Bachelet’s newly published report on the human rights situation in Xinjiang has already first impacts. The United Nations may have no concrete power over China, and the report is only a mere paper for many member countries, but when things are openly named, the way they are perceived changes; in this case, it affects the severe human rights violations in western China.
As Marcel Grzanna reports, there were a lot of reactions to the report on the following day. The German Foreign Office demands the release of all detainees in Xinjiang. Other demands are directed at Volkswagen. The company should end its involvement in the region. This is nothing new, but it now has the backing of the UN.
Some states have already labeled human rights violations in Xinjiang as genocide. The US even passed a law against questionable imports from the region. The UN report could now provide a tailwind for more such laws.
Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan visit continues to preoccupy military and trade experts. Even after the end of the official Chinese military maneuvers around Taiwan, warships and fighter jets frequently cross the so-called median line in the middle of the Taiwan Strait. There are numerous indications that China’s military wants to move this unofficial border, Christiane Kuehl reports. The risk of accidental escalation continues to grow as Chinese and Taiwanese warships come dangerously close.
Our team in Beijing reports on rarely mentioned victims of the Taiwan escalation. As a result of the visit, China unilaterally terminated some cooperation formats with the United States. Among them is the fight against drugs. The People’s Republic is the biggest supplier of illegal fentanyl. The opioid is added to drugs such as cocaine and heroin to increase their effectiveness. Ending cooperation could increase the number of drug deaths in the United States. China’s authorities are deliberately accepting this to harm the USA.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights report on the situation in the autonomous Chinese region of Xinjiang creates a stir in Germany. The German Foreign Office called on the Chinese government to immediately release the detained Uyghurs and members of other ethnic minorities and to “immediately grant all people in Xinjiang their full human rights.” The Foreign Office announced its intention to discuss possible consequences of the “carefully researched” report with the US and its European partners.
Meanwhile, the Human Rights Spokesman for the FDP parliamentary group in the German Bundestag, Peter Heidt, called for the involvement of German companies in Xinjiang to be closely investigated. Heidt sees particular responsibility on the part of Wolfsburg-based automaker Volkswagen, which has been operating a factory in the regional capital of Urumqi in cooperation with Chinese state-owned corporation SAIC for nearly ten years. “We need to discuss VW’s involvement in Xinjiang,” Heidt told China.Table.
He had noticed that a much more critical attitude toward China as a business location recently developed among medium-sized companies. He knows many medium-sized companies that have already returned to the European Union as their production site. “We are in a systemic competition with China and must therefore also keep a very close eye on the economic impact on our democracy,” Heidt said.
The report by former High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet clarified that the UN believes the victims of Chinese human rights crimes in Xinjiang, not the Chinese government’s account. “This will further deepen the divisions within the UN institutions in the coming years,” predicts an official at a UN agency in Geneva, speaking to China.Table. Since he is not authorized to speak publicly for the organization, he requests anonymity.
This division is likely to be noticeable for the first time in mid-September at the 51st session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, where the Xinjiang report is expected to generate intense debate. The Council, composed of representatives from 47 states, could launch a formal investigation by a Commission of Inquiry. China is also a member of the Council, but unlike the Security Council, it does not have veto power.
The People’s Republic had already dismissed the Xinjiang report as a farce and a conspiracy by so-called “anti-Chinese forces”. China’s response in the annex to the UN report was 131 pages long. The response was thus three times longer than the High Commissioner’s account.
Beijing was undoubtedly surprised by the directness of the accusations in the document. The Chinese mission in Geneva argues that Bachelet had received a first-hand and complete understanding of the situation in Xinjiang after her trip to the region in late May, and subsequently made a formal statement to journalists. “Regrettably, the content and conclusion of this so-called ‘assessment’ is entirely contradictory to the formal statement issued by Madam High Commissioner.”
China’s military is increasingly crossing the invisible line between the mainland and Taiwan. On Thursday alone, Taiwan’s military observed 23 Chinese fighter jets on its side of the unofficial border. In previous days, fighter jets flew maneuvers over the line. In addition, dozens of aircraft and several warships have traversed the waters near Taiwan over the past week. Civilian drones also repeatedly fly from the Mainland to the small Taiwanese islands just a few kilometers off the coast. Taiwan stated it shot down one of them on Thursday over Kinmen near Xiamen.
Since US top leader Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, frigates and destroyers from both sides have been getting very close to each other in the Taiwan Strait. China’s ships try to avoid Taiwanese patrols in order to cross the symbolically important median line.
A US general had drawn the line in the middle of the Taiwan Strait in 1954 – at the height of an initial crisis between the People’s Republic and Taiwan, which was still recognized by Washington at the time. This median line has no legal status. China has never officially recognized the line but has respected it until now.
