time still under the leadership of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) parliamentary group had requested to suspend the talks, while other parties had at least set certain preconditions.
In early March, the main committee of the City of Kiel decided to hold talks with Qingdao about a partnership. The council then voted by a majority to explore cooperation with Qingdao in areas such as environmental and marine protection, sustainability and science. “Even if China’s stance on the war in Ukraine, on the independence of Taiwan, on human rights violations and the treatment of minorities does not correspond to our ideas of democracy, I still think it is necessary to remain in dialogue,” said long-time city president Hans-Werner Tovar of the Social Democrats at the time. The partnership was to be deliberately used to address politically sensitive issues.
The city of Kiel, with a population of 250,000, and the nine-million metropolis of Qingdao have been working together for some time. Kiel, with its Olympic experience from 1972, helped Qingdao to set up a sailing center for the Beijing Summer Games in 2008. The port city in the province of Shandong was a German colony from 1898 to 1919, and its traditional buildings can still be seen today. Since 2013, there has been a German-Chinese eco-park there. Both cities have commercial ports, promenades with a sea view and beaches. The Ocean University of Qingdao has long cooperated with the Kiel Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research, or Geomar for short.
But something else connects the two cities, which is where the problem is: Kiel and Qingdao serve as naval bases. Kiel is home to one of three Baltic Sea naval base commands of the German armed forces. The shipyard thyssenkrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) builds submarines in Kiel. The company claims to be the global market leader in conventional submarines and a leader in surface and underwater technologies for the navy. Qingdao, in turn, is the base of the Chinese submarine fleet and the center of Chinese undersea warfare, as the former German ambassador to China, Michael Schaefer, recently wrote in an op-ed for Table.Media: “The Naval Submarine Academy is one of the most important training institutions of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.”
This is why critics warn of Chinese espionage at TKMS and the Bundeswehr’s naval bases. And while the Ocean University of Qingdao is famous for civilian underwater research, critics believe it can also serve military purposes – including knowledge skimmed from Geomar. Geomar preferred not to comment on the debate to Table.Media.
Among the most prominent critics, apart from the Christian Democratic city council group, is the Institute for Security Policy at the University of Kiel (ISPK). “That the promotion of sailing is Qingdao’s central concern is questionable in view of geopolitical trends and Beijing’s goals and methods in international cooperation,” warned Sarah Kirchberger, Head of the Center for Asia-Pacific Strategy & Security, in a position paper published in April. Institute Director Joachim Krause told the German broadcaster NDR that China has a long tradition of exploiting city partnerships and scientific contacts “in order to fish out information that is of crucial importance above all for the military and, in this case, for the navy of the People’s Republic.” Specifically, China is interested in submarine technology and underwater warfare.
In March, Krause called SPD city president Tovar “highly naive.” Tovar defended himself: “Anyone who calls me naive has not the faintest idea of municipal foreign policy,” he told the newspaper Kieler Nachrichten in May. Tovar regards the suspicion that the Chinese could be spying on Kiel as “silly.” “If the Chinese want to spy, they definitely don’t need a city partnership to do it,” he told the New York Times, which covered the debate in Kiel in surprising detail in May.
In fact, the case exemplifies that local governments often tick quite differently than the federal government or academic experts. Local politics focuses on the concrete, looks at locational advantages – and not so much on overarching strategic concepts or risks. This was also evident in the dispute over the stake of the Chinese state-owned company Cosco in a Hamburg container terminal. The Hanseatic city supported the deal across the political spectrum, while the Greens and the Free Democratic Party (FDP), in particular, were opposed at the federal level. In the end, the compromise was a reduced minority stake of 24.9 percent, although Cosco has not yet agreed to this.
To make matters worse, city halls often lack China expertise. Krause also sees the same problem in Kiel’s city council.
Qingdao has been one of the 16 cities loosely “twinned” with Kiel since 2022 – including cities like Hangzhou, the capital of the coastal province of Zhejiang, which has been twinned with the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein for 35 years – and now wants to develop this into a formal partnership. With 13 city partnerships, Kiel is a particularly active German city – by comparison, Munich has only eight partnerships. However, Kiel has suspended its partnerships with two Russian cities since Russia invaded Ukraine.
“The development of international contacts after the Second World War served above all to promote international understanding and support the foreign policy goals of the Federal Republic of Germany,” reads a city paper on internationalization. “In recent years, cities have focused their international contacts more on project-related cooperation and inter-municipal learning. In addition, there has been the realization that maintaining and expanding international relations also strengthens the city as a business location.” Over the years, a national perspective has turned into a municipal one.
