The tone is set for the first US-China meeting since the US presidential transition: When foreign ministers from both world powers see each other in Alaska on Thursday, Beijing will define the Biden administration’s latest sanctions as a continuation of Trump’s policies. Finn Mayer-Kuckuk assesses the implications of the American move for the German debate about Huawei.
Since the signing of the European-Chinese investment agreement CAI at the end of 2020, there has been a lot of speculation about the contents hidden in the previously unknown annexes. After seven weeks, Brussels has finally revealed the secret. Amelie Richter has looked through almost 270 pages.
China.Table has already devoted its own analyses to the relations of the EU member states Italy and the Czech Republic with China in recent weeks. Today Christiane Kühl looks at Sweden’s relationship with China.
Did the Carlsen publishing house bow to Chinese censorship when it took its latest children’s book off the market just days after it was published? The book, “Ein Corona Regenbogen für Anna und Moritz” (“A Corona Rainbow for Anna and Moritz”), says the virus also originated in China, prompting angry protests from people of Asian descent who see it as discrimination. Rightly so, writes researcher Liya Yu in her opinion piece today, warning of a growing divide in society as Asian-born children and their families are unfairly stamped as complicit in a global pandemic.
Our new section at the end of the China.Table, “So To Speak”, is about more than just learning the language. Every Monday, Verena Menzel will translate important terms and phrases and give us insight into the cultural background.
US President Joe Biden is de facto kicking major Chinese telecoms equipment suppliers off domestic networks. Providers like Huawei are an “unacceptable risk”, the US Telecommunications Authority announced. The decision means network operators will not receive funding from the government’s billion-dollar network expansion fund if they order accessories from China. In parallel, the government is asking mobile and Internet providers to remove equipment from Chinese suppliers and replace it with domestic products. For smaller providers with less than ten million customers, there is compensation. This scrapping premium for mobile phone antennas and routers is called “rip and replace“; it is financed by the big economic stimulus package with which Biden wants to revive the economy after COVID-19. The government could hardly express its distrust of Huawei more clearly.
The list of allegedly risky vendors includes Huawei, ZTE, Hytera Communications, Hangzhou Hikvision, and Dahua, in an explicit move by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to implement the will of the new administration. “This list is a big step toward restoring trust in our communications networks,” said FFC Acting
Chairwoman Rosenworcel. Biden had elevated the lawyer to her post in late January. It was a “mistake” to install Chinese equipment in the first place, Roenworcel said.
Before the US election, Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei had expressed hope that Joe Biden would be more open to Chinese business than his predecessor. However, the Biden administration is now applying a Trump-era anti-China law without mitigation. Trump had ordered the FCC to ferret out security risks two years ago. Joe Biden could now have formulated a milder policy – but he didn’t. Now, in the third month of his presidency, another hard blow came against Huawei.
At the same time, further actions by the US government against Chinese tech providers are underway. Joe Biden continues to deny Huawei access to use US technology through licenses. This is a huge roadblock for Chinese industry. Many small elements of modern technology are patented on other continents – transmission formats, chip designs, parts of computer programs, encryption, and decryption algorithms. In peaceful times, this is not a problem. Anyone with a need simply buys licenses to use them. In the future, however, Huawei and its suppliers would have to circumvent all US patents with original in-house developments. As things stand, that is practically impossible.
App providers Tencent and ByteDance are also currently in trouble in the US. In their last days, the Trump administration had been on a frontal assault against their flagship products, TikTok and Wechat. As part of a review of all Trump sanctions, the court cases that were already underway have admittedly been put on hold. However, unlike the network equipment, TikTok and WeChat are pure software, providing a platform for expression. Therefore, in contrast to the Huawei ban, legal experts give a TikTok ban worse chances in court.
The administration’s hard-line against Huawei could well influence the discussion in Europe. After all, this time, it is not an erratic outsider like Trump who is behind the policy, but the respected and experienced Joe Biden. Neither Germany nor its EU neighbors have yet come to a clear assessment. In December, German Economics Minister Peter Altmaier formulated a compromise that has so far held: Huawei may stay, but it will be better monitored. But there are already the first signs of the unraveling of this agreement.