But that could be over. As early as 2020, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Beijing declared that the line “does not exist”. The Ministry of Defense and the Taiwan Affairs Council immediately agreed to this statement. Now there could be consequences. “It’s possible that China wants to continue its military presence near the centerline of the Taiwan Strait,” Amanda Hsiao, China analyst at think tank Crisis Group, told China.Table. Beijing wants to make a presence east of the line – and thus closer to Taiwan than to the Mainland – the norm, she said.
US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby also stressed on Wednesday that by crossing what has been the most respected median line, China is “trying to sort of set a new normal for their activities and behavior. The United States announced publicly that changing the status quo is unacceptable – and we will not recognize it.”
There is even a precedent for this approach. In 2012, in a dispute with Japan over a group of uninhabited islands, China sent ships to the archipelago’s adjacent zone. Shortly before, Tokyo had placed the disputed islands – Senkaku in Japanese, Diaoyu in Chinese – under its de facto administration. Beijing was strategically clever in creating facts at the time, Zhou Bo of the Center for International Security and Strategy at Beijing Tsinghua University and a retired colonel, wrote recently in the South China Morning Post: “Today, despite Japan’s protests, Chinese coast guard vessels regularly sail there to demonstrate Beijing’s claim to sovereignty.” Beijing thus used the dispute of that time as a pretext for expanding its sphere of power, which otherwise would have triggered a far more violent reaction from abroad.
Now the same thing may happen in the Taiwan Strait. The pretext this time is Pelosi’s trip. China’s army held large military maneuvers in the waters around Taiwan immediately after Pelosi’s departure, firing missiles across the island – and sending several warships across the median line. Taiwan condemned the maneuvers and missile tests and has since repeatedly threatened a strong response. As recently as Wednesday, the military announced an unspecified “counterattack” in case Chinese fighter jets and warships penetrated Taiwan’s territory.
“They want to increase the pressure on us, with the end goal of us giving up the median line,” Reuters quoted an unnamed Taiwanese official familiar with security planning in the region. Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said in August, that Taiwan could not tolerate a change in the status quo.
Because for Taiwan, the invisible line is an important buffer. The Taiwan Strait is about 180 kilometers in width. At the narrowest point of the sea lane, the median line is only about 40 kilometers from Taiwan’s waters. A more or less permanent Chinese naval presence near its territorial waters would severely challenge Taiwan’s military and make a Chinese blockade or invasion much easier. At the same time, however, it would be difficult to defend the line without increasing the risk of a dangerous escalation.
The risk of accidental escalation is already growing. Chieh Chung, a Security Analyst at the National Policy Foundation think tank in Taipei, told Reuters that Taiwan needs to revise its rules of engagement for the coast guard and military to give them more authority in responding as necessary to increasingly complex challenges from Chinese forces.
Taiwan will likely have to secure the median line on its own. Three US officials told Reuters that the Chinese crossing the median line has little tactical significance.
Rather, Washington is concerned with securing the Taiwan Strait as an international sea lane. In late August, the two US cruisers USS Antietam and USS Chancellorsville sailed through the Taiwan Strait to demonstrate that “the United States is committed to an Indo-Pacific that is free and open.” Not a word about the median line. Yet the de facto end of the median line would certainly challenge US domination of China’s nearby seas – the so-called first island chain. Domination has long been a thorn in China’s side.
Ultimately, it is about more than a line on the sea chart. Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen recently compared China’s aggression against her country to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Both developments, she said, are evidence of “how authoritarian states disrupt and threaten the liberal world order.” Weeks before he invaded Ukraine, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had also sent army units throughout the border area with Ukraine – for alleged exercises. Amanda Hsiao believes maneuvers encircling Taiwan may repeat in the coming months. That, too, could become the norm.
The Beijing government used Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan as an opportunity to initiate a series of countermeasures against the United States. In addition to the military operations, cooperation in the fight against drug trafficking was terminated. The drug fentanyl in particular is a severe problem in the USA. The end of cooperation could lead to even more drug-related deaths there.
The Chinese government is aware of this danger, as Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin indicated in his exit statement, “the responsibility of undermining China-US counternarcotics cooperation rests entirely with the US side.”
That’s because China is the largest supplier of illegally manufactured fentanyl or related substances, according to a study by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The accusation is that China is flooding the US market with the deadly drug, and Beijing is looking the other way. The synthetic opioid, originally developed for pain relief specifically for cancer patients, found its way into the black market in the 2000s and is driving up casualty rates from overdoses. Fentanyl overdose is a common cause of death in the United States.