Germany maintains more than 100 city partnerships with China – the port cities of Hamburg and Bremen have been twinned with Shanghai and Dalian in north-eastern China since the mid-1980s. Hamburg and Shanghai rank among the largest port transshipment centers in their respective regions. According to the German broadcaster NDR, the main topics between Bremen and Dalian are space travel and satellite construction, electromobility and wind energy, all of which are important for Bremen.
But now the perspective of China has darkened: Instead of being regarded as an aspiring partner, the People’s Republic is now primarily seen as a competitor and systematic rival. In China, city twinning is not a municipal matter, but is strategically driven by higher institutions, warn critical experts such as Mareike Ohlberg from the Global Marshall Fund. “The naive idea that this is only about a civil society exchange would be absurd. In China, everything is subordinate to the one-party state,” says ex-ambassador Schaefer, who nevertheless does not outright reject the partnership between Kiel and Qingdao. It is important to approach this decision soberly, be aware of the potential risks, and bring the right China experts on board, Schaefer recommends.
The Greens in the city coalition with the SPD were also in favor of the partnership talks under certain conditions. Bettina Aust made no public statements about Qingdao in the first few days after taking office. However, it will soon become clear what will happen next.
Even earlier than last year, China is struggling with unusually high temperatures this summer which could further slow down the economic recovery. Two weeks ago, Shanghai recorded 36.1 degrees, the highest May temperature in over 100 years. A total of 446 Chinese cities reported record temperatures last month. The forecast predicts temperatures of up to 40 degrees in Beijing this week.
Almost the entire country is affected by the early heat wave. Farmers are already complaining about the heat. Reports of dead pigs, fish and other animals are making the rounds on social networks. In addition, authorities are warning of severe crop failures. Depending on the region, these could be triggered by either extreme drought or extreme rainfall.
These high temperatures bring back memories of the previous two years, when electricity had to be rationed in various regions of China.
At that time, electricity shortages occurred because energy consumption was driven up by the mass use of the many air-conditioning systems to counteract the heat. In parallel, electricity was scarce because many rivers carried significantly less water due to prolonged drought. As a result, water levels in the reservoirs behind hydropower plants had dropped, in some cases to historic lows, which affected the energy production of the hydropower plants. Local authorities then usually try to step in with coal-fired power – which is bad for the climate.
For Beijing, the massive power outages of the past two years were a major nuisance. Because it exposed the flaws in the country’s electricity management. Across the country, coal-fired power plants had to run at full speed to compensate for the shortages – even though this led to higher greenhouse gas emissions. China is currently massively expanding the capacities of renewables such as solar and wind – and nuclear power – but this takes time.
The shortages have shown millions of people affected that even the Chinese leadership cannot plan everything perfectly.
So far, no significant measures have had to be enforced this year. However, the meteorological summer only started two weeks ago. And problems with the power supply are already on the horizon. Guangdong, with its many factories, of all places, is a crucial province for China’s growth and seems to be faced with significant challenges again.
Guangdong draws most of its electricity from Yunnan Province further west. Seven of China’s ten largest hydropower plants are operated there. But rainfall was down 60 percent between January and April compared to last year. As a result, Yunnan is already sending significantly less electricity to Guangdong.
In 2021, many factories in the booming province had to temporarily stop production because not enough electricity was available. Last year, the province of Sichuan was particularly affected by factory stoppages. China cannot afford such outages, especially this year. After all, economists hope for a strong upswing after the end of zero-Covid. But after a solid start to the year, a whole series of economic indicators have recently disappointed.
Sinolytics is a European research-based consultancy entirely focused on China. It advises European companies on their strategic orientation and concrete business activities in the People’s Republic.
“If it is all Chinese to you, then you are in the right place” – this is how the episodes of the China podcast “süsssauer” (sweet and sour) by Yang and Steffen begin. But before that, Yang sets the mood for the respective topic with a few opening words in Chinese. With a lot of humor and insider tips, the German-Chinese duo talks about niche topics related to the vast Middle Kingdom: “We add another perspective to the existing media coverage in Germany and show facets that aren’t given as much attention.”
Prompted by little anecdotes, the elective Cologne residents talk about Chinese drinking and bathing culture, the LGBTQ+ community, and much more. Yang particularly favors the episodes in which he talks a lot about his childhood: “I like the episode ‘China in 2005’ the most because that was an absolute highlight of my life: eating at KFC for the first time.” The audience learns that the fast food chain has a different status in China than in Europe or the US, for example. Especially in the early 2000s, KFC was remarkably expensive and extremely popular there – something you can only indulge in occasionally. In Japan, eating the Christmas feast at KFC has even become a tradition.
