Chinese carmakers have not had a good standing in Germany so far. Apart from Volvo, no manufacturer from the People’s Republic has managed to challenge the German industry on the domestic market. And hardly anyone knows that Volvo is no longer Swedish, but in Chinese hands.
That could now change: In the field of electromobility, a number of highly successful companies are about to make the leap to Europe. Of all companies, SAIC, Volkswagen’s long-time joint venture partner, wants to be the first Chinese automaker to establish its own production facility in the EU.
The Ford plant in Saarlouis, which is up for sale, is under consideration for acquisition by SAIC. This is good news for the German state of Saarland. Stuttgart, Wolfsburg, Ingolstadt and Munich, on the other hand, will have to prepare themselves if good and affordable cars from Chinese brands now come directly from Germany.
Millions of migrant workers also need to bundle up. They built the bridges, roads and skyscrapers that China boasts today, and hundreds of thousands of them produced goods in factories for the global market. Migrant workers have made a significant contribution to China’s economic rise.
Now the first generation is entering retirement age. But for most of them, retirement is out of the question. Because their pension is not even enough to feed themselves, writes Fabian Kretschmer in his analysis. At least millions of users on social media are expressing their concern after a Chinese online medium took up the issue.
Shanghai state-owned automaker SAIC has started the search for a manufacturing site in Europe. Caixin reported this, citing a press meeting with company CEO Yu De. Yu has plans for Europe because his company sold 115,000 cars in the EU in the first half of the year, an increase of 143 percent, the report says. Overall, a sales boom of good and affordable Chinese EVs is emerging in the EU.
This would make SAIC the first Chinese carmaker to set up production in the EU without taking over an entire European brand. Geely did acquire Volvo in 2010 and thus operates factories in Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands. But what SAIC is now planning is closer to the first steps of Japanese supplier Toyota into the EU, which has been manufacturing locally since 1992 and currently operates eight European plants.
SAIC is already sounding out the region. Chen Hong, Chairman of SAIC, and Wang Xiaoqiu, President of the company, reportedly made initial exploratory trips to Europe.
Manufacturing in the EU would benefit SAIC in a number of ways.
Overall, China has a better position as a global economic citizen if it not only produces domestically and floods foreign markets, but is willing to be involved on the ground. It has now acquired the necessary capital strength and experience to climb to this new level of global involvement.
Investments in production facilities in other countries would also be perceived as fair because European, American, Japanese and Taiwanese industries have built up many structures in China over the decades. The plants of international manufacturers have helped entire cities and regions grow.
SAIC’s plan also reveals a long-term focus on the European market. “The plan shows that Chinese automakers are coming to stay,” says Stefan Bratzel of the Center of Automotive Management (CAM). They have learned that success on the international stage is not achieved in the short term, but requires perseverance. “From a Chinese perspective, I think this is an important step in the right direction,” says Bratzel.
In 2020, SAIC did not even appear as a manufacturer in Germany’s Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA) registration statistics. In 2021, the company sold 3,239 vehicles in Germany; in 2022, the company had already sold 15,684 – an increase of 480 percent. All of them are electric cars.
SAICS’ main bridgehead in Europe is the British MG brand, which the Shanghai-based company acquired in 2007. Its cars have been built entirely in China since 2016 and are exported ready for sale. In May, SAIC sold 21,000 MG brand cars in Europe, representing a 170 percent year-on-year increase.
According to the BBC, the new European plant will not primarily produce MG-branded cars. It has not yet been decided which brands will roll off the production line. Other SAIC brands include Roewe, Maxus, Rising and Yue Jin.
It is also still open whether SAIC will build a new factory on a greenfield site or buy and adapt an existing plant. The Ford plant in the German town of Saarlouis is a prime candidate. Shortly after the Sino-German government consultations in Berlin in June, it was announced that a buyer for the plant had been found.
Ford will cease production at the plant in 2025. All parties involved are interested in retaining as many of the 5,700 employees at the Ford plant and neighboring suppliers as possible. This would make an acquisition by SAIC a perfect fit.