Fentanyl has an effect 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine. The substance is thus popular with drug cartels. They mix it with other substances, such as heroin or cocaine, to increase their effectiveness. Since users are often unaware of the admixture, unintentional overdoses are becoming increasingly common. Other users die from counterfeit drugs containing fentanyl sold to unsuspecting customers.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), fentanyl led to more than 100,000 drug deaths, last year alone. Rahul Gupta, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy said in response to China’s termination of cooperation, China must play a key role in the fight: “At a time when the overdose epidemic continues to claim a life every 5 minutes, it’s unacceptable that the PRC is withholding its cooperation that would help to bring to justice individuals who traffic these illicit drugs […].”
Even before that, the cooperation had been marked by conflicts and recriminations. There had been a supposed breakthrough in cooperation in 2019. China had tightened controls on fentanyl following commitments made by President Xi Jinping at the G-20 summit. Websites that openly sold fentanyl were shut down, mail was more tightly controlled, and some Chinese nationals were severely punished. But the number of drug deaths in the US continued to climb.
The Chinese side interprets this as a clear sign that it has nothing to do with the problem. According to the Chinese Ambassador to the USA, the fact that there has been an increase in drug-related deaths regardless shows that the USA has “not addressed the crux of the problem”. The State Department spokesman also reiterated this during his statement on the withdrawal: “Regarding fentanyl abuse in the US, I would like to emphasize that the root of this crisis lies in the United States,” Wang said. Drug enforcement in the US is simply less effective than that in China, he said. This statement seems almost cynical against the backdrop of the narrative propagated by the state in China that the mass importation of opium by Western colonial powers in the 19th century was the main reason for China’s opium crisis.
US sources also paint a different picture of the efficiency of China’s 2019 crackdown, saying that the international cartels have simply switched to sourcing the raw materials from China instead of fentanyl as the finished active ingredient. The final product would then be manufactured in the US or neighboring countries such as Mexico. The Chinese crackdown, “resulted in near-zero shipments to the US. But since those actions, North America has been flooded with precursor chemicals from China, stifling international efforts,” Gupta says in a commentary in the Wall Street Journal.
Further, Gupta accused the Chinese of using Pelosi’s visit only as an excuse to back out of the cooperation. He predicted a further increase in fentanyl victims worldwide. In the medium and long term, China’s exit thus reinforces the escalation between the two countries. This is because the fatalities can also be used as a pretext for political action on the US side in the future. Gregor Koppenburg/Joern Petring
Carbon emissions in the People’s Republic have fallen for the fourth quarter in a row. This is according to a survey by analyst Lauri Myllyvirta of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. In the second quarter of 2022, Carbon emissions fell by eight percent compared to the same period last year. The largest quarterly decline in more than a decade. The causes are believed to be the housing crisis, zero Covid measures and low electricity demand. According to the report, in the twelve months between July 2021 and June 2022, emissions fell by three percent.
Cement production fell by 18 percent in the second quarter. The number of completed projects in the real estate sector fell by 33 percent in the second quarter. 44 percent fewer projects were started. Coal-fired power generation fell four percent in the first half of 2022 compared with the same period last year. However, it increased again slightly in July and August. Overall, five percent less natural gas was consumed.
According to Myllyvirta, the government’s medium-term response to the economic crisis will be decisive in determining whether China has already reached its emissions peak or will reach it later on. Recently, the government approved an economic stimulus program with spending to expand infrastructure and support the real estate sector but also on renewable energies. nib
For the Chinese, “losing face” is a misfortune. Why? A German psychotherapist knows the answer: everyone has a “true face.” But in a dictatorship, it is far “too dangerous” to show it. Beneath “the mask worn on display, simmers a pent-up emotional potential of existential angst, murderous rage, hatred, deep pain, and often bitter sadness.”
The quote was made by Hans-Joachim Maaz, who was chief physician at the psychotherapeutic clinic in Halle for many years. However, he was not referring to China. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he wrote a “psychogram of the GDR” that was published in 1990 under the title “Gefuehlsstau” (Emotional Congestion). The German bestseller was also translated into Chinese in 2013 under the title “情感堵塞” and caused a stir among psychologists, social scientists, and educationalists. Since party leader Xi Jinping has lifted himself into absolute power and is pursuing the re-ideologization of his country, such critical reflections on the behavior of people and their split personalities in authoritarian states do not fit with the new era of socialist China propagated by Xi and the realization of his dream of renewing the nation.
People’s lives in the GDR, Maaz says, were “essentially characterized by social facades, the inevitable result of repressive upbringing.” Psychotherapists saw through the mechanisms “with which people can perceive the new ‘identity’ as their ‘true’ nature – this is possible by splitting off their feelings.” Thus, “the imposed second face gradually became a habit and finally self-evident normality. But no human being can live well with dissimulation in the long run.”
Do such diagnoses also apply to the behavior of today’s Chinese, who are growing up in a globalized and permissive consumer society? In post-Mao reform China, everything seems grotesquely bifurcated and has its own terms for this situation. From the mix of planned, state, and market economies to the family, where one spouse works for a state agency or enterprise and the other for a private company (体制内体制外); for the peasants, who are only second-class immigrants in the cities without hukou citizen status, to “one country two systems” (一国两制), which Beijing just recently abolished in Hong Kong.
