All those years at the conference table with China have paid off for Maria Martin-Prat: The EU negotiator for the investment agreement between the community of states and Beijing (CAI) has been promoted to deputy director-general within the EU Directorate for Trade. Meanwhile, no progress is being made for the CAI in the European Parliament: The responsible monitoring group of the Committee on International Trade has suspended its meetings since the imposition of Chinese sanctions against several EU parliamentarians. The agreement will not be touched again until Beijing withdraws the punitive measures against MEPs, according to trade committee circles. With the sanctions, there is no majority for the CAI in the EU Parliament. If necessary, work on the agreement will be suspended until the French EU Council presidency begins – which is in January 2022.
It is precisely this agreement and the EU Council presidency that could now become decisive for the political future of French leader Emmanuel Macron – because the debates about and the vote on the agreement are complicating Macron’s domestic election campaign. France’s election is in the spring of 2022 – and criticism of the deal is hailing from both the left and the right. Therefore, China.Table takes a look at relations between Paris and Beijing today.
China is the self-proclaimed largest market for green bonds – but the environmentally-friendly appearance is deceptive when one takes a closer look at the supposedly green loans. Nico Beckert analyses what Beijing means by green bonds and presents the reforms it is aiming for in this area.
This week the “Auto China” starts in Shanghai. Frank Sieren is on-site for China.Table and already takes a look at the trends of the auto show, the market opportunities, and challenges. He comes to the conclusion that this year will be one of the most decisive for the German automotive industry in China.
Felix Lee also introduces you to one of the most exciting women in world politics today: Taiwan’s Digital Minister Audrey Tang.
Have a great start to the week!
China is one of the largest green finance markets in the world by its own standards. In 2019, before the numbers were skewed by COVID-19, companies and financial institutions took in the equivalent of $46.6 billion in green bonds. Then, in the first quarter of 2021, it was a record $13.2 billion that Chinese banks, developers, power generators, and rail operators, for example, collected from financial markets with green bonds. They thus overtook the competition from the USA. The figures are even higher for green loans issued by Chinese banks. The total amount of green money outstanding from Chinese banks in the summer of 2020 was the equivalent of more than €1.4 trillion. However, as great as these numbers sound, a closer look reveals some shortcomings.
This is because China’s yardsticks of green investments and assets are very different from those of Europe. Green bonds are used in China to finance “clean coal power” and the “clean extraction” of oil. Nuclear power and gas-fired power plants may also be financed with green bonds. In addition, 50 percent of the proceeds from green bonds do not have to go to green projects at all, but may be used to repay bank loans or as working capital. These lax requirements do not meet international standards. For example, if one applies the standards of the Climate Bonds Initiative, only bonds worth €26.3 billion were considered truly green bonds in China in 2019. It is true that in the summer of 2020 it was announced that Beijing’s authorities intend to revise and tighten the standards for green bonds. But so far, this has not happened. After all, according to the chairman of China’s central bank Yi Gang, the revision of green bond standards will be “completed soon“. Investments in fossil fuels will then be excluded.
Nor should we be blinded by the supposed size of the figures. Achieving the climate targets is a mammoth task that requires massive financial resources. According to a study by Tsinghua University, China will have to invest the equivalent of €17.5 trillion in its energy supply alone by 2060 to achieve the self-imposed goal of becoming CO2 neutral before 2060. In the energy-intensive production sector and also the infrastructure, further costs amounting to trillions will be incurred.
What’s more: Relative to conventional bonds and loans, the green finance sector is barely growing. The share of green bank loans in the total credit market grew from 8.8 to only 10.8 percent between 2013 and 2020. And green bonds so far account for only 0.5 percent of China’s bond market, shows Mathias Lund Larsen of the International Institute of Green Finance (IIGF) at the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing. Moreover, too much money is still flowing into the carbon-based economy. Chinese banks are among the world’s biggest bond issuers for the coal industry. They brokered the equivalent of €390 billion in bonds from this industrial sector over the past two years, according to data from Urgewald and 28 other non-governmental organizations.