Experts from the Danish technology consultancy Strand Consult consider a gradual replacement of Huawei devices with Western equipment in Europe to be entirely feasible. The costs for this in the EU would be in the single-digit billions. Since communication devices quickly become obsolete anyway, the changeover could be carried out together with the next generation change, according to Strand Consult.
A completely different question is whether a complete abandonment of Huawei is necessary and desirable. So far, security experts have not proven any bad intentions on the part of the company in terms of large-scale espionage or sabotage. China could also strike back – and it is, after all, the largest market for numerous German product groups. The government’s declaration of censure against Huawei is, above all, an act of trade war and industrial policy. As a pure security policy decision, a ban on Chinese network equipment would, in any case, have little credibility. Biden is clearly willing to continue being tough on China – and is leaving Donald Trump’s decisions in place for now.
The EU Commission waited a good seven weeks before publishing the details of the investment agreement with China (CAI). The annexes now published with the details of market access show that the European Union is making progress in manifesting the oft-mentioned “level playing field”, for example, in the manufacturing sector and private healthcare – but that major negotiating successes beyond this have not been achieved. In some areas, the agreement falls short of expectations.
EU Vice-President and Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis said that the CAI will rebalance EU-China investment relations “in Europe’s favor”. The CAI will help level the playing field and create more market opening for EU companies and investors. Dombrovskis praised the CAI’s “clear and enforceable regulatory framework”. This would offer EU companies better access and more certainty when investing in China.
The People’s Republic is making “significant commitments in the manufacturing sector“, the EU Commission stressed when publishing the annexes. Accordingly, this manufacturing industry accounts for more than half of the total EU investment in China. This includes 28 percent for the automotive sector and 22 percent for the basic materials sector, according to the Commission. “China currently has no commitments to the EU in this area,” the Brussels-based authority stressed.
The annexes to the CAI that have now been published contain the details of market access on the European and Chinese sides. There are no changes to the political agreements on the agreement – for example, the much-criticized sustainability chapter, which deals, among other things, with the implementation of core standards of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and forced labor.
The so-called commitment schedules of the annexes are complex – for the Chinese side, they comprise 93 pages, for the European 175 pages. Both negotiating sides had agreed to adopt a “hybrid approach” – the annexes list so-called negative and positive lists. The negative list approach means that the relevant commitments are made for all sectors except those that are explicitly excluded. For the sectors in a positive list, both sides commit not to impose quantitative restrictions in the specified areas.
And the restrictions take up no small amount of space in the CAI Annex text: For example, most automotive companies will be exempt from the joint venture constraint from 2022, and China is also committed to market access for alternatively powered vehicles – but there are limits. New car factories with internal combustion engines are banned, and expansion is severely restricted. Electric car plants are limited to provinces where electric car production quotas have already been exceeded. Exceptions will be made for investments of more than $1 billion. In other words, there will be no foreign start-ups, Chinese or already established companies will be given a clear advantage in the sector.
In other areas, foreign investment remains severely restricted. These include, for example, rare earth exploration, geological mapping – and also the nuclear energy sector. “Chinese control is required for foreign investors to invest in the construction or operation of nuclear power plants,” the relevant annex states. Foreign investors are also “not allowed to invest in exploration, mining, purification, conversion, isotope separation”.
After the publication of the annexes, there was increased criticism of the details on the media sector – which is often underestimated or given little attention. For China, however, the sector is particularly important when it comes to so-called “soft power”. Through television or radio programs, but also films and news journalism, Beijing is trying to increasingly shape China’s image in a positive way in the EU. With the CAI, the Chinese side has now cemented the fact that Beijing has access to European media companies through investments – but the other way around, there are tough restrictions for foreign media in the People’s Republic.
On Friday, the EU Commission stressed that there are no new rights for Chinese investors in the media sector. However, the EU states and their media regulators can still take action against Chinese broadcasters, for example, due to security concerns, as was recently the case with CGTN. With regard to the individual EU states, there are stipulated differences in the CAI regarding the treatment of Chinese investors in the media sector.