SAIC has long been a household name in the German automotive community. It is an important partner of Volkswagen in China. The collaboration started in 1984 with the joint production of the Santana, which is legendary in China. An unusually successful joint venture has existed since 1988.
Like everywhere else in China’s automotive industry, SAIC is consistently pursuing the switch to e-mobility. The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) ranking places SAIC, along with many other Chinese manufacturers and German companies, in the mid-range of companies rapidly advancing the transition. Tesla and BYD are at the top.
Zhao has lived in Beijing since the turn of the millennium, where he once sought a better future. In reality, however, he mostly found dashed hopes: Despite being 49 years old now, Zhao could never marry due to his meager financial savings. And all he can afford from his salary as a security guard in a residential neighborhood is a ten-square-meter basement shack filled with mold in the summer and freezing cold in the winter – because it has no heating.
Zhao belongs to China’s lost generation, which researcher Qiu Fengxian from Anhui Normal University analyzed in a comprehensive study. With 2,500 questionnaires and 200 in-depth interviews, she wanted to find out how the first generation of migrant workers fared today: Chinese who moved from the provinces to the large metropolises in the wake of the market liberalization to work in plants and on construction sites. They have worked for more than three decades, but only very few will retire.
Qiu’s findings are shocking because they reveal a two-tier society: While the average pension in cities is equivalent to 400 euros, most migrant workers surveyed receive less than a tenth. And more than half of them have savings of less than 6,000 euros. Unsurprisingly, more than 76 percent stated that they would continue to work even into old age – even if their bodies would no longer keep up. Almost all respondents avoid doctor’s appointments as long as possible.
When a Chinese online medium took up the issue, it received an enormous response. “I worked in the city for over 30 years, but in the end, I’m not one bit better off than the people who stayed in the village,” read the headline of the text, which was shared millions of times on social media. China’s censors immediately sprang into action but could hardly keep up with deleting posts.
Because this topic does not fit at all into the picture that President Xi Jinping paints of his China. Back in 2021, he proclaimed a “complete victory” in the fight against poverty. However, the fact that around six hundred million Chinese still have to live off the equivalent of 130 euros a month or less was only briefly mentioned by his then Premier Li Keqiang.
Most Chinese in the big cities are unaware of the fate of the first-generation migrant workers. They are everywhere in the cities, but they remain invisible in the daily lives of most: It is always migrant workers from the provinces who deliver food to the offices in Shanghai and Beijing, build the subway lines and high-rises, and clean apartments for a pittance.
Even though they contributed significantly to the prosperity of the People’s Republic, they have benefited disproportionately little from economic advancement. And because of the state’s household registration system, migrant workers in the East Coast metropolises can never become full citizens either: They do not receive the same health coverage, are not eligible for full social benefits, and their children are not allowed to graduate from schools in the cities.
And once cheap workers are no longer needed, they are driven away like pigeons. Five years ago, Beijing’s then-mayor Cai Qi launched what was probably the most systematic “purge” of the city, vowing, in his words, to crack down on the “lower end of the population”. He had all migrant worker settlements in the city center destroyed and displaced its residents beyond the fifth ring road.
However, this shameful campaign did in no way damage the 67-year-old’s political career. On the contrary, last year, President Xi Jinping promoted Cai Qi to the Standing Committee of the Politburo. Fabian Kretschmer
In its heyday between 1900 and the end of World War II, Peking opera was China’s most popular form of entertainment and the most widely performed musical form.
Back then, many people in the street could sing one line or two from his favorite piece. Big-name Peking opera actors and actresses back then enjoyed similar status as today’s film and pop stars. They earned big money. Enthusiastic fans avidly read gossip about them and would also cry when seeing them. The top Peking opera actor, Mei Lanfang, became a cultural icon and inspired foreign artists like Bertolt Brecht and Konstantin Stanislavski.
Today, it is still seen as one of the most important symbols of traditional Chinese culture. However, for most foreign audiences and even some Chinese, it is something very inaccessible. It’s so different from western opera. The singing and music are strident and the acting bizarre.