Beijing’s authorities have recognized the problems in the green finance sector. The Chinese central bank, one of the standard-setting institutions, has set the sector as one of its priorities for 2021. It wants to unify standards and define more strictly what counts as a green investment. Green credit standards will also be adjusted to meet climate change requirements, says green finance expert Ma Yun, who is a member of the Chinese central bank’s monetary policy committee. But as with the EU taxonomy, there is “a lot of haggling in China over what should be considered green,” says Wang Yao, Dean of the International Institute of Green Finance.
The authorities also announced reforms to an important component of green finance regulations, namely the disclosure requirements for companies: Only if companies disclose the climate risks of their operations and investments using clear standards can investors assess whether green bonds and loans are really being used for environmentally sustainable investments. Without corresponding information from companies, banks and other financial actors cannot assess whether and to what extent companies are still invested in fossil sectors and how high the risk is that these investments will have to be written off in the near future because they do not meet the climate targets of the states.
Enhanced disclosure requirements “by companies, borrowers, and investors are therefore an important regulatory requirement to support the growth of China’s green finance sector,” says Linan Liu, an analyst at Deutsche Bank Research. However, there are still many problems with climate risk disclosure in China at the moment. Many companies do not report on how much climate risk their business faces. Listed companies would still think, “nobody told me to disclose, so why should I disclose data?”. Companies haven’t yet realized that environmental information is important to investors,” says Wang Yao. The former chief economist of the Chinese central bank, Ma Jun, therefore also suggests that “disclosure requirements for listed companies should be introduced as soon as possible”.
In Shenzhen, on the other hand, disclosure is already a step further. Since the beginning of March, regulations have been in place that require companies and projects benefiting from green financing to submit environmental information to financial institutions.
In addition to stricter rules for disclosure obligations, the central bank wants to anchor climate change as an important topic within its own field of activity – this also includes so-called stress tests to better assess the climate risks of banks (keyword: stranded assets) and to be able to prevent financial crises. In addition, international cooperation in the area of green finance is to be further expanded.
When Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, and China’s President Xi Jinping spoke to each other at the end of December 2020 to cement the political agreement on the EU-China Investment Agreement (CAI) together with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU Council President Charles Michel, there was discreet amazement among Brussels observers. Why did Macron take part in the video conversation? Likely, the French president was there at Merkel’s invitation to showcase EU unity. But since then, there have also been rumors of a Franco-German-Chinese backroom deal – rumors that continue to be spread, despite all the EU Commission’s assurances that there were no extra deals for individual EU states.
What is clear, however, is that Macron’s ambition is to wrap up the agreement, complete the vote in the European Parliament, and ratify the deal within the French EU Council presidency, which begins in January 2022. In his home country, however, Macron’s commitment to the EU-China prestige project could turn into a shot in his own foot.
Because in Germany’s neighboring country, the election for the post of president is also due in the spring of 2022. If the European Parliament were to vote on the CAI in the spring of next year, during France’s EU presidency, that would not be particularly good for Macron, says academic Antoine Bondaz, who studies China and Asia for the French think tank Fondation pour la recherche stratégique (FRS). Within the European Parliament, there is growing antipathy to the deal, especially since Beijing has imposed sanctions on several EU parliamentarians. “The Xinjiang problem, moreover, will certainly remain,” Bondaz tells China.Table. Without a concrete commitment from China to crack down on forced labor, the debate and a vote on the agreement could become “toxic” for the French president, according to Bondaz. “If the CAI is not voted on in parliament, that’s good for the president.”
While foreign policy issues, such as China policy, will not be the main focus of the campaign in France, Bondaz says. “But it could help some opponents of Macron, especially on the left, to portray him as too liberal and not supportive of human rights.” If it came to a vote in the European Parliament, the French government would have no option but to support the agreement, Bondaz says. Businesses in France are even largely happy with the CAI deal, the China expert says. There is fire mainly from politics, in Paris and Brussels. In France, the agreement is under fire from both the left and the right – and with it Macron.
