The international community has condemned the Russian attack on Ukraine and called for the withdrawal of Russia’s troops. China abstained from the historic vote at the emergency session of the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday. The resolution fails to take the “the history and complexity of the current crisis” into account, Chinese UN Ambassador Zhang Jun said after the vote. Moreover, it did not express the urgency of a political settlement or considers the security concerns of all states involved, the ambassador said. However, China was willing to “continue to play a constructive role.” China’s abstention – along with 34 other states – is no surprise. Beijing has been trying a shaky balancing act of economic and political interests in the conflict for the past week.
Russia’s increasing isolation by the West could give Chinese car manufacturers a boost. Cars from the People’s Republic have already gained popularity in Russia in recent years. Chinese manufacturers already hold a larger market share over their Russian competitors. And the withdrawal of Western companies could now open up even larger gaps for brands like Chery and Haval, as Finn Mayer-Kuckuk analyzes. This is because Russia, unlike China, has never had a strategy of acquiring the know-how itself. In the end, the country could even become a satellite of China’s automotive sector.
China already dominates large parts of another market: Chinese smartphone brands dominate in India. However, almost all locally sold Chinese smartphones are produced in India, as Frank Sieren reports. The market share of domestic brands is shrinking dramatically in the process. However, the growing interconnection of technology could help ease the political tensions between the two nations.
Before the invasion of Ukraine, things were going very well for Chinese car manufacturers on the Russian market. Their most recent market share was at 7.5 percent. That is still far behind the Europeans, Koreans and Japanese. But it marks a doubling compared to 2020, and it is significantly more than the share of Russian competitors. The latter only had a share of 5.3 percent in their own country. “Perception of Chinese brands has fundamentally changed,” independent auto analyst Sergei Burgasliyev told the portal Yicai. Quality and design have advanced to world-class level in recent years. The Chery brand has enjoyed particular success in Russia recently, followed by Great Wall, Geely, Changan and FAW. EVs are also considered a future growth market for Chinese suppliers in Russia.
This development gains particular significance as a result of the Ukraine war. This is because Western car companies have begun to withdraw from the Russian market. BMW has stopped all exports and expects disruptions in local manufacturing. Volvo and GM have also suspended shipments to Russia. Daimler Trucks has terminated its cooperation with Russian truck manufacturer Kamaz. Volkswagen blocks shipments of finished cars. However, the company continues to operate its Russian factories. Toyota, which has stopped the assembly lines, is different. Its plants are already suffering from a shortage of parts that normally come from international suppliers.
Local production is less sophisticated. Complex technical components are imported from other countries. Cars are often merely screwed together in Russia. “The technology is located in Europe or China,” says Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer of the Center Automotive Research in Germany. Even the old Lada brand is now majority-owned by the Renault Group and technically dependent on it. Russia never had a strategy like China of acquiring the know-how itself.
China now intends to quickly fill the gap left by the sanctions. “China and Russia will continue normal trade cooperation,” a foreign ministry spokesman in Beijing said on Wednesday. He warned Western countries against imposing so-called secondary sanctions. Secondary sanctions are used in Western countries to punish Chinese companies that do business with Russia. A Chinese bank that grants a loan to a Russian company could then also be penalized in New York.
The main reason for Russia’s lack of supply of cars and car parts from the EU, the USA and Japan has so far been the financial sanctions. After being excluded from the Swift payment system, Russia now has problems paying for its imports. In addition, the EU has frozen Russia’s currency reserves. Here, too, China holds a special position for Russia (China.Table reported). This is because, although Russia can no longer pay for anything in the West, it still holds usable foreign exchange reserves in yuan. These are estimated to be the equivalent of between €70 billion and €80 billion.
Russia is also able to continue to generate revenue in China, which then is denominated in yuan. China is more dependent than ever on energy supplies, and Russia has an abundance of oil and gas (China.Table reported). The yuan revenue can then be spent directly on Chinese products. So in principle, China can compensate for the collapsing European business for quite a while in many of Russia’s economic sectors. However, Russia’s opportunities for consumption are shrinking rapidly due to the upcoming economic crisis.
Dudenhoeffer’s research team expects the Russian car market to shrink by around 34 to 52 percent following Western sanctions. Sales there would then be around or below one million units. His optimistic scenario assumes considerable help from China in the form of loans. In his more pessimistic scenario, China does not interfere and simply contributes to the Russian decline through passivity.
However, along with the shrinking of the market, a shift towards available Chinese goods can be expected in any case. Great Wall has already laid a strong foundation for further expansion with its Haval brand. The company has invested around half a billion euros in factories in Russia and built up a dealer network. Geely operates a manufacturing plant in its allied neighbor Belarus and supplies the Russian market from there.