But let’s ignore the strangeness for a moment and turn to a story first. After the first emperor of a united China, Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇, 259-210 BC), died, his 18th son, Qin Er Shi (秦二世, literally meaning Emperor Qin II), came to the throne with the help of Zhao Gao (赵高, 258-207 BC) and others, who faked the first emperor’s will and killed the originally appointed successor. Zhao became the new emperor’s prime minister. So much for the historical background.
Now comes the legend. On a visit to Zhao’s, the new emperor meets Zhao’s daughter, Yanrong, whose exiled husband is from a family Zhao considers a political rival. The emperor is struck by her beauty and asks her father Zhao in private to present her to him to be his concubine. The father agrees promptly. But the daughter vehemently refused.
One of Yanrong’s maids is mute but clever. When the father presses the daughter, the maid suggests that Yanrong pretends to go insane. She does so in front of her father, and later in front of the emperor, lambasting the latter for being a corrupt ruler. The emperor, convinced that she truly is insane, dismisses her. She survives.
This is the synopsis of the middle part of the Peking opera Yu Zhou Feng (宇宙锋, the name of a sword that plays a role in the first part and roughly means “cosmic blade”). The opera is a popular piece among Beijing opera connoisseurs and one of the most daunting and tempting parts for actors/actresses playing young female roles.
A storyline like Yu Zhou Feng won’t be unfamiliar to fans of classical Western operas. In particular, it bears an interesting resemblance to the works of Gaetano Donizetti, whose most famous works deal with women in delirium, and love, betrayal, intrigue in the monarchy, or both.
But acting in Yu Zhou Feng is more challenging for the leading female role than Lucia di Lammermoor or Anna Bolena.
In Donizetti’s operas, the women are genuinely mad. But Yanrong, the prime minister’s daughter, is pretending. On stage, she needs to switch very quickly between miming with the maid for her advice, and frenzied talking (She even says to her father something like “My dear darling, let’s go to bed together”) and exaggerated gestures targeting her father or the emperor, and the occasional sad soliloquies.
All these are performed through stylized speech and movements, half-dancing steps, and, most importantly, singing.
But it is precisely the singing and the accompanying music that have turned many first-time listeners away. The singing, particularly by young female roles and the high-pitched fiddle, both sound abrasive screeching, and the percussion a deafening cacophony. The speech of actors and actresses and ritual-like gestures are also hard to understand.
It’s always difficult to explain musical taste of a people as well as of a specific person. It’s probably comparable to gustatory preference. Few Chinese would appreciate cheese at the first bite, and the Pi Dan (皮蛋), also known as Song Hua Dan (松花蛋) and one-thousand-year egg, would taste to a non-Chinese like a “monkey’s ass,” in the words of a friend of mine from the United States.
In vocal music, yodeling from the Alps, Tuvan throat singing from Mongolia and the whining Utai in Japanese Noh plays could all be unpleasant to a foreign ear. One needs lots of exposure and some luck to get to appreciate them.
But once you cross that threshold for Peking opera, a door to a great art form is opened. The singing is beautifully expressive; the small accompanying ensemble creates the rightly dramatic atmosphere, the speech and the gestures also start to make sense in the Peking opera’s art language system. Adding to the joy is dazzling acrobatics and martial art techniques, which are used in battle or combat scenes.
In Beijing slang, Old Beijingers used to call Peking opera a Wan Yi’r (玩意儿), which means craftwork. Like other craftsmanship in other trades, such as jade carving, it takes years to train a Peking opera actor, and decades to make a master.
Just as Western operas are not all Donizetti, Peking opera is not exclusively about crazy women and the king. The repertoire is enormous. There are cheerful equivalents to Rossini, tragedies in the style of Verdi, sentimentality as in Puccini, and many others that have no counterparts in Western operas.
No longer science fiction: Tech companies present their newest products at the Artificial Intelligence Expo in Shanghai, including robots that not only serve coffee and mapo tofu, but also perform dance routines. Their performance may still seem a bit awkward, but that is no different from an inexperienced human dancer.