The CAI also imposes restrictions in the area of private healthcare: For example, EU companies can only invest in medical facilities in the form of a joint venture. This is limited to eight cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Suzhou, as well as Hainan Island. “The majority of the joint venture’s doctors and medical staff, as well as foreign-owned hospitals and clinics, must be Chinese nationals,” the agreement states.
Foreign investment in non-governmental and charitable organizations is prohibited without Chinese permission. NGOs founded abroad are not allowed to have a permanent branch in China – critics see this as a manifestation of the People’s Republic’s intention to further prevent foreign interference in “internal affairs”.
What happens now? The text of the agreement must now be legally checked and translated into all EU languages. It will then be submitted to the EU Council and the European Parliament for debate and adoption. Ratification is expected in early 2022.
The CAI will still face strong headwinds, especially in the EU Parliament: Reading the annexes to the agreement only “thickens the fog” further, French MEP Marie-Pierre Vedrenne wrote on Twitter. This shows the need for “autonomous measures” and a “legal arsenal”, Vedrenne said. According to media reports, the European Parliament’s monitoring committee will take a closer look at the annexes for the first time next week.
Genocide in Xinjiang – yes or no? This question is increasingly becoming the focus of international discourse and could sooner or later also occupy the German Bundestag. According to reports, the topic is increasingly rumbling in the parliamentary groups after the parliaments in Canada and the Netherlands condemned the Chinese government’s actions against Muslim Uyghurs in the northwest of the People’s Republic as genocide a few weeks ago.
“The reports make it unmistakably clear that dramatic things are going on there. We now have to evaluate how we deal with it conceptually,” says the human rights spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group, Frank Schwabe, in an interview with China.Table. “Other parliaments have created facts. Therefore, we will automatically also have to deal with it promptly.” Regarding the plethora of reports on torture and rape in re-education camps, where around one million Uyghurs are held against their will, Schwabe speaks of “unknown dimensions that were unimaginable to me a few years ago”. Nevertheless: “The debate has only just begun, and we must carefully discuss which terms we use for such unique crimes. The term genocide, at any rate, lacks further capacity for its meaning to be expanded upon.”
Meanwhile, the new US administration is also using the term in official statements. White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the “genocide against the Uyghurs” will be a “direct topic of conversation” with the Chinese when Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets his counterpart Wang Yi for the first time in Alaska this Thursday. The genocide designation is more than a rhetorical quibble. It is considered a criminal offense in international law under the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which must be punished.
The chairwoman of the Human Rights Committee in the German Bundestag, Gyde Jensen (FDP), had recently said that she could understand, based on the facts, why governments would conclude that it was genocide. Michel Brandt (die Linke) is more reserved, speaking instead of an “ethnocide”. This refers to the eradication of the cultural identity of a population group. Internment, mass surveillance, repression, and reports of forced sterilizations are cause for great concern. “To get a full picture of what is going on in Xinjiang our group supports the sending of a UN mission to the region. We consider it the Chinese government’s duty to cooperate and continuously admonish this”, said Brandt to China.Table. The central goal is to improve the human rights situation in Xinjiang. Representatives of the CDU and AfD did not respond to questions on the issue.
The strongest instrument at the Bundestag’s disposal is a resolution that would recognize and condemn genocide in Xinjiang. A draft to this effect could be introduced by both the governing coalition and the opposition. Regardless of the likelihood of success of such a draft, however, the imminent end of the legislative period could prove to be a brake on such an initiative. With the federal election on the horizon and only a few weeks of sessions remaining until Parliament’s summer recess, time is running out. This could trigger fears that a resolution will be decided hastily. Such a delay would certainly suit the Chinese because it would speed up the debate in their favor.