The strengthening of Chinese brands as a result of the sanctions comes mainly at the expense of Renault, Hyundai, and Volkswagen, which have had the largest market shares to date. Overall, the developments on the car market should primarily be seen as just one piece of the puzzle of a larger process that is already taking shape: “In the optimistic scenario, Russia could melt down into an economic satellite of China,” as Dudenhoeffer puts it. In the pessimistic scenario, it will lose all economic significance.
The “Pillar of Shame” by Danish sculptor Jens Galschiøt has found a new home. The three-meter-high sculpture was erected on Wednesday between the “Free Hong Kong Road” and the “Uyghur Martyrs Road” in Budapest.
A political battle has been raging for weeks over the location of the statue: First, Hungary’s President Victor Orbán had announced that a university supported by China would be built on the site. This was followed by protests. Subsequently, the city government of Budapest decided to rename the streets around the planned site. That means if the university is actually built, it would be located between “Free Hong Kong Road” and “Uyghur Martyrs Road” and “Dalai Lama Square.” And since yesterday, Wednesday, well within sight of the “Pillar of Shame”.
In the meantime, more than 200,000 signatures have also been collected to call for a referendum on the construction (China.Table reported). The controversial project with Fudan University in Shanghai recently also made relations between China and Hungary an election issue (China.Table reported).
The three-meter-tall sculpture by Galschiøt commemorates one of the darkest chapters in Chinese history: The bloody suppression of the protests of June 1989. For a good 24 years, it stood on the campus of the University of Hong Kong. There, the “Pillar of Shame” had to be removed in January (China.Table reported). The reason given was that the sculpture’s existence violated the National Security Law. The law, which came into force in July 2020, allows the authorities to take action against any activity that they deem to threaten China’s national security.
The Hong Kong statue will bear the same inscription on its pedestal in Budapest as its counterparts in Mexico and Brazil: “The old cannot kill the young forever.” According to Jens Galschiøt, the words are not only intended to remind us of what happened to the statue in Hong Kong on Chinese orders. Russia’s war in Ukraine also gave his work sad relevance again. Putin stands for the past, Galschiøt hopes. rad
It has been more than four years since Yu Wensheng was permanently detained. On January 19, 2018, about a dozen police and civilian officers forcibly stopped the lawyer as he walked his son to school. After that, it took three and a half years for Yu to see his son again – in a Nanjing prison.
The 54-year-old was imprisoned there after the Xuzhou Intermediate People’s Court of Jiangsu Province found him guilty. The charge: inciting subversion of state power. On the day before his arrest, Yu had written an open letter in which he proposed reforms to the Chinese constitution. In it, he called for free elections and a supervisory authority for the actions of the Communist Party, which has ruled the People’s Republic of China in an authoritarian manner since 1949.
It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. After all, Yu was not a blank slate. He had been a thorn in the side of the security authorities for many years. In 2014, he had supported the umbrella protests in Hong Kong. The movement was a reaction to the city’s electoral system at the time, which drastically limited the democratic participation of citizens in choosing their political leaders. Yu was detained for 99 days for his solidarity at the time.
The consequences came in 2015. When the Chinese government arrested more than 200 activists and lawyers in a coordinated action with the so-called 709 raid in the weeks after July 15 (7/09/15), Yu Wensheng was also targeted. His wife Xu Yan recalls 20 men standing outside the door of their apartment in early August of that year, eventually forcing their way in with a chainsaw after Yu Wensheng refused to open up. Yu remained in custody for only 24 hours this time. After that, he tended to the defense of those who remained imprisoned.
He did not lose his courage to take on the overpowering and notoriously merciless opponent to bring about change in his homeland through repeated incarcerations. He fought for the rights of fellow countrymen whose personal interests clashed with those of the state – human rights activists, petitioners, fellow lawyers. Yu always insisted on the established rights of the people.
A year later, his name again turned up. He was part of a six-member group that sued the cities of Beijing and Tianjin and the province of Hebei over massive air pollution in the region. “Serious dereliction of duty,” was the complaint. The lawyers demanded a public apology from the administration as well as financial compensation. The case made headlines around the world. However, the lawsuit was shot down. Yu, however, was spared a new imprisonment.
Until the day he decided to criticize the grand scheme of things. His open letter was the beginning of a martyrdom. It took months before Yu Wensheng was transferred from so-called Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL) to formal detention. RSDL is a gray-area legal tool used by police to lock people away for months at a time. It gives authorities the power to neither inform victims’ families of the location and duration of the detention, nor to provide legal assistance.