Chinese carmakers have not had a good standing in Germany so far. Apart from Volvo, no manufacturer from the People’s Republic has managed to challenge the German industry on the domestic market. And hardly anyone knows that Volvo is no longer Swedish, but in Chinese hands.
That could now change: In the field of electromobility, a number of highly successful companies are about to make the leap to Europe. Of all companies, SAIC, Volkswagen’s long-time joint venture partner, wants to be the first Chinese automaker to establish its own production facility in the EU.
The Ford plant in Saarlouis, which is up for sale, is under consideration for acquisition by SAIC. This is good news for the German state of Saarland. Stuttgart, Wolfsburg, Ingolstadt and Munich, on the other hand, will have to prepare themselves if good and affordable cars from Chinese brands now come directly from Germany.
Millions of migrant workers also need to bundle up. They built the bridges, roads and skyscrapers that China boasts today, and hundreds of thousands of them produced goods in factories for the global market. Migrant workers have made a significant contribution to China’s economic rise.
Now the first generation is entering retirement age. But for most of them, retirement is out of the question. Because their pension is not even enough to feed themselves, writes Fabian Kretschmer in his analysis. At least millions of users on social media are expressing their concern after a Chinese online medium took up the issue.
Shanghai state-owned automaker SAIC has started the search for a manufacturing site in Europe. Caixin reported this, citing a press meeting with company CEO Yu De. Yu has plans for Europe because his company sold 115,000 cars in the EU in the first half of the year, an increase of 143 percent, the report says. Overall, a sales boom of good and affordable Chinese EVs is emerging in the EU.
This would make SAIC the first Chinese carmaker to set up production in the EU without taking over an entire European brand. Geely did acquire Volvo in 2010 and thus operates factories in Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands. But what SAIC is now planning is closer to the first steps of Japanese supplier Toyota into the EU, which has been manufacturing locally since 1992 and currently operates eight European plants.
SAIC is already sounding out the region. Chen Hong, Chairman of SAIC, and Wang Xiaoqiu, President of the company, reportedly made initial exploratory trips to Europe.
Manufacturing in the EU would benefit SAIC in a number of ways.
Overall, China has a better position as a global economic citizen if it not only produces domestically and floods foreign markets, but is willing to be involved on the ground. It has now acquired the necessary capital strength and experience to climb to this new level of global involvement.
Investments in production facilities in other countries would also be perceived as fair because European, American, Japanese and Taiwanese industries have built up many structures in China over the decades. The plants of international manufacturers have helped entire cities and regions grow.
SAIC’s plan also reveals a long-term focus on the European market. “The plan shows that Chinese automakers are coming to stay,” says Stefan Bratzel of the Center of Automotive Management (CAM). They have learned that success on the international stage is not achieved in the short term, but requires perseverance. “From a Chinese perspective, I think this is an important step in the right direction,” says Bratzel.
In 2020, SAIC did not even appear as a manufacturer in Germany’s Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA) registration statistics. In 2021, the company sold 3,239 vehicles in Germany; in 2022, the company had already sold 15,684 – an increase of 480 percent. All of them are electric cars.
SAICS’ main bridgehead in Europe is the British MG brand, which the Shanghai-based company acquired in 2007. Its cars have been built entirely in China since 2016 and are exported ready for sale. In May, SAIC sold 21,000 MG brand cars in Europe, representing a 170 percent year-on-year increase.
According to the BBC, the new European plant will not primarily produce MG-branded cars. It has not yet been decided which brands will roll off the production line. Other SAIC brands include Roewe, Maxus, Rising and Yue Jin.
It is also still open whether SAIC will build a new factory on a greenfield site or buy and adapt an existing plant. The Ford plant in the German town of Saarlouis is a prime candidate. Shortly after the Sino-German government consultations in Berlin in June, it was announced that a buyer for the plant had been found.
Ford will cease production at the plant in 2025. All parties involved are interested in retaining as many of the 5,700 employees at the Ford plant and neighboring suppliers as possible. This would make an acquisition by SAIC a perfect fit.