Foreign travelers experienced (still until shortly before the lockdown) seemingly different situations immediately after their arrival in the country. According to their accounts, the Chinese pragmatically and flexibly adapted to the respective situation. On the way into the city, they heard (if they understood the language) how nonchalantly and loudly their cab driver complained about China’s leadership. When I got to know a driver, who often cursed about his government, he turned out to be a party member. He would get up early in the morning to volunteer to solve quiz questions in a CP training app (学习强国) before heading off to work. The praise for his perfect party-loyal answers went into his evaluation. He did not understand what was contradictory about his behavior, “That’s what everyone does.”
Even the couple who allowed their daughter to watch provocative South Korean and Japanese music videos on pirated DVDs at home on weekends found nothing reprehensible about it. They were only rewarding their daughter, who not only got good grades at school but was allowed to wear the red scarf for young pioneers for exemplary socialist morals. The parents also watched illegal copies of foreign TV series at home. The next morning, during the organized break at work, they sang along vigorously in the colleagues’ choir: “Without a Communist Party, there is no new China.”
“China has become the country with the most serious cases of divided personalities” (中国是双重人格最严重的国家), warns essayist Wang Xiao (王霄). The books and writings of Hannah Arendt on authoritarianism and the “elements and origins of total domination” translated during the reform era have strongly influenced his verdict.
The consequences also find particularly fertile ground among the Chinese because they are reinforced by the influence of traditional Confucian education, which prepares the individual from an early age for submission and subordination. In schools, where today “harebrained nonsense” has to be crammed into the subjects of Chinese, history or social studies, the “newspeak” and “doublethink” described by George Orwell in 1984 is common, writes the well-known cultural critic and university lecturer Xu Ben (徐贲).
He now lives in the USA. He sees how China drifts into a “new form of totalitarianism”. It has evolved from the original totalitarianism (under Stalin and Hitler) to post-totalitarianism (like once in Eastern Europe, for example) into this third form (从极权主义、后极权主义到”新极权主义). It is a variant of post-totalitarianism and condemns its liberal traits as political “weakness”. But the new totalitarianism produces only “patchwork,” not terror-spreading, systematic repression, but partial, albeit massive, forms of repression. For example, to silence the media and the Internet or to violently end mass protests. But he no longer had the power of persuasion or the “capacity for ideological mobilization.”
China expert Minxin Pei, professor of government management at the US Claremont McKenna College, sees the People’s Republic drifting into a bifurcated world. In a Financial Times podcast, he says, “People know that one side of politics is about ritual. And that ritual you have to perform. Whether you believe it or not is irrelevant.” He says it works as long as there is still “substance, reality, and pragmatism” on the other side of politics. The same official who “proudly displays his smartphone to you to show that he’s done his morning exercise in reading Xi Jinping Thought. Then he turns around and talks in very pragmatic terms about his daily challenges at work.” Minxin Pei “grew up in the Maoist era”. In those days, people actually genuinely believed in that kind of political rituals. But today, we have to make a great deal of deductions about whether Xi Jinping Thought is genuinely embraced by the party members, officials and by ordinary people.
Pei laments that the space for critical liberal ideas in universities has been “completely closed”. His fellow academics no longer speak out publicly. “The smart ones simply shut up.”
In the end, he says, patriotism must act as putty to bridge the internal divide, of which many are not even aware. The opposition author Huang Yukai, a member of the independent Chinese Pen, calls such a two-part personality “schizophrenia,” but not in the medical sense, but rather as a diagnosis of a personality disorder induced by the system.
There were also public debates in China after Mao’s death about how to distinguish between what is true and real, false and mendacious. Translations, for example, of more than two dozen works and books by Hannah Arendt contributed to this, as did the novel “1984” by George Orwell, or “Animal Farm”.
In 2009, for example, a debate was sparked about whether, and if so, when the Chinese can remember where they first learned how to lie. Many answered that it was in elementary school when the system began its political indoctrination. In 2011, The New Week magazine (新周刊) published a special issue, “Why Do Chinese Love to Tell Lies?”. The Critical author Wu Si (吴思) at the time headlined his piece, “When the rulers spread lies, we pretend to believe them.”
Today, emotional congestion is having an effect. Many believe the lies.
Counting whale sharks to fall asleep? These kids in Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, probably won’t be closing their eyes anytime soon, because in addition to several species of sharks, manta rays are circling above their heads. The Chimelong Ocean Kingdom in the southern Chinese city offers camping under the glass dome of its shark aquarium. With 22.7 million liters of water, it is the largest aquarium in the world.