The French public is increasingly rejecting the CAI. It will not be easy for Macron to sell the investment agreement to voters after the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit France particularly hard economically. The EU has not sufficiently considered that the political realities have changed a lot in the past years in which the CAI was negotiated, says Bondaz: “What could have been a good agreement a few years ago is simply not enough at the end of 2020.”
Macron’s opponents from both sides therefore now find in the CAI a ready-made target for criticism. Marine Le Pen’s right-wing Rassemblement National (RN) – that is again in the presidental election – is questioning the agreement and sees the danger that companies will increasingly move to China: “We must be clear about this: this agreement will encourage investment by European companies in China. Is it a good moment to encourage even greater delocalization at a time when the COVID-19 crisis is hitting the economies of certain European countries hard?” asked French MEP Hervé Juvin, who sits in the European Parliament for RN. In this way, the party is increasingly playing on the fears of economically insecure French citizens.
But the right-wing nationalist politicians are not the only ones who are using the CAI in the still young election campaign. In France, the debate about forced labor in Xinjiang is becoming more and more present. Only last week, several human rights organizations filed a complaint against several national clothing manufacturers in France, accusing them of using cotton from Xinjiang, for example. Left-wing and centrist politicians in France fear that the EU has not used the agreement sufficiently as a lever to improve labor rights and environmental conditions in China. French MEP Raphaël Glucksmann has been a vocal supporter of the Uyghurs and against forced labor at the EU level. MEPs from the liberal Renew Group, to which the presidential party La République en Marche belongs, are also increasingly negative about the agreement.
So far, France has not been particularly successful with its China policy in general, says China expert Bondaz. The main point on the Paris agenda in recent years has been to make the relationship more reciprocal, Bondaz says, “especially in economic terms, but also to get China to engage more on climate change and biodiversity issues.” In both areas successes have been quite limited: Economically, France got a few limited concessions, but it did not address the overall massive trade inequality.
In addition to the mega-deals for Airbus, there was one notable advance: Paris achieved the complete lifting of the embargo on French beef imposed by China in 2001. At the European level, France was also instrumental in the agreement to protect designations of origin. Nearly a third of the 100 food products now listed come from France. According to Comtrade, in 2019, France exported to China goods worth $23.44 billion – of which $6.59 billion were only in the aircraft sector. In the same year, France’s imports from China amounted to $59.56 billion, according to Comtrade. And the trade deficit continues to grow.
Economically, then, French ambitions have yet to come to fruition. And item two on the list? With regard to climate and biodiversity, both states were keen to demonstrate their cooperation. Beijing had agreed to some commitments – but that was not thanks to France’s initiative, Bondaz said. France and China signed the Beijing Call for Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Change in 2019 – which was an important step as only shortly afterwards the IUCN World Conservation Congress in the French coastal city of Marseille and the UN Biodiversity Conference in Kunming had to be postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, cooperation between Paris and Beijing is currently on shaky ground – within just one year, the French Foreign Ministry summoned China’s ambassador Lu Shaye twice. The embassy of the People’s Republic and its diplomatic representatives are currently running particularly active campaigns against critics on their social media channels – China expert Bondaz has been personally attacked and insulted several times. In a letter to French senators last week, Lu Shaye threatened, according to a media report, that a planned Taiwan trip by a Senate delegation could result in sanctions. The People’s Republic wants to ensure that there is no public debate on Xinjiang or Taiwan, Bondaz said – but in his view, the plan is not working: French civil society, including young people in particular, are increasingly interested in the issues.
Audrey Tang has many designations. Officially, she has been Taiwan’s digital minister since 2016. In the rest of the world, she is best known as the first trans minister. She describes herself as a “civic hacker.”
Civic, she means in the sense of the welfare of the public. And hacker to her means “understanding a system, and then innovating to improve it.” “I don’t want to disrupt existing institutions, I want to think about how they could be better.”