The last time the Parliament explicitly described the crimes of the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians and other Christian minorities with up to 1.5 million victims as genocide was almost five years ago when it drafted a corresponding resolution. Turkey’s reactions at the time were angry protests. That the People’s Republic of China would simply accept a resolution on Xinjiang is probably out of the question. Even on much lesser occasions, Chinese diplomats issue threats against German MPs or complain to Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble. This was the case, for example, when the Bundestag debated the human rights situation in the region in a consultation in 2018. The People’s Republic also regularly threatens other states with economic consequences if Beijing’s repressive policies towards third parties are critically assessed there. It always refers to internal affairs, from which other countries should keep out of the way.
Meanwhile, the discussion about the assessment of the events has been given a new basis by a study of the Newlines Institute. The independent think tank in the US capital Washington, which deals with geopolitical developments, has come to the conclusion, with the participation of 33 international researchers, that the term genocide is appropriate. The English-language paper, titled “The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention”, brings together 55 pages of evidence and circumstantial evidence that the authors believe justifies the definition. The study bundles all the information gathered over the years by scholars, media, and eyewitnesses into a stringent thread of argument and assesses its significance along the lines of the 1948 UN Convention.
In their investigations, the researchers limited themselves to violations of Article II, which lists five acts committed with the intent “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such”. The scholars regard all five acts as proven. They base their assessment on extensively available “primary and secondary sources, including witness testimonies, internal Chinese government statements, documents, statistics, white papers and reports, and various expert analyses and scholarly works.” China’s government, however, dismisses any criticism of its actions, defending its policies as a “war against extremism, terrorism, or separatism”.
The rhetoric of Chinese officials is indeed bellicose, as the study reveals. On several occasions, officials have made statements such as “wiping out tumors”, “wiping them out completely”, “destroying their roots and branches”, “rounding everyone up” or “showing absolutely no mercy”. The means China uses are surveillance, criminalization, destruction of Uyghur culture, internment and forced labor, “systematic forced abortions and sterilization of Uyghur women of childbearing age”, and the “forcible separation of Uyghur children from their parents”.
Sanctions against Chinese officials for human rights abuses in Xinjiang are reportedly under consideration within the European Union. Four individuals and one entity are to be placed on a list for punitive measures, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing EU diplomats. According to the report, the sanctions will be decided at the meeting of EU foreign ministers at the end of March. The European External Action Service did not confirm the reports at first.
Things haven’t been running smoothly between Sweden and China for a long time. The saga of a small Swedish-Chinese publisher imprisoned in China poisoned relations. The Chinese ambassador in Stockholm was a constant critic of Sweden’s media. And then, in October 2020, Sweden barred Chinese telecom equipment suppliers Huawei and ZTE from building 5G networks. “The Swedish Security Service believes that the Chinese state and security services can influence and pressure Huawei,” the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority announced in unusually strong terms, repeating the words for ZTE. A Beijing foreign office spokesman immediately threatened to harm Swedish companies in China.
Bilateral relations have thus hit bottom. And this is despite the fact that Sweden’s policy does not really differ from that of most EU states. According to a “Policy Intentions Mapping” by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) from September 2020, Sweden, like most EU states, is in favor of finding a “common EU position on China that – pragmatically – considers China as a partner or a rival, depending on the issue”. Also, according to ECFR, Stockholm is in favor of limiting Chinese investments only in strategic sectors – precisely areas such as 5G. Only Finland, Denmark, and Hungary are against any restrictions.
The very special problems between China and Sweden began in 2015, when Swedish-Chinese publisher Gui Minhai disappeared from Thailand – and shortly afterward appeared on Chinese state television. Sweden’s observers assumed it was a coerced confession – because Gui, along with three other men, ran a small publishing house in Hong Kong that sold books full of snappy stories about the private lives of China’s political leaders. The other three, as well as the bookseller who sold their books in Hong Kong, also disappeared in mainland China at the same time. In February 2020, Gui was sentenced to ten years in prison for allegedly passing state secrets abroad. Sweden sought Gui’s release and departure for years to no avail; the case repeatedly triggered diplomatic skirmishes.