Bachelet’s newly published report on the human rights situation in Xinjiang has already first impacts. The United Nations may have no concrete power over China, and the report is only a mere paper for many member countries, but when things are openly named, the way they are perceived changes; in this case, it affects the severe human rights violations in western China.
As Marcel Grzanna reports, there were a lot of reactions to the report on the following day. The German Foreign Office demands the release of all detainees in Xinjiang. Other demands are directed at Volkswagen. The company should end its involvement in the region. This is nothing new, but it now has the backing of the UN.
Some states have already labeled human rights violations in Xinjiang as genocide. The US even passed a law against questionable imports from the region. The UN report could now provide a tailwind for more such laws.
Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan visit continues to preoccupy military and trade experts. Even after the end of the official Chinese military maneuvers around Taiwan, warships and fighter jets frequently cross the so-called median line in the middle of the Taiwan Strait. There are numerous indications that China’s military wants to move this unofficial border, Christiane Kuehl reports. The risk of accidental escalation continues to grow as Chinese and Taiwanese warships come dangerously close.
Our team in Beijing reports on rarely mentioned victims of the Taiwan escalation. As a result of the visit, China unilaterally terminated some cooperation formats with the United States. Among them is the fight against drugs. The People’s Republic is the biggest supplier of illegal fentanyl. The opioid is added to drugs such as cocaine and heroin to increase their effectiveness. Ending cooperation could increase the number of drug deaths in the United States. China’s authorities are deliberately accepting this to harm the USA.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights report on the situation in the autonomous Chinese region of Xinjiang creates a stir in Germany. The German Foreign Office called on the Chinese government to immediately release the detained Uyghurs and members of other ethnic minorities and to “immediately grant all people in Xinjiang their full human rights.” The Foreign Office announced its intention to discuss possible consequences of the “carefully researched” report with the US and its European partners.
Meanwhile, the Human Rights Spokesman for the FDP parliamentary group in the German Bundestag, Peter Heidt, called for the involvement of German companies in Xinjiang to be closely investigated. Heidt sees particular responsibility on the part of Wolfsburg-based automaker Volkswagen, which has been operating a factory in the regional capital of Urumqi in cooperation with Chinese state-owned corporation SAIC for nearly ten years. “We need to discuss VW’s involvement in Xinjiang,” Heidt told China.Table.
He had noticed that a much more critical attitude toward China as a business location recently developed among medium-sized companies. He knows many medium-sized companies that have already returned to the European Union as their production site. “We are in a systemic competition with China and must therefore also keep a very close eye on the economic impact on our democracy,” Heidt said.
The report by former High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet clarified that the UN believes the victims of Chinese human rights crimes in Xinjiang, not the Chinese government’s account. “This will further deepen the divisions within the UN institutions in the coming years,” predicts an official at a UN agency in Geneva, speaking to China.Table. Since he is not authorized to speak publicly for the organization, he requests anonymity.
This division is likely to be noticeable for the first time in mid-September at the 51st session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, where the Xinjiang report is expected to generate intense debate. The Council, composed of representatives from 47 states, could launch a formal investigation by a Commission of Inquiry. China is also a member of the Council, but unlike the Security Council, it does not have veto power.
The People’s Republic had already dismissed the Xinjiang report as a farce and a conspiracy by so-called “anti-Chinese forces”. China’s response in the annex to the UN report was 131 pages long. The response was thus three times longer than the High Commissioner’s account.
Beijing was undoubtedly surprised by the directness of the accusations in the document. The Chinese mission in Geneva argues that Bachelet had received a first-hand and complete understanding of the situation in Xinjiang after her trip to the region in late May, and subsequently made a formal statement to journalists. “Regrettably, the content and conclusion of this so-called ‘assessment’ is entirely contradictory to the formal statement issued by Madam High Commissioner.”
China’s military is increasingly crossing the invisible line between the mainland and Taiwan. On Thursday alone, Taiwan’s military observed 23 Chinese fighter jets on its side of the unofficial border. In previous days, fighter jets flew maneuvers over the line. In addition, dozens of aircraft and several warships have traversed the waters near Taiwan over the past week. Civilian drones also repeatedly fly from the Mainland to the small Taiwanese islands just a few kilometers off the coast. Taiwan stated it shot down one of them on Thursday over Kinmen near Xiamen.
Since US top leader Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, frigates and destroyers from both sides have been getting very close to each other in the Taiwan Strait. China’s ships try to avoid Taiwanese patrols in order to cross the symbolically important median line.
A US general had drawn the line in the middle of the Taiwan Strait in 1954 – at the height of an initial crisis between the People’s Republic and Taiwan, which was still recognized by Washington at the time. This median line has no legal status. China has never officially recognized the line but has respected it until now.