And the 39-year-old also sees herself as an anarchist, officially changing her gender designation in 2005 and subsequently both her Chinese and her chosen English name. For her, this means that she neither gives nor takes orders but designs things in a Daoist way, that is, without trying to force anything.
“I want to change mechanisms so that people come together naturally despite different positions.” As a politician, that is precisely her program. She sees herself as a “mediating minister”. Tang does not allow herself to be tied down to a clear political position. Instead, she sees her task as talking to all sides, listening, and ensuring that people can also listen to each other.
From this interaction, she then develops positions that she subsequently advocates as minister. An important prerequisite for her approach: absolute transparency. She considers this to be the be-all and end-all of a functioning democracy.
She left school at 14 and trained as a software programmer. At 19, she consulted for Apple and the Wikimedia Foundation in Silicon Valley. In 2014, she participated in the Sunflower Movement, which occupied the parliament in Taipei in protest against a services agreement with China. The democratic island republic, which is considered a breakaway island by the authoritarian People’s Republic and is not recognized under international law, is fighting for its independence.
At the same time, Taiwan is closely linked economically with mainland China. Many young Taiwanese see this as a danger. The agreement was eventually withdrawn. With the election victory of the progressive democrats under President Tsai Ing-wen in 2016, Tang was persuaded to take over the office of digital minister as a non-party member.
Taiwan is the country with one of the lowest rates of COVID-19 infection, with no lockdowns at all – despite its proximity to the People’s Republic, the likely country of origin of the dangerous virus. Under Tang’s leadership, the country has been an early adopter of digital tracking of entrants who might bring in the virus from abroad.
Anyone entering the country must be quarantined for 14 days. The SIM card is monitored via a radio cell query – without an app. Once the quarantine is over, the monitoring is lifted all data is deleted immediately. The price: a normal life and a thank you of the equivalent of around €30 per day spent in quarantine. Felix Lee
Audrey Tang will join tazlab live from Taiwan on April 24th to discuss China’s digital rise with political scientist and sinologist Janka Oertel. Further information here.
All those years at the conference table with China have paid off for Maria Martin-Prat: The EU negotiator for the investment agreement between the community of states and Beijing (CAI) has been promoted to deputy director-general within the EU Directorate for Trade. Meanwhile, no progress is being made for the CAI in the European Parliament: The responsible monitoring group of the Committee on International Trade has suspended its meetings since the imposition of Chinese sanctions against several EU parliamentarians. The agreement will not be touched again until Beijing withdraws the punitive measures against MEPs, according to trade committee circles. With the sanctions, there is no majority for the CAI in the EU Parliament. If necessary, work on the agreement will be suspended until the French EU Council presidency begins – which is in January 2022.
It is precisely this agreement and the EU Council presidency that could now become decisive for the political future of French leader Emmanuel Macron – because the debates about and the vote on the agreement are complicating Macron’s domestic election campaign. France’s election is in the spring of 2022 – and criticism of the deal is hailing from both the left and the right. Therefore, China.Table takes a look at relations between Paris and Beijing today.
China is the self-proclaimed largest market for green bonds – but the environmentally-friendly appearance is deceptive when one takes a closer look at the supposedly green loans. Nico Beckert analyses what Beijing means by green bonds and presents the reforms it is aiming for in this area.
This week the “Auto China” starts in Shanghai. Frank Sieren is on-site for China.Table and already takes a look at the trends of the auto show, the market opportunities, and challenges. He comes to the conclusion that this year will be one of the most decisive for the German automotive industry in China.
Felix Lee also introduces you to one of the most exciting women in world politics today: Taiwan’s Digital Minister Audrey Tang.
Have a great start to the week!
China is one of the largest green finance markets in the world by its own standards. In 2019, before the numbers were skewed by COVID-19, companies and financial institutions took in the equivalent of $46.6 billion in green bonds. Then, in the first quarter of 2021, it was a record $13.2 billion that Chinese banks, developers, power generators, and rail operators, for example, collected from financial markets with green bonds. They thus overtook the competition from the USA. The figures are even higher for green loans issued by Chinese banks. The total amount of green money outstanding from Chinese banks in the summer of 2020 was the equivalent of more than €1.4 trillion. However, as great as these numbers sound, a closer look reveals some shortcomings.