SAIC has long been a household name in the German automotive community. It is an important partner of Volkswagen in China. The collaboration started in 1984 with the joint production of the Santana, which is legendary in China. An unusually successful joint venture has existed since 1988.
Like everywhere else in China’s automotive industry, SAIC is consistently pursuing the switch to e-mobility. The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) ranking places SAIC, along with many other Chinese manufacturers and German companies, in the mid-range of companies rapidly advancing the transition. Tesla and BYD are at the top.
Zhao has lived in Beijing since the turn of the millennium, where he once sought a better future. In reality, however, he mostly found dashed hopes: Despite being 49 years old now, Zhao could never marry due to his meager financial savings. And all he can afford from his salary as a security guard in a residential neighborhood is a ten-square-meter basement shack filled with mold in the summer and freezing cold in the winter – because it has no heating.
Zhao belongs to China’s lost generation, which researcher Qiu Fengxian from Anhui Normal University analyzed in a comprehensive study. With 2,500 questionnaires and 200 in-depth interviews, she wanted to find out how the first generation of migrant workers fared today: Chinese who moved from the provinces to the large metropolises in the wake of the market liberalization to work in plants and on construction sites. They have worked for more than three decades, but only very few will retire.
Qiu’s findings are shocking because they reveal a two-tier society: While the average pension in cities is equivalent to 400 euros, most migrant workers surveyed receive less than a tenth. And more than half of them have savings of less than 6,000 euros. Unsurprisingly, more than 76 percent stated that they would continue to work even into old age – even if their bodies would no longer keep up. Almost all respondents avoid doctor’s appointments as long as possible.
When a Chinese online medium took up the issue, it received an enormous response. “I worked in the city for over 30 years, but in the end, I’m not one bit better off than the people who stayed in the village,” read the headline of the text, which was shared millions of times on social media. China’s censors immediately sprang into action but could hardly keep up with deleting posts.
Because this topic does not fit at all into the picture that President Xi Jinping paints of his China. Back in 2021, he proclaimed a “complete victory” in the fight against poverty. However, the fact that around six hundred million Chinese still have to live off the equivalent of 130 euros a month or less was only briefly mentioned by his then Premier Li Keqiang.
Most Chinese in the big cities are unaware of the fate of the first-generation migrant workers. They are everywhere in the cities, but they remain invisible in the daily lives of most: It is always migrant workers from the provinces who deliver food to the offices in Shanghai and Beijing, build the subway lines and high-rises, and clean apartments for a pittance.
Even though they contributed significantly to the prosperity of the People’s Republic, they have benefited disproportionately little from economic advancement. And because of the state’s household registration system, migrant workers in the East Coast metropolises can never become full citizens either: They do not receive the same health coverage, are not eligible for full social benefits, and their children are not allowed to graduate from schools in the cities.
And once cheap workers are no longer needed, they are driven away like pigeons. Five years ago, Beijing’s then-mayor Cai Qi launched what was probably the most systematic “purge” of the city, vowing, in his words, to crack down on the “lower end of the population”. He had all migrant worker settlements in the city center destroyed and displaced its residents beyond the fifth ring road.
However, this shameful campaign did in no way damage the 67-year-old’s political career. On the contrary, last year, President Xi Jinping promoted Cai Qi to the Standing Committee of the Politburo. Fabian Kretschmer
In its heyday between 1900 and the end of World War II, Peking opera was China’s most popular form of entertainment and the most widely performed musical form.
Back then, many people in the street could sing one line or two from his favorite piece. Big-name Peking opera actors and actresses back then enjoyed similar status as today’s film and pop stars. They earned big money. Enthusiastic fans avidly read gossip about them and would also cry when seeing them. The top Peking opera actor, Mei Lanfang, became a cultural icon and inspired foreign artists like Bertolt Brecht and Konstantin Stanislavski.
Today, it is still seen as one of the most important symbols of traditional Chinese culture. However, for most foreign audiences and even some Chinese, it is something very inaccessible. It’s so different from western opera. The singing and music are strident and the acting bizarre.