But that could be over. As early as 2020, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Beijing declared that the line “does not exist”. The Ministry of Defense and the Taiwan Affairs Council immediately agreed to this statement. Now there could be consequences. “It’s possible that China wants to continue its military presence near the centerline of the Taiwan Strait,” Amanda Hsiao, China analyst at think tank Crisis Group, told China.Table. Beijing wants to make a presence east of the line – and thus closer to Taiwan than to the Mainland – the norm, she said.
US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby also stressed on Wednesday that by crossing what has been the most respected median line, China is “trying to sort of set a new normal for their activities and behavior. The United States announced publicly that changing the status quo is unacceptable – and we will not recognize it.”
There is even a precedent for this approach. In 2012, in a dispute with Japan over a group of uninhabited islands, China sent ships to the archipelago’s adjacent zone. Shortly before, Tokyo had placed the disputed islands – Senkaku in Japanese, Diaoyu in Chinese – under its de facto administration. Beijing was strategically clever in creating facts at the time, Zhou Bo of the Center for International Security and Strategy at Beijing Tsinghua University and a retired colonel, wrote recently in the South China Morning Post: “Today, despite Japan’s protests, Chinese coast guard vessels regularly sail there to demonstrate Beijing’s claim to sovereignty.” Beijing thus used the dispute of that time as a pretext for expanding its sphere of power, which otherwise would have triggered a far more violent reaction from abroad.
Now the same thing may happen in the Taiwan Strait. The pretext this time is Pelosi’s trip. China’s army held large military maneuvers in the waters around Taiwan immediately after Pelosi’s departure, firing missiles across the island – and sending several warships across the median line. Taiwan condemned the maneuvers and missile tests and has since repeatedly threatened a strong response. As recently as Wednesday, the military announced an unspecified “counterattack” in case Chinese fighter jets and warships penetrated Taiwan’s territory.
“They want to increase the pressure on us, with the end goal of us giving up the median line,” Reuters quoted an unnamed Taiwanese official familiar with security planning in the region. Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said in August, that Taiwan could not tolerate a change in the status quo.
Because for Taiwan, the invisible line is an important buffer. The Taiwan Strait is about 180 kilometers in width. At the narrowest point of the sea lane, the median line is only about 40 kilometers from Taiwan’s waters. A more or less permanent Chinese naval presence near its territorial waters would severely challenge Taiwan’s military and make a Chinese blockade or invasion much easier. At the same time, however, it would be difficult to defend the line without increasing the risk of a dangerous escalation.
The risk of accidental escalation is already growing. Chieh Chung, a Security Analyst at the National Policy Foundation think tank in Taipei, told Reuters that Taiwan needs to revise its rules of engagement for the coast guard and military to give them more authority in responding as necessary to increasingly complex challenges from Chinese forces.
Taiwan will likely have to secure the median line on its own. Three US officials told Reuters that the Chinese crossing the median line has little tactical significance.
Rather, Washington is concerned with securing the Taiwan Strait as an international sea lane. In late August, the two US cruisers USS Antietam and USS Chancellorsville sailed through the Taiwan Strait to demonstrate that “the United States is committed to an Indo-Pacific that is free and open.” Not a word about the median line. Yet the de facto end of the median line would certainly challenge US domination of China’s nearby seas – the so-called first island chain. Domination has long been a thorn in China’s side.
Ultimately, it is about more than a line on the sea chart. Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen recently compared China’s aggression against her country to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Both developments, she said, are evidence of “how authoritarian states disrupt and threaten the liberal world order.” Weeks before he invaded Ukraine, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had also sent army units throughout the border area with Ukraine – for alleged exercises. Amanda Hsiao believes maneuvers encircling Taiwan may repeat in the coming months. That, too, could become the norm.
The Beijing government used Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan as an opportunity to initiate a series of countermeasures against the United States. In addition to the military operations, cooperation in the fight against drug trafficking was terminated. The drug fentanyl in particular is a severe problem in the USA. The end of cooperation could lead to even more drug-related deaths there.
The Chinese government is aware of this danger, as Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin indicated in his exit statement, “the responsibility of undermining China-US counternarcotics cooperation rests entirely with the US side.”
That’s because China is the largest supplier of illegally manufactured fentanyl or related substances, according to a study by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The accusation is that China is flooding the US market with the deadly drug, and Beijing is looking the other way. The synthetic opioid, originally developed for pain relief specifically for cancer patients, found its way into the black market in the 2000s and is driving up casualty rates from overdoses. Fentanyl overdose is a common cause of death in the United States.