Then in September 2018, a dispute between three Chinese tourists and a hostel in Stockholm caused an absurd diplomatic row. According to the hostel, the group had arrived around midnight many hours before their booking was due to start. The hostel initially made them wait in the lobby, but then asked them to leave as they were ranting loudly – and eventually called the police. Videos showed police officers carrying the family into the street, with the son yelling in English, “This is killing!” China’s ambassador to Sweden, Gui Congyou, demanded an apology from the police officers and TV station SVT over a satirical broadcast about the incident. A foreign office spokesman in Beijing also called the broadcast a “gross insult and a vicious attack on China and the Chinese people”.
Nerves were apparently on edge: Ambassador Gui repeatedly complained about Swedish coverage of China and threatened Sweden’s culture minister with an entry ban at the end of 2019 over an award ceremony for publisher Gui. “We will never back down from such a threat. Never,” Prime Minister Stefan Löfven said. “We have freedom of speech here. Period.” Sweden’s foreign ministry summoned the ambassador dozens of times over his outbursts – but rejected opposition calls for the diplomat to be expelled.
All this has not been without consequences. In a survey by the Pew Research Center, around 70 percent of Swedes had a negative opinion of China at the end of 2019. Globally, only Japan had more, at 85 percent. As recently as 2018, Swedes had a more positive view of China than people in Germany, Italy, or France.
“At least since 2018, Sweden’s bilateral relations with China appear to be at an all-time low,” Jerker Hellström, director of the Swedish Center for China Studies, wrote in a mid-2020 review of relations in recent years. Still, “the impact on trade relations between Sweden and China seems to have been limited”. Economically, things went well nonetheless: Sweden’s exports to China increased during that period, erasing the earlier trade deficit. Conversely, since Volvo’s takeover by Chinese carmaker Geely in 2010, more and more Chinese investment poured into Sweden, which was initially welcomed with open arms – partly because of the success of the Volvo takeover. In 2018, Geely added a minority stake in truckmaker AB Volvo – the largest Chinese investment in the country to date at $3.3 billion. In 2019, China’s internet giant Tencent acquired music platform Spotify for $2.3 billion.
In 2018, however, a debate about political naivety towards China flared up in the face of these acquisitions, as Hellström recalls. Among the biggest warnings was Lars Fredén, Sweden’s ambassador to Beijing from 2010 to 2016. Hellström quotes a paper Fredén gave at a 2019 workshop: “Sweden is a unique combination in the West of high technology – which often has direct military applications – and boundless naivety.” Since then Sweden has improved its expertise on China and is seriously engaged in an institutionalized China strategy – bilaterally and also within the EU framework.
Huawei’s exclusion could also be a consequence of the naivety debate. Huawei sued several times against its exclusion from 5G deployment – but lost in court. The auction of 5G licenses went ahead in January 2021 without Huawei and ZTE. But now, there is criticism from the business community. Börje Ekholm, head of Huawei’s Swedish rival Ericsson criticized Huawei‘s exclusion and expressed concern about its own 5G business in China; whether rightly or not is uncertain so far.
A German children’s book from the Carlsen publishing house tried to explain the coronavirus. In it, there was a sentence that at first glance seemed harmless: Children are told that the virus that has turned our lives upside down, leading to drastic restrictions on everyday life, unemployment, and financial hardship for parents, and the loss of friends and family members, comes from China.
German-Chinese parents instantly feel a bitter sting when they read this sentence because they can see their children in daycare groups and elementary school classes (the book series is recommended for reading aloud from age three) hearing these words read aloud to their classmates. They know that their children will feel shame and confusion that the country from which one or both of their parents come from has caused so much terrible and evil, global catastrophe, disease and death.
Children’s brains are highly sensitive at an early age to social exclusion and the dangers of standing out because of otherness. In evolutionary terms, it makes sense: Those who stand out, especially negatively, become the social group’s target because full membership and positive recognition are denied. Often, then, the counter-reaction is to distance oneself from one’s Chinese or Asian identity. “I’m not Chinese!” or shouting “I hate China!” is then often a sad migrant survival strategy to avoid scorn and teasing from other classmates. I know this because I was one of these German-Chinese children myself.