But let’s ignore the strangeness for a moment and turn to a story first. After the first emperor of a united China, Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇, 259-210 BC), died, his 18th son, Qin Er Shi (秦二世, literally meaning Emperor Qin II), came to the throne with the help of Zhao Gao (赵高, 258-207 BC) and others, who faked the first emperor’s will and killed the originally appointed successor. Zhao became the new emperor’s prime minister. So much for the historical background.
Now comes the legend. On a visit to Zhao’s, the new emperor meets Zhao’s daughter, Yanrong, whose exiled husband is from a family Zhao considers a political rival. The emperor is struck by her beauty and asks her father Zhao in private to present her to him to be his concubine. The father agrees promptly. But the daughter vehemently refused.
One of Yanrong’s maids is mute but clever. When the father presses the daughter, the maid suggests that Yanrong pretends to go insane. She does so in front of her father, and later in front of the emperor, lambasting the latter for being a corrupt ruler. The emperor, convinced that she truly is insane, dismisses her. She survives.
This is the synopsis of the middle part of the Peking opera Yu Zhou Feng (宇宙锋, the name of a sword that plays a role in the first part and roughly means “cosmic blade”). The opera is a popular piece among Beijing opera connoisseurs and one of the most daunting and tempting parts for actors/actresses playing young female roles.
A storyline like Yu Zhou Feng won’t be unfamiliar to fans of classical Western operas. In particular, it bears an interesting resemblance to the works of Gaetano Donizetti, whose most famous works deal with women in delirium, and love, betrayal, intrigue in the monarchy, or both.
But acting in Yu Zhou Feng is more challenging for the leading female role than Lucia di Lammermoor or Anna Bolena.
In Donizetti’s operas, the women are genuinely mad. But Yanrong, the prime minister’s daughter, is pretending. On stage, she needs to switch very quickly between miming with the maid for her advice, and frenzied talking (She even says to her father something like “My dear darling, let’s go to bed together”) and exaggerated gestures targeting her father or the emperor, and the occasional sad soliloquies.
All these are performed through stylized speech and movements, half-dancing steps, and, most importantly, singing.
But it is precisely the singing and the accompanying music that have turned many first-time listeners away. The singing, particularly by young female roles and the high-pitched fiddle, both sound abrasive screeching, and the percussion a deafening cacophony. The speech of actors and actresses and ritual-like gestures are also hard to understand.
It’s always difficult to explain musical taste of a people as well as of a specific person. It’s probably comparable to gustatory preference. Few Chinese would appreciate cheese at the first bite, and the Pi Dan (皮蛋), also known as Song Hua Dan (松花蛋) and one-thousand-year egg, would taste to a non-Chinese like a “monkey’s ass,” in the words of a friend of mine from the United States.
In vocal music, yodeling from the Alps, Tuvan throat singing from Mongolia and the whining Utai in Japanese Noh plays could all be unpleasant to a foreign ear. One needs lots of exposure and some luck to get to appreciate them.
But once you cross that threshold for Peking opera, a door to a great art form is opened. The singing is beautifully expressive; the small accompanying ensemble creates the rightly dramatic atmosphere, the speech and the gestures also start to make sense in the Peking opera’s art language system. Adding to the joy is dazzling acrobatics and martial art techniques, which are used in battle or combat scenes.
In Beijing slang, Old Beijingers used to call Peking opera a Wan Yi’r (玩意儿), which means craftwork. Like other craftsmanship in other trades, such as jade carving, it takes years to train a Peking opera actor, and decades to make a master.
Just as Western operas are not all Donizetti, Peking opera is not exclusively about crazy women and the king. The repertoire is enormous. There are cheerful equivalents to Rossini, tragedies in the style of Verdi, sentimentality as in Puccini, and many others that have no counterparts in Western operas.
No longer science fiction: Tech companies present their newest products at the Artificial Intelligence Expo in Shanghai, including robots that not only serve coffee and mapo tofu, but also perform dance routines. Their performance may still seem a bit awkward, but that is no different from an inexperienced human dancer.