This is because China’s yardsticks of green investments and assets are very different from those of Europe. Green bonds are used in China to finance “clean coal power” and the “clean extraction” of oil. Nuclear power and gas-fired power plants may also be financed with green bonds. In addition, 50 percent of the proceeds from green bonds do not have to go to green projects at all, but may be used to repay bank loans or as working capital. These lax requirements do not meet international standards. For example, if one applies the standards of the Climate Bonds Initiative, only bonds worth €26.3 billion were considered truly green bonds in China in 2019. It is true that in the summer of 2020 it was announced that Beijing’s authorities intend to revise and tighten the standards for green bonds. But so far, this has not happened. After all, according to the chairman of China’s central bank Yi Gang, the revision of green bond standards will be “completed soon“. Investments in fossil fuels will then be excluded.
Nor should we be blinded by the supposed size of the figures. Achieving the climate targets is a mammoth task that requires massive financial resources. According to a study by Tsinghua University, China will have to invest the equivalent of €17.5 trillion in its energy supply alone by 2060 to achieve the self-imposed goal of becoming CO2 neutral before 2060. In the energy-intensive production sector and also the infrastructure, further costs amounting to trillions will be incurred.
What’s more: Relative to conventional bonds and loans, the green finance sector is barely growing. The share of green bank loans in the total credit market grew from 8.8 to only 10.8 percent between 2013 and 2020. And green bonds so far account for only 0.5 percent of China’s bond market, shows Mathias Lund Larsen of the International Institute of Green Finance (IIGF) at the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing. Moreover, too much money is still flowing into the carbon-based economy. Chinese banks are among the world’s biggest bond issuers for the coal industry. They brokered the equivalent of €390 billion in bonds from this industrial sector over the past two years, according to data from Urgewald and 28 other non-governmental organizations.
Beijing’s authorities have recognized the problems in the green finance sector. The Chinese central bank, one of the standard-setting institutions, has set the sector as one of its priorities for 2021. It wants to unify standards and define more strictly what counts as a green investment. Green credit standards will also be adjusted to meet climate change requirements, says green finance expert Ma Yun, who is a member of the Chinese central bank’s monetary policy committee. But as with the EU taxonomy, there is “a lot of haggling in China over what should be considered green,” says Wang Yao, Dean of the International Institute of Green Finance.
The authorities also announced reforms to an important component of green finance regulations, namely the disclosure requirements for companies: Only if companies disclose the climate risks of their operations and investments using clear standards can investors assess whether green bonds and loans are really being used for environmentally sustainable investments. Without corresponding information from companies, banks and other financial actors cannot assess whether and to what extent companies are still invested in fossil sectors and how high the risk is that these investments will have to be written off in the near future because they do not meet the climate targets of the states.
Enhanced disclosure requirements “by companies, borrowers, and investors are therefore an important regulatory requirement to support the growth of China’s green finance sector,” says Linan Liu, an analyst at Deutsche Bank Research. However, there are still many problems with climate risk disclosure in China at the moment. Many companies do not report on how much climate risk their business faces. Listed companies would still think, “nobody told me to disclose, so why should I disclose data?”. Companies haven’t yet realized that environmental information is important to investors,” says Wang Yao. The former chief economist of the Chinese central bank, Ma Jun, therefore also suggests that “disclosure requirements for listed companies should be introduced as soon as possible”.
In Shenzhen, on the other hand, disclosure is already a step further. Since the beginning of March, regulations have been in place that require companies and projects benefiting from green financing to submit environmental information to financial institutions.
In addition to stricter rules for disclosure obligations, the central bank wants to anchor climate change as an important topic within its own field of activity – this also includes so-called stress tests to better assess the climate risks of banks (keyword: stranded assets) and to be able to prevent financial crises. In addition, international cooperation in the area of green finance is to be further expanded.
When Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, and China’s President Xi Jinping spoke to each other at the end of December 2020 to cement the political agreement on the EU-China Investment Agreement (CAI) together with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU Council President Charles Michel, there was discreet amazement among Brussels observers. Why did Macron take part in the video conversation? Likely, the French president was there at Merkel’s invitation to showcase EU unity. But since then, there have also been rumors of a Franco-German-Chinese backroom deal – rumors that continue to be spread, despite all the EU Commission’s assurances that there were no extra deals for individual EU states.
What is clear, however, is that Macron’s ambition is to wrap up the agreement, complete the vote in the European Parliament, and ratify the deal within the French EU Council presidency, which begins in January 2022. In his home country, however, Macron’s commitment to the EU-China prestige project could turn into a shot in his own foot.
Because in Germany’s neighboring country, the election for the post of president is also due in the spring of 2022. If the European Parliament were to vote on the CAI in the spring of next year, during France’s EU presidency, that would not be particularly good for Macron, says academic Antoine Bondaz, who studies China and Asia for the French think tank Fondation pour la recherche stratégique (FRS). Within the European Parliament, there is growing antipathy to the deal, especially since Beijing has imposed sanctions on several EU parliamentarians. “The Xinjiang problem, moreover, will certainly remain,” Bondaz tells China.Table. Without a concrete commitment from China to crack down on forced labor, the debate and a vote on the agreement could become “toxic” for the French president, according to Bondaz. “If the CAI is not voted on in parliament, that’s good for the president.”
While foreign policy issues, such as China policy, will not be the main focus of the campaign in France, Bondaz says. “But it could help some opponents of Macron, especially on the left, to portray him as too liberal and not supportive of human rights.” If it came to a vote in the European Parliament, the French government would have no option but to support the agreement, Bondaz says. Businesses in France are even largely happy with the CAI deal, the China expert says. There is fire mainly from politics, in Paris and Brussels. In France, the agreement is under fire from both the left and the right – and with it Macron.
The French public is increasingly rejecting the CAI. It will not be easy for Macron to sell the investment agreement to voters after the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit France particularly hard economically. The EU has not sufficiently considered that the political realities have changed a lot in the past years in which the CAI was negotiated, says Bondaz: “What could have been a good agreement a few years ago is simply not enough at the end of 2020.”
Macron’s opponents from both sides therefore now find in the CAI a ready-made target for criticism. Marine Le Pen’s right-wing Rassemblement National (RN) – that is again in the presidental election – is questioning the agreement and sees the danger that companies will increasingly move to China: “We must be clear about this: this agreement will encourage investment by European companies in China. Is it a good moment to encourage even greater delocalization at a time when the COVID-19 crisis is hitting the economies of certain European countries hard?” asked French MEP Hervé Juvin, who sits in the European Parliament for RN. In this way, the party is increasingly playing on the fears of economically insecure French citizens.
But the right-wing nationalist politicians are not the only ones who are using the CAI in the still young election campaign. In France, the debate about forced labor in Xinjiang is becoming more and more present. Only last week, several human rights organizations filed a complaint against several national clothing manufacturers in France, accusing them of using cotton from Xinjiang, for example. Left-wing and centrist politicians in France fear that the EU has not used the agreement sufficiently as a lever to improve labor rights and environmental conditions in China. French MEP Raphaël Glucksmann has been a vocal supporter of the Uyghurs and against forced labor at the EU level. MEPs from the liberal Renew Group, to which the presidential party La République en Marche belongs, are also increasingly negative about the agreement.
So far, France has not been particularly successful with its China policy in general, says China expert Bondaz. The main point on the Paris agenda in recent years has been to make the relationship more reciprocal, Bondaz says, “especially in economic terms, but also to get China to engage more on climate change and biodiversity issues.” In both areas successes have been quite limited: Economically, France got a few limited concessions, but it did not address the overall massive trade inequality.