In April 2018, his Wife Xu received a letter signed by her husband. In it, he dismissed the lawyer who had been representing him on her behalf. He also wanted to forgo legal assistance organized by her, the letter said. Yu apparently knew he would be pressured into signing such a document. In a far-sighted prepared video message, he had stressed that he would not voluntarily dismiss his lawyer while in detention. In later conversations with his wife, he complained that he had sometimes not seen his public defender for more than a year.
Less than a year after his open letter, Germany and France awarded him the Franco-German Prize for Human Rights and the Rule of Law. The award did not save Yu from a sentence. In May 2019, he was secretly put on trial in Xuzhou. Without knowledge of the outside world and without a lawyer present, the Chinese People’s Court put him on trial. But it was not until a year later that the court handed down a verdict: four years in prison.
At the beginning of last year, the Martin Ennals Foundation once again drew attention to the case. Yu was one of three recipients of the annual Martin Ennals Award. The foundation’s namesake was the Secretary-General of Amnesty International in the 1970s. But appeals by the European Union and human rights organizations to the Chinese government to release the lawyer also failed.
China was determined to have Yu Wensheng serve the full duration of the sentence. In talks with his wife, he told of the torture he suffered. He was forced to sit on a metal chair for hours until muscle spasms tormented him. He lost considerable weight because his rations were cut back. In the summer, he was locked in non-air-conditioned cells where the temperature was so high that he fainted. At times, fellow inmates would beat him for no apparent reason. As a result, he suffered nerve damage in his hand and face. Today, Yu, who is right-handed, can only hold pens and chopsticks with his left hand.
On March 1, Yu Wensheng was released from prison in Nanjing. He immediately traveled to Beijing to be with his family. His incarceration is over for the time being. His social ostracism is not. Yu is no longer allowed to work as a lawyer. His license was revoked years ago. Marcel Grzanna
Preparing for the Paralympic Winter Olympics: Torchbearers Li Rui and Zhou Jingjing carry the Paralympic torch to the flaming ceremony at the Temple of Heaven Park in Beijing. The torch had been lit in Stoke Mandeville on Monday. The village northwest of London is considered the birthplace of the Paralympics. Host country China awaits the Paralympic Winter Olympics with a record delegation: 96 athletes will compete for the People’s Republic. The Games begin tomorrow, Friday, and last until March 13.
The international community has condemned the Russian attack on Ukraine and called for the withdrawal of Russia’s troops. China abstained from the historic vote at the emergency session of the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday. The resolution fails to take the “the history and complexity of the current crisis” into account, Chinese UN Ambassador Zhang Jun said after the vote. Moreover, it did not express the urgency of a political settlement or considers the security concerns of all states involved, the ambassador said. However, China was willing to “continue to play a constructive role.” China’s abstention – along with 34 other states – is no surprise. Beijing has been trying a shaky balancing act of economic and political interests in the conflict for the past week.
Russia’s increasing isolation by the West could give Chinese car manufacturers a boost. Cars from the People’s Republic have already gained popularity in Russia in recent years. Chinese manufacturers already hold a larger market share over their Russian competitors. And the withdrawal of Western companies could now open up even larger gaps for brands like Chery and Haval, as Finn Mayer-Kuckuk analyzes. This is because Russia, unlike China, has never had a strategy of acquiring the know-how itself. In the end, the country could even become a satellite of China’s automotive sector.
China already dominates large parts of another market: Chinese smartphone brands dominate in India. However, almost all locally sold Chinese smartphones are produced in India, as Frank Sieren reports. The market share of domestic brands is shrinking dramatically in the process. However, the growing interconnection of technology could help ease the political tensions between the two nations.
Before the invasion of Ukraine, things were going very well for Chinese car manufacturers on the Russian market. Their most recent market share was at 7.5 percent. That is still far behind the Europeans, Koreans and Japanese. But it marks a doubling compared to 2020, and it is significantly more than the share of Russian competitors. The latter only had a share of 5.3 percent in their own country. “Perception of Chinese brands has fundamentally changed,” independent auto analyst Sergei Burgasliyev told the portal Yicai. Quality and design have advanced to world-class level in recent years. The Chery brand has enjoyed particular success in Russia recently, followed by Great Wall, Geely, Changan and FAW. EVs are also considered a future growth market for Chinese suppliers in Russia.
This development gains particular significance as a result of the Ukraine war. This is because Western car companies have begun to withdraw from the Russian market. BMW has stopped all exports and expects disruptions in local manufacturing. Volvo and GM have also suspended shipments to Russia. Daimler Trucks has terminated its cooperation with Russian truck manufacturer Kamaz. Volkswagen blocks shipments of finished cars. However, the company continues to operate its Russian factories. Toyota, which has stopped the assembly lines, is different. Its plants are already suffering from a shortage of parts that normally come from international suppliers.