But, the objection goes, the virus does come from China. Why should a true sentence be subject to censorship? I argue that avoiding the sentence in this particular context of children’s reading does not constitute censorship but prevents young children from being cognitively shaped negatively towards a cultural and ethnic group from an early age. A sentence like this is enough to do that, especially when it is presented completely out of context. Research shows that this kind of imprinting starts very early.
Children’s brains, especially those at a young age, seek simple causalities and do not understand geopolitical relationships. Preschool and elementary school children do not know who governs China or what role the Chinese government played in fighting the pandemic. Instead, children’s world horizons are much more concrete and smaller: They know that the classmate who “kind of looks different” is from China. Now, in this book, they are told without further explanation that this stupid virus is coming from China, which is why they are not allowed to meet their friends, why their parents worry and discuss late at night, and why grandma had to go to the hospital.
So their brains connect all these negative, drastic experiences of the past months with concrete people around them who can embody the abstraction “China” for them. Children of this age are not aware that Chinese classmates from daycare or school have nothing to do with the “China” that the sentence in the book refers to. Publishers like Carlsen have to understand that children’s brains cannot process information in the same differentiated way as adults or even teenagers. Therefore, it is not the fault of the children who draw the wrong conclusions from the sentence, but the responsibility of the adults not to contribute to negative cognitive imprints.
The result of this imprinting is the rise of exclusion and teasing of Chinese and Asian classmates, as well as potential dehumanization. At the brain level, studies using fMRI brain scanning methods show that the association of a specific group with a disgusting phenomenon such as a deadly virus leads to empathy rejection and dehumanization of that group. This has consequences not only in terms of exclusion but also in terms of not cognitively understanding (i.e., no longer being able to “mentalize”) that group.
This, I argue, can also have undesirable consequences for later political awareness: If children are shaped from an early age so that they cannot mentalize China, they will not be interested in learning about China and understanding China. Even from the point of view of the biggest China critic, this is not desirable because a lack of mentalization understanding of China ultimately harms Germany. So instead of educating people about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its role in the pandemic, as the defenders of the phrase in the children’s book hope, this shot may backfire.
Above all, it backfires because Chinese-German parents feel dehumanized by Germany as a result of experiences like this. This is described in research as “metadehumanization”, that is, the feeling of being dehumanised by others in society. The problem with metadehumanization is that it can lead to greater hostility and divisiveness, more so than other experiences of exclusion. This is precisely the goal of the Chinese Communist Party: To divide the Chinese diaspora, to give them the impression that the Western democracies they live in do not care about their humanity and representation, and therefore the Chinese Communist Party is the true and only representative for them.
In my book “Vulnerable Minds: The Neuropolitics of Divided Societies”, which will be published this year, I argue that we need to understand and prevent the exclusionary mechanisms that our brains possess universally and cross-culturally so that our divided democracies have a chance to survive into the 21st century. Therefore, it should also be Germany’s goal at the political-strategic level to offer the Chinese diaspora an alternative, democratic-inclusive narrative by which they feel represented and humanized. To ignore the German-Chinese parents and their interests in the whole discussion about the children’s book is tantamount to a double dehumanization: as if their concerns for their children did not count; as if they had no individual, legitimate interest in standing up for their children.
At the same time, this case raises the difficult question of how we should one day communicate the COVID-19 pandemic historically, politically, and pedagogically to the youngest generation. At the moment, no one has clear answers to these questions. Of course, older children should later learn where the virus came from, how this relates to other historical pandemics, what went wrong in this pandemic, and how such an outbreak can be prevented in the future. We need to think about how this can be done without using Asian minorities as scapegoats.
Dr. Liya Yu is a political scientist and writer. She has conducted research on the political neuroscience of racism and dehumanization at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Columbia University in New York. Her book, Vulnerable Minds, will be published in 2021 by Columbia University Press. She lives in Berlin and Taipei.
The tone is set for the first US-China meeting since the US presidential transition: When foreign ministers from both world powers see each other in Alaska on Thursday, Beijing will define the Biden administration’s latest sanctions as a continuation of Trump’s policies. Finn Mayer-Kuckuk assesses the implications of the American move for the German debate about Huawei.