In addition to the mega-deals for Airbus, there was one notable advance: Paris achieved the complete lifting of the embargo on French beef imposed by China in 2001. At the European level, France was also instrumental in the agreement to protect designations of origin. Nearly a third of the 100 food products now listed come from France. According to Comtrade, in 2019, France exported to China goods worth $23.44 billion – of which $6.59 billion were only in the aircraft sector. In the same year, France’s imports from China amounted to $59.56 billion, according to Comtrade. And the trade deficit continues to grow.
Economically, then, French ambitions have yet to come to fruition. And item two on the list? With regard to climate and biodiversity, both states were keen to demonstrate their cooperation. Beijing had agreed to some commitments – but that was not thanks to France’s initiative, Bondaz said. France and China signed the Beijing Call for Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Change in 2019 – which was an important step as only shortly afterwards the IUCN World Conservation Congress in the French coastal city of Marseille and the UN Biodiversity Conference in Kunming had to be postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, cooperation between Paris and Beijing is currently on shaky ground – within just one year, the French Foreign Ministry summoned China’s ambassador Lu Shaye twice. The embassy of the People’s Republic and its diplomatic representatives are currently running particularly active campaigns against critics on their social media channels – China expert Bondaz has been personally attacked and insulted several times. In a letter to French senators last week, Lu Shaye threatened, according to a media report, that a planned Taiwan trip by a Senate delegation could result in sanctions. The People’s Republic wants to ensure that there is no public debate on Xinjiang or Taiwan, Bondaz said – but in his view, the plan is not working: French civil society, including young people in particular, are increasingly interested in the issues.
Audrey Tang has many designations. Officially, she has been Taiwan’s digital minister since 2016. In the rest of the world, she is best known as the first trans minister. She describes herself as a “civic hacker.”
Civic, she means in the sense of the welfare of the public. And hacker to her means “understanding a system, and then innovating to improve it.” “I don’t want to disrupt existing institutions, I want to think about how they could be better.”
And the 39-year-old also sees herself as an anarchist, officially changing her gender designation in 2005 and subsequently both her Chinese and her chosen English name. For her, this means that she neither gives nor takes orders but designs things in a Daoist way, that is, without trying to force anything.
“I want to change mechanisms so that people come together naturally despite different positions.” As a politician, that is precisely her program. She sees herself as a “mediating minister”. Tang does not allow herself to be tied down to a clear political position. Instead, she sees her task as talking to all sides, listening, and ensuring that people can also listen to each other.
From this interaction, she then develops positions that she subsequently advocates as minister. An important prerequisite for her approach: absolute transparency. She considers this to be the be-all and end-all of a functioning democracy.
She left school at 14 and trained as a software programmer. At 19, she consulted for Apple and the Wikimedia Foundation in Silicon Valley. In 2014, she participated in the Sunflower Movement, which occupied the parliament in Taipei in protest against a services agreement with China. The democratic island republic, which is considered a breakaway island by the authoritarian People’s Republic and is not recognized under international law, is fighting for its independence.
At the same time, Taiwan is closely linked economically with mainland China. Many young Taiwanese see this as a danger. The agreement was eventually withdrawn. With the election victory of the progressive democrats under President Tsai Ing-wen in 2016, Tang was persuaded to take over the office of digital minister as a non-party member.
Taiwan is the country with one of the lowest rates of COVID-19 infection, with no lockdowns at all – despite its proximity to the People’s Republic, the likely country of origin of the dangerous virus. Under Tang’s leadership, the country has been an early adopter of digital tracking of entrants who might bring in the virus from abroad.
Anyone entering the country must be quarantined for 14 days. The SIM card is monitored via a radio cell query – without an app. Once the quarantine is over, the monitoring is lifted all data is deleted immediately. The price: a normal life and a thank you of the equivalent of around €30 per day spent in quarantine. Felix Lee
Audrey Tang will join tazlab live from Taiwan on April 24th to discuss China’s digital rise with political scientist and sinologist Janka Oertel. Further information here.