Local production is less sophisticated. Complex technical components are imported from other countries. Cars are often merely screwed together in Russia. “The technology is located in Europe or China,” says Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer of the Center Automotive Research in Germany. Even the old Lada brand is now majority-owned by the Renault Group and technically dependent on it. Russia never had a strategy like China of acquiring the know-how itself.
China now intends to quickly fill the gap left by the sanctions. “China and Russia will continue normal trade cooperation,” a foreign ministry spokesman in Beijing said on Wednesday. He warned Western countries against imposing so-called secondary sanctions. Secondary sanctions are used in Western countries to punish Chinese companies that do business with Russia. A Chinese bank that grants a loan to a Russian company could then also be penalized in New York.
The main reason for Russia’s lack of supply of cars and car parts from the EU, the USA and Japan has so far been the financial sanctions. After being excluded from the Swift payment system, Russia now has problems paying for its imports. In addition, the EU has frozen Russia’s currency reserves. Here, too, China holds a special position for Russia (China.Table reported). This is because, although Russia can no longer pay for anything in the West, it still holds usable foreign exchange reserves in yuan. These are estimated to be the equivalent of between €70 billion and €80 billion.
Russia is also able to continue to generate revenue in China, which then is denominated in yuan. China is more dependent than ever on energy supplies, and Russia has an abundance of oil and gas (China.Table reported). The yuan revenue can then be spent directly on Chinese products. So in principle, China can compensate for the collapsing European business for quite a while in many of Russia’s economic sectors. However, Russia’s opportunities for consumption are shrinking rapidly due to the upcoming economic crisis.
Dudenhoeffer’s research team expects the Russian car market to shrink by around 34 to 52 percent following Western sanctions. Sales there would then be around or below one million units. His optimistic scenario assumes considerable help from China in the form of loans. In his more pessimistic scenario, China does not interfere and simply contributes to the Russian decline through passivity.
However, along with the shrinking of the market, a shift towards available Chinese goods can be expected in any case. Great Wall has already laid a strong foundation for further expansion with its Haval brand. The company has invested around half a billion euros in factories in Russia and built up a dealer network. Geely operates a manufacturing plant in its allied neighbor Belarus and supplies the Russian market from there.
The strengthening of Chinese brands as a result of the sanctions comes mainly at the expense of Renault, Hyundai, and Volkswagen, which have had the largest market shares to date. Overall, the developments on the car market should primarily be seen as just one piece of the puzzle of a larger process that is already taking shape: “In the optimistic scenario, Russia could melt down into an economic satellite of China,” as Dudenhoeffer puts it. In the pessimistic scenario, it will lose all economic significance.
The “Pillar of Shame” by Danish sculptor Jens Galschiøt has found a new home. The three-meter-high sculpture was erected on Wednesday between the “Free Hong Kong Road” and the “Uyghur Martyrs Road” in Budapest.
A political battle has been raging for weeks over the location of the statue: First, Hungary’s President Victor Orbán had announced that a university supported by China would be built on the site. This was followed by protests. Subsequently, the city government of Budapest decided to rename the streets around the planned site. That means if the university is actually built, it would be located between “Free Hong Kong Road” and “Uyghur Martyrs Road” and “Dalai Lama Square.” And since yesterday, Wednesday, well within sight of the “Pillar of Shame”.
In the meantime, more than 200,000 signatures have also been collected to call for a referendum on the construction (China.Table reported). The controversial project with Fudan University in Shanghai recently also made relations between China and Hungary an election issue (China.Table reported).
The three-meter-tall sculpture by Galschiøt commemorates one of the darkest chapters in Chinese history: The bloody suppression of the protests of June 1989. For a good 24 years, it stood on the campus of the University of Hong Kong. There, the “Pillar of Shame” had to be removed in January (China.Table reported). The reason given was that the sculpture’s existence violated the National Security Law. The law, which came into force in July 2020, allows the authorities to take action against any activity that they deem to threaten China’s national security.
The Hong Kong statue will bear the same inscription on its pedestal in Budapest as its counterparts in Mexico and Brazil: “The old cannot kill the young forever.” According to Jens Galschiøt, the words are not only intended to remind us of what happened to the statue in Hong Kong on Chinese orders. Russia’s war in Ukraine also gave his work sad relevance again. Putin stands for the past, Galschiøt hopes. rad
It has been more than four years since Yu Wensheng was permanently detained. On January 19, 2018, about a dozen police and civilian officers forcibly stopped the lawyer as he walked his son to school. After that, it took three and a half years for Yu to see his son again – in a Nanjing prison.