The two refrain from political analyses in their podcast. They prefer to share their personal experiences and combine them with interesting facts. “We show new sides of the Middle Kingdom by approaching the topics with a wink,” says Steffen. And Yang adds, “People are much more open to cultural topics than political ones.” So instead of polarizing, they prefer to connect, inform, inspire, and entertain with their podcast. And to make sure every episode provides something practical, they have created the sections ‘cliché killer’ and ‘dictionary.’ This way, some prejudices can be cleared up – and the listeners can expand their Chinese vocabulary.
And which two personalities are hiding behind the pleasant voices? Yang is northern Chinese and has been in Germany since 2015. He is following in the footsteps of Gauss – the first German he learned about in school – and studied electrical engineering in Braunschweig. Steffen Eggebrecht is from Rostock. Although northern Germans are considered people of few words, he works in communications.
The contrast between the two podcasters is what makes their audio production so appealing: “We talk openly about what our cultures have in common and why some things differ.” What the two men have in common is an interest in each other’s cultures and the fun of sharing their insights and experiences through media.
By now, more than 1,500 listeners follow the podcast every month. This makes their medium one of the most popular China podcasts in Germany. The two started in 2019 with a microphone standing on a suitcase. Since then, they have been steadily growing the podcast. It now has over 40 episodes. And the pair is always happy to hear topic suggestions from listeners. Juliane Scholuebbers
Tea time in historic Beijing: This backyard near the old Drum Tower, where these two men are taking a break, is located in Beijing’s Central Axis (中轴线), which was first created in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368). Called hutongs (胡同) in the capital, the traditional narrow streets have been massively renovated – some say gentrified – in recent years as part of new urban development plans. Many corners have become greener and cleaner, but also significantly more expensive.
Is it naïve for the German city of Kiel to form a partnership with the Chinese port city of Qingdao? Or does it make sense in order to keep the dialogue going? The majority of the city assembly is in favor, whereas others, including the Christian Democrats and the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University, are opposed. There are over 100 city partnerships between Germany and China. But in the case of Kiel and Qingdao, there is a catch, as Christiane Kuehl analyzes. Because the capital of Schleswig-Holstein is – like Qingdao – a naval base. Submarines are also built there. Now a new city government is at the helm and must decide whether to advance the project.
What is certain is that extreme weather events will increase. They are the result of climate change, which will lead to record temperatures in China again this year. As in the past two years, the expected summer heatwave could cause electricity shortages and threaten economic development, writes Joern Petring. Among other things, because the water levels of hydropower plants are dropping and the demand for electricity by air conditioners is rising.
As of last Thursday, the German city of Kiel has a new mayor: Bettina Aust from the Green Party, who won the local elections in May. This means that a project that has been controversial for months is now on her desk: The planned city partnership with the Chinese port city of Qingdao. Just two days before the local elections, Kiel’s council assembly had once again voted to continue talks with Qingdao, at that time still under the leadership of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) parliamentary group had requested to suspend the talks, while other parties had at least set certain preconditions.
In early March, the main committee of the City of Kiel decided to hold talks with Qingdao about a partnership. The council then voted by a majority to explore cooperation with Qingdao in areas such as environmental and marine protection, sustainability and science. “Even if China’s stance on the war in Ukraine, on the independence of Taiwan, on human rights violations and the treatment of minorities does not correspond to our ideas of democracy, I still think it is necessary to remain in dialogue,” said long-time city president Hans-Werner Tovar of the Social Democrats at the time. The partnership was to be deliberately used to address politically sensitive issues.
The city of Kiel, with a population of 250,000, and the nine-million metropolis of Qingdao have been working together for some time. Kiel, with its Olympic experience from 1972, helped Qingdao to set up a sailing center for the Beijing Summer Games in 2008. The port city in the province of Shandong was a German colony from 1898 to 1919, and its traditional buildings can still be seen today. Since 2013, there has been a German-Chinese eco-park there. Both cities have commercial ports, promenades with a sea view and beaches. The Ocean University of Qingdao has long cooperated with the Kiel Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research, or Geomar for short.
But something else connects the two cities, which is where the problem is: Kiel and Qingdao serve as naval bases. Kiel is home to one of three Baltic Sea naval base commands of the German armed forces. The shipyard thyssenkrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) builds submarines in Kiel. The company claims to be the global market leader in conventional submarines and a leader in surface and underwater technologies for the navy. Qingdao, in turn, is the base of the Chinese submarine fleet and the center of Chinese undersea warfare, as the former German ambassador to China, Michael Schaefer, recently wrote in an op-ed for Table.Media: “The Naval Submarine Academy is one of the most important training institutions of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.”