Fentanyl has an effect 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine. The substance is thus popular with drug cartels. They mix it with other substances, such as heroin or cocaine, to increase their effectiveness. Since users are often unaware of the admixture, unintentional overdoses are becoming increasingly common. Other users die from counterfeit drugs containing fentanyl sold to unsuspecting customers.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), fentanyl led to more than 100,000 drug deaths, last year alone. Rahul Gupta, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy said in response to China’s termination of cooperation, China must play a key role in the fight: “At a time when the overdose epidemic continues to claim a life every 5 minutes, it’s unacceptable that the PRC is withholding its cooperation that would help to bring to justice individuals who traffic these illicit drugs […].”
Even before that, the cooperation had been marked by conflicts and recriminations. There had been a supposed breakthrough in cooperation in 2019. China had tightened controls on fentanyl following commitments made by President Xi Jinping at the G-20 summit. Websites that openly sold fentanyl were shut down, mail was more tightly controlled, and some Chinese nationals were severely punished. But the number of drug deaths in the US continued to climb.
The Chinese side interprets this as a clear sign that it has nothing to do with the problem. According to the Chinese Ambassador to the USA, the fact that there has been an increase in drug-related deaths regardless shows that the USA has “not addressed the crux of the problem”. The State Department spokesman also reiterated this during his statement on the withdrawal: “Regarding fentanyl abuse in the US, I would like to emphasize that the root of this crisis lies in the United States,” Wang said. Drug enforcement in the US is simply less effective than that in China, he said. This statement seems almost cynical against the backdrop of the narrative propagated by the state in China that the mass importation of opium by Western colonial powers in the 19th century was the main reason for China’s opium crisis.
US sources also paint a different picture of the efficiency of China’s 2019 crackdown, saying that the international cartels have simply switched to sourcing the raw materials from China instead of fentanyl as the finished active ingredient. The final product would then be manufactured in the US or neighboring countries such as Mexico. The Chinese crackdown, “resulted in near-zero shipments to the US. But since those actions, North America has been flooded with precursor chemicals from China, stifling international efforts,” Gupta says in a commentary in the Wall Street Journal.
Further, Gupta accused the Chinese of using Pelosi’s visit only as an excuse to back out of the cooperation. He predicted a further increase in fentanyl victims worldwide. In the medium and long term, China’s exit thus reinforces the escalation between the two countries. This is because the fatalities can also be used as a pretext for political action on the US side in the future. Gregor Koppenburg/Joern Petring
Carbon emissions in the People’s Republic have fallen for the fourth quarter in a row. This is according to a survey by analyst Lauri Myllyvirta of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. In the second quarter of 2022, Carbon emissions fell by eight percent compared to the same period last year. The largest quarterly decline in more than a decade. The causes are believed to be the housing crisis, zero Covid measures and low electricity demand. According to the report, in the twelve months between July 2021 and June 2022, emissions fell by three percent.
Cement production fell by 18 percent in the second quarter. The number of completed projects in the real estate sector fell by 33 percent in the second quarter. 44 percent fewer projects were started. Coal-fired power generation fell four percent in the first half of 2022 compared with the same period last year. However, it increased again slightly in July and August. Overall, five percent less natural gas was consumed.
According to Myllyvirta, the government’s medium-term response to the economic crisis will be decisive in determining whether China has already reached its emissions peak or will reach it later on. Recently, the government approved an economic stimulus program with spending to expand infrastructure and support the real estate sector but also on renewable energies. nib
For the Chinese, “losing face” is a misfortune. Why? A German psychotherapist knows the answer: everyone has a “true face.” But in a dictatorship, it is far “too dangerous” to show it. Beneath “the mask worn on display, simmers a pent-up emotional potential of existential angst, murderous rage, hatred, deep pain, and often bitter sadness.”
The quote was made by Hans-Joachim Maaz, who was chief physician at the psychotherapeutic clinic in Halle for many years. However, he was not referring to China. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he wrote a “psychogram of the GDR” that was published in 1990 under the title “Gefuehlsstau” (Emotional Congestion). The German bestseller was also translated into Chinese in 2013 under the title “情感堵塞” and caused a stir among psychologists, social scientists, and educationalists. Since party leader Xi Jinping has lifted himself into absolute power and is pursuing the re-ideologization of his country, such critical reflections on the behavior of people and their split personalities in authoritarian states do not fit with the new era of socialist China propagated by Xi and the realization of his dream of renewing the nation.
People’s lives in the GDR, Maaz says, were “essentially characterized by social facades, the inevitable result of repressive upbringing.” Psychotherapists saw through the mechanisms “with which people can perceive the new ‘identity’ as their ‘true’ nature – this is possible by splitting off their feelings.” Thus, “the imposed second face gradually became a habit and finally self-evident normality. But no human being can live well with dissimulation in the long run.”
Do such diagnoses also apply to the behavior of today’s Chinese, who are growing up in a globalized and permissive consumer society? In post-Mao reform China, everything seems grotesquely bifurcated and has its own terms for this situation. From the mix of planned, state, and market economies to the family, where one spouse works for a state agency or enterprise and the other for a private company (体制内体制外); for the peasants, who are only second-class immigrants in the cities without hukou citizen status, to “one country two systems” (一国两制), which Beijing just recently abolished in Hong Kong.