The 54-year-old was imprisoned there after the Xuzhou Intermediate People’s Court of Jiangsu Province found him guilty. The charge: inciting subversion of state power. On the day before his arrest, Yu had written an open letter in which he proposed reforms to the Chinese constitution. In it, he called for free elections and a supervisory authority for the actions of the Communist Party, which has ruled the People’s Republic of China in an authoritarian manner since 1949.
It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. After all, Yu was not a blank slate. He had been a thorn in the side of the security authorities for many years. In 2014, he had supported the umbrella protests in Hong Kong. The movement was a reaction to the city’s electoral system at the time, which drastically limited the democratic participation of citizens in choosing their political leaders. Yu was detained for 99 days for his solidarity at the time.
The consequences came in 2015. When the Chinese government arrested more than 200 activists and lawyers in a coordinated action with the so-called 709 raid in the weeks after July 15 (7/09/15), Yu Wensheng was also targeted. His wife Xu Yan recalls 20 men standing outside the door of their apartment in early August of that year, eventually forcing their way in with a chainsaw after Yu Wensheng refused to open up. Yu remained in custody for only 24 hours this time. After that, he tended to the defense of those who remained imprisoned.
He did not lose his courage to take on the overpowering and notoriously merciless opponent to bring about change in his homeland through repeated incarcerations. He fought for the rights of fellow countrymen whose personal interests clashed with those of the state – human rights activists, petitioners, fellow lawyers. Yu always insisted on the established rights of the people.
A year later, his name again turned up. He was part of a six-member group that sued the cities of Beijing and Tianjin and the province of Hebei over massive air pollution in the region. “Serious dereliction of duty,” was the complaint. The lawyers demanded a public apology from the administration as well as financial compensation. The case made headlines around the world. However, the lawsuit was shot down. Yu, however, was spared a new imprisonment.
Until the day he decided to criticize the grand scheme of things. His open letter was the beginning of a martyrdom. It took months before Yu Wensheng was transferred from so-called Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL) to formal detention. RSDL is a gray-area legal tool used by police to lock people away for months at a time. It gives authorities the power to neither inform victims’ families of the location and duration of the detention, nor to provide legal assistance.
In April 2018, his Wife Xu received a letter signed by her husband. In it, he dismissed the lawyer who had been representing him on her behalf. He also wanted to forgo legal assistance organized by her, the letter said. Yu apparently knew he would be pressured into signing such a document. In a far-sighted prepared video message, he had stressed that he would not voluntarily dismiss his lawyer while in detention. In later conversations with his wife, he complained that he had sometimes not seen his public defender for more than a year.
Less than a year after his open letter, Germany and France awarded him the Franco-German Prize for Human Rights and the Rule of Law. The award did not save Yu from a sentence. In May 2019, he was secretly put on trial in Xuzhou. Without knowledge of the outside world and without a lawyer present, the Chinese People’s Court put him on trial. But it was not until a year later that the court handed down a verdict: four years in prison.
At the beginning of last year, the Martin Ennals Foundation once again drew attention to the case. Yu was one of three recipients of the annual Martin Ennals Award. The foundation’s namesake was the Secretary-General of Amnesty International in the 1970s. But appeals by the European Union and human rights organizations to the Chinese government to release the lawyer also failed.
China was determined to have Yu Wensheng serve the full duration of the sentence. In talks with his wife, he told of the torture he suffered. He was forced to sit on a metal chair for hours until muscle spasms tormented him. He lost considerable weight because his rations were cut back. In the summer, he was locked in non-air-conditioned cells where the temperature was so high that he fainted. At times, fellow inmates would beat him for no apparent reason. As a result, he suffered nerve damage in his hand and face. Today, Yu, who is right-handed, can only hold pens and chopsticks with his left hand.
On March 1, Yu Wensheng was released from prison in Nanjing. He immediately traveled to Beijing to be with his family. His incarceration is over for the time being. His social ostracism is not. Yu is no longer allowed to work as a lawyer. His license was revoked years ago. Marcel Grzanna
Preparing for the Paralympic Winter Olympics: Torchbearers Li Rui and Zhou Jingjing carry the Paralympic torch to the flaming ceremony at the Temple of Heaven Park in Beijing. The torch had been lit in Stoke Mandeville on Monday. The village northwest of London is considered the birthplace of the Paralympics. Host country China awaits the Paralympic Winter Olympics with a record delegation: 96 athletes will compete for the People’s Republic. The Games begin tomorrow, Friday, and last until March 13.