This is why critics warn of Chinese espionage at TKMS and the Bundeswehr’s naval bases. And while the Ocean University of Qingdao is famous for civilian underwater research, critics believe it can also serve military purposes – including knowledge skimmed from Geomar. Geomar preferred not to comment on the debate to Table.Media.
Among the most prominent critics, apart from the Christian Democratic city council group, is the Institute for Security Policy at the University of Kiel (ISPK). “That the promotion of sailing is Qingdao’s central concern is questionable in view of geopolitical trends and Beijing’s goals and methods in international cooperation,” warned Sarah Kirchberger, Head of the Center for Asia-Pacific Strategy & Security, in a position paper published in April. Institute Director Joachim Krause told the German broadcaster NDR that China has a long tradition of exploiting city partnerships and scientific contacts “in order to fish out information that is of crucial importance above all for the military and, in this case, for the navy of the People’s Republic.” Specifically, China is interested in submarine technology and underwater warfare.
In March, Krause called SPD city president Tovar “highly naive.” Tovar defended himself: “Anyone who calls me naive has not the faintest idea of municipal foreign policy,” he told the newspaper Kieler Nachrichten in May. Tovar regards the suspicion that the Chinese could be spying on Kiel as “silly.” “If the Chinese want to spy, they definitely don’t need a city partnership to do it,” he told the New York Times, which covered the debate in Kiel in surprising detail in May.
In fact, the case exemplifies that local governments often tick quite differently than the federal government or academic experts. Local politics focuses on the concrete, looks at locational advantages – and not so much on overarching strategic concepts or risks. This was also evident in the dispute over the stake of the Chinese state-owned company Cosco in a Hamburg container terminal. The Hanseatic city supported the deal across the political spectrum, while the Greens and the Free Democratic Party (FDP), in particular, were opposed at the federal level. In the end, the compromise was a reduced minority stake of 24.9 percent, although Cosco has not yet agreed to this.
To make matters worse, city halls often lack China expertise. Krause also sees the same problem in Kiel’s city council.
Qingdao has been one of the 16 cities loosely “twinned” with Kiel since 2022 – including cities like Hangzhou, the capital of the coastal province of Zhejiang, which has been twinned with the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein for 35 years – and now wants to develop this into a formal partnership. With 13 city partnerships, Kiel is a particularly active German city – by comparison, Munich has only eight partnerships. However, Kiel has suspended its partnerships with two Russian cities since Russia invaded Ukraine.
“The development of international contacts after the Second World War served above all to promote international understanding and support the foreign policy goals of the Federal Republic of Germany,” reads a city paper on internationalization. “In recent years, cities have focused their international contacts more on project-related cooperation and inter-municipal learning. In addition, there has been the realization that maintaining and expanding international relations also strengthens the city as a business location.” Over the years, a national perspective has turned into a municipal one.
Germany maintains more than 100 city partnerships with China – the port cities of Hamburg and Bremen have been twinned with Shanghai and Dalian in north-eastern China since the mid-1980s. Hamburg and Shanghai rank among the largest port transshipment centers in their respective regions. According to the German broadcaster NDR, the main topics between Bremen and Dalian are space travel and satellite construction, electromobility and wind energy, all of which are important for Bremen.
But now the perspective of China has darkened: Instead of being regarded as an aspiring partner, the People’s Republic is now primarily seen as a competitor and systematic rival. In China, city twinning is not a municipal matter, but is strategically driven by higher institutions, warn critical experts such as Mareike Ohlberg from the Global Marshall Fund. “The naive idea that this is only about a civil society exchange would be absurd. In China, everything is subordinate to the one-party state,” says ex-ambassador Schaefer, who nevertheless does not outright reject the partnership between Kiel and Qingdao. It is important to approach this decision soberly, be aware of the potential risks, and bring the right China experts on board, Schaefer recommends.
The Greens in the city coalition with the SPD were also in favor of the partnership talks under certain conditions. Bettina Aust made no public statements about Qingdao in the first few days after taking office. However, it will soon become clear what will happen next.
Even earlier than last year, China is struggling with unusually high temperatures this summer which could further slow down the economic recovery. Two weeks ago, Shanghai recorded 36.1 degrees, the highest May temperature in over 100 years. A total of 446 Chinese cities reported record temperatures last month. The forecast predicts temperatures of up to 40 degrees in Beijing this week.
Almost the entire country is affected by the early heat wave. Farmers are already complaining about the heat. Reports of dead pigs, fish and other animals are making the rounds on social networks. In addition, authorities are warning of severe crop failures. Depending on the region, these could be triggered by either extreme drought or extreme rainfall.