Foreign travelers experienced (still until shortly before the lockdown) seemingly different situations immediately after their arrival in the country. According to their accounts, the Chinese pragmatically and flexibly adapted to the respective situation. On the way into the city, they heard (if they understood the language) how nonchalantly and loudly their cab driver complained about China’s leadership. When I got to know a driver, who often cursed about his government, he turned out to be a party member. He would get up early in the morning to volunteer to solve quiz questions in a CP training app (学习强国) before heading off to work. The praise for his perfect party-loyal answers went into his evaluation. He did not understand what was contradictory about his behavior, “That’s what everyone does.”
Even the couple who allowed their daughter to watch provocative South Korean and Japanese music videos on pirated DVDs at home on weekends found nothing reprehensible about it. They were only rewarding their daughter, who not only got good grades at school but was allowed to wear the red scarf for young pioneers for exemplary socialist morals. The parents also watched illegal copies of foreign TV series at home. The next morning, during the organized break at work, they sang along vigorously in the colleagues’ choir: “Without a Communist Party, there is no new China.”
“China has become the country with the most serious cases of divided personalities” (中国是双重人格最严重的国家), warns essayist Wang Xiao (王霄). The books and writings of Hannah Arendt on authoritarianism and the “elements and origins of total domination” translated during the reform era have strongly influenced his verdict.
The consequences also find particularly fertile ground among the Chinese because they are reinforced by the influence of traditional Confucian education, which prepares the individual from an early age for submission and subordination. In schools, where today “harebrained nonsense” has to be crammed into the subjects of Chinese, history or social studies, the “newspeak” and “doublethink” described by George Orwell in 1984 is common, writes the well-known cultural critic and university lecturer Xu Ben (徐贲).
He now lives in the USA. He sees how China drifts into a “new form of totalitarianism”. It has evolved from the original totalitarianism (under Stalin and Hitler) to post-totalitarianism (like once in Eastern Europe, for example) into this third form (从极权主义、后极权主义到”新极权主义). It is a variant of post-totalitarianism and condemns its liberal traits as political “weakness”. But the new totalitarianism produces only “patchwork,” not terror-spreading, systematic repression, but partial, albeit massive, forms of repression. For example, to silence the media and the Internet or to violently end mass protests. But he no longer had the power of persuasion or the “capacity for ideological mobilization.”
China expert Minxin Pei, professor of government management at the US Claremont McKenna College, sees the People’s Republic drifting into a bifurcated world. In a Financial Times podcast, he says, “People know that one side of politics is about ritual. And that ritual you have to perform. Whether you believe it or not is irrelevant.” He says it works as long as there is still “substance, reality, and pragmatism” on the other side of politics. The same official who “proudly displays his smartphone to you to show that he’s done his morning exercise in reading Xi Jinping Thought. Then he turns around and talks in very pragmatic terms about his daily challenges at work.” Minxin Pei “grew up in the Maoist era”. In those days, people actually genuinely believed in that kind of political rituals. But today, we have to make a great deal of deductions about whether Xi Jinping Thought is genuinely embraced by the party members, officials and by ordinary people.
Pei laments that the space for critical liberal ideas in universities has been “completely closed”. His fellow academics no longer speak out publicly. “The smart ones simply shut up.”
In the end, he says, patriotism must act as putty to bridge the internal divide, of which many are not even aware. The opposition author Huang Yukai, a member of the independent Chinese Pen, calls such a two-part personality “schizophrenia,” but not in the medical sense, but rather as a diagnosis of a personality disorder induced by the system.
There were also public debates in China after Mao’s death about how to distinguish between what is true and real, false and mendacious. Translations, for example, of more than two dozen works and books by Hannah Arendt contributed to this, as did the novel “1984” by George Orwell, or “Animal Farm”.
In 2009, for example, a debate was sparked about whether, and if so, when the Chinese can remember where they first learned how to lie. Many answered that it was in elementary school when the system began its political indoctrination. In 2011, The New Week magazine (新周刊) published a special issue, “Why Do Chinese Love to Tell Lies?”. The Critical author Wu Si (吴思) at the time headlined his piece, “When the rulers spread lies, we pretend to believe them.”
Today, emotional congestion is having an effect. Many believe the lies.
Counting whale sharks to fall asleep? These kids in Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, probably won’t be closing their eyes anytime soon, because in addition to several species of sharks, manta rays are circling above their heads. The Chimelong Ocean Kingdom in the southern Chinese city offers camping under the glass dome of its shark aquarium. With 22.7 million liters of water, it is the largest aquarium in the world.