These high temperatures bring back memories of the previous two years, when electricity had to be rationed in various regions of China.
At that time, electricity shortages occurred because energy consumption was driven up by the mass use of the many air-conditioning systems to counteract the heat. In parallel, electricity was scarce because many rivers carried significantly less water due to prolonged drought. As a result, water levels in the reservoirs behind hydropower plants had dropped, in some cases to historic lows, which affected the energy production of the hydropower plants. Local authorities then usually try to step in with coal-fired power – which is bad for the climate.
For Beijing, the massive power outages of the past two years were a major nuisance. Because it exposed the flaws in the country’s electricity management. Across the country, coal-fired power plants had to run at full speed to compensate for the shortages – even though this led to higher greenhouse gas emissions. China is currently massively expanding the capacities of renewables such as solar and wind – and nuclear power – but this takes time.
The shortages have shown millions of people affected that even the Chinese leadership cannot plan everything perfectly.
So far, no significant measures have had to be enforced this year. However, the meteorological summer only started two weeks ago. And problems with the power supply are already on the horizon. Guangdong, with its many factories, of all places, is a crucial province for China’s growth and seems to be faced with significant challenges again.
Guangdong draws most of its electricity from Yunnan Province further west. Seven of China’s ten largest hydropower plants are operated there. But rainfall was down 60 percent between January and April compared to last year. As a result, Yunnan is already sending significantly less electricity to Guangdong.
In 2021, many factories in the booming province had to temporarily stop production because not enough electricity was available. Last year, the province of Sichuan was particularly affected by factory stoppages. China cannot afford such outages, especially this year. After all, economists hope for a strong upswing after the end of zero-Covid. But after a solid start to the year, a whole series of economic indicators have recently disappointed.
Sinolytics is a European research-based consultancy entirely focused on China. It advises European companies on their strategic orientation and concrete business activities in the People’s Republic.
“If it is all Chinese to you, then you are in the right place” – this is how the episodes of the China podcast “süsssauer” (sweet and sour) by Yang and Steffen begin. But before that, Yang sets the mood for the respective topic with a few opening words in Chinese. With a lot of humor and insider tips, the German-Chinese duo talks about niche topics related to the vast Middle Kingdom: “We add another perspective to the existing media coverage in Germany and show facets that aren’t given as much attention.”
Prompted by little anecdotes, the elective Cologne residents talk about Chinese drinking and bathing culture, the LGBTQ+ community, and much more. Yang particularly favors the episodes in which he talks a lot about his childhood: “I like the episode ‘China in 2005’ the most because that was an absolute highlight of my life: eating at KFC for the first time.” The audience learns that the fast food chain has a different status in China than in Europe or the US, for example. Especially in the early 2000s, KFC was remarkably expensive and extremely popular there – something you can only indulge in occasionally. In Japan, eating the Christmas feast at KFC has even become a tradition.
The two refrain from political analyses in their podcast. They prefer to share their personal experiences and combine them with interesting facts. “We show new sides of the Middle Kingdom by approaching the topics with a wink,” says Steffen. And Yang adds, “People are much more open to cultural topics than political ones.” So instead of polarizing, they prefer to connect, inform, inspire, and entertain with their podcast. And to make sure every episode provides something practical, they have created the sections ‘cliché killer’ and ‘dictionary.’ This way, some prejudices can be cleared up – and the listeners can expand their Chinese vocabulary.
And which two personalities are hiding behind the pleasant voices? Yang is northern Chinese and has been in Germany since 2015. He is following in the footsteps of Gauss – the first German he learned about in school – and studied electrical engineering in Braunschweig. Steffen Eggebrecht is from Rostock. Although northern Germans are considered people of few words, he works in communications.
The contrast between the two podcasters is what makes their audio production so appealing: “We talk openly about what our cultures have in common and why some things differ.” What the two men have in common is an interest in each other’s cultures and the fun of sharing their insights and experiences through media.
By now, more than 1,500 listeners follow the podcast every month. This makes their medium one of the most popular China podcasts in Germany. The two started in 2019 with a microphone standing on a suitcase. Since then, they have been steadily growing the podcast. It now has over 40 episodes. And the pair is always happy to hear topic suggestions from listeners. Juliane Scholuebbers
Tea time in historic Beijing: This backyard near the old Drum Tower, where these two men are taking a break, is located in Beijing’s Central Axis (中轴线), which was first created in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368). Called hutongs (胡同) in the capital, the traditional narrow streets have been massively renovated – some say gentrified – in recent years as part of new urban development plans. Many corners have become greener and cleaner, but also significantly more expensive.