Since the signing of the European-Chinese investment agreement CAI at the end of 2020, there has been a lot of speculation about the contents hidden in the previously unknown annexes. After seven weeks, Brussels has finally revealed the secret. Amelie Richter has looked through almost 270 pages.
China.Table has already devoted its own analyses to the relations of the EU member states Italy and the Czech Republic with China in recent weeks. Today Christiane Kühl looks at Sweden’s relationship with China.
Did the Carlsen publishing house bow to Chinese censorship when it took its latest children’s book off the market just days after it was published? The book, “Ein Corona Regenbogen für Anna und Moritz” (“A Corona Rainbow for Anna and Moritz”), says the virus also originated in China, prompting angry protests from people of Asian descent who see it as discrimination. Rightly so, writes researcher Liya Yu in her opinion piece today, warning of a growing divide in society as Asian-born children and their families are unfairly stamped as complicit in a global pandemic.
Our new section at the end of the China.Table, “So To Speak”, is about more than just learning the language. Every Monday, Verena Menzel will translate important terms and phrases and give us insight into the cultural background.
US President Joe Biden is de facto kicking major Chinese telecoms equipment suppliers off domestic networks. Providers like Huawei are an “unacceptable risk”, the US Telecommunications Authority announced. The decision means network operators will not receive funding from the government’s billion-dollar network expansion fund if they order accessories from China. In parallel, the government is asking mobile and Internet providers to remove equipment from Chinese suppliers and replace it with domestic products. For smaller providers with less than ten million customers, there is compensation. This scrapping premium for mobile phone antennas and routers is called “rip and replace“; it is financed by the big economic stimulus package with which Biden wants to revive the economy after COVID-19. The government could hardly express its distrust of Huawei more clearly.
The list of allegedly risky vendors includes Huawei, ZTE, Hytera Communications, Hangzhou Hikvision, and Dahua, in an explicit move by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to implement the will of the new administration. “This list is a big step toward restoring trust in our communications networks,” said FFC Acting
Chairwoman Rosenworcel. Biden had elevated the lawyer to her post in late January. It was a “mistake” to install Chinese equipment in the first place, Roenworcel said.
Before the US election, Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei had expressed hope that Joe Biden would be more open to Chinese business than his predecessor. However, the Biden administration is now applying a Trump-era anti-China law without mitigation. Trump had ordered the FCC to ferret out security risks two years ago. Joe Biden could now have formulated a milder policy – but he didn’t. Now, in the third month of his presidency, another hard blow came against Huawei.
At the same time, further actions by the US government against Chinese tech providers are underway. Joe Biden continues to deny Huawei access to use US technology through licenses. This is a huge roadblock for Chinese industry. Many small elements of modern technology are patented on other continents – transmission formats, chip designs, parts of computer programs, encryption, and decryption algorithms. In peaceful times, this is not a problem. Anyone with a need simply buys licenses to use them. In the future, however, Huawei and its suppliers would have to circumvent all US patents with original in-house developments. As things stand, that is practically impossible.
App providers Tencent and ByteDance are also currently in trouble in the US. In their last days, the Trump administration had been on a frontal assault against their flagship products, TikTok and Wechat. As part of a review of all Trump sanctions, the court cases that were already underway have admittedly been put on hold. However, unlike the network equipment, TikTok and WeChat are pure software, providing a platform for expression. Therefore, in contrast to the Huawei ban, legal experts give a TikTok ban worse chances in court.
The administration’s hard-line against Huawei could well influence the discussion in Europe. After all, this time, it is not an erratic outsider like Trump who is behind the policy, but the respected and experienced Joe Biden. Neither Germany nor its EU neighbors have yet come to a clear assessment. In December, German Economics Minister Peter Altmaier formulated a compromise that has so far held: Huawei may stay, but it will be better monitored. But there are already the first signs of the unraveling of this agreement.
Experts from the Danish technology consultancy Strand Consult consider a gradual replacement of Huawei devices with Western equipment in Europe to be entirely feasible. The costs for this in the EU would be in the single-digit billions. Since communication devices quickly become obsolete anyway, the changeover could be carried out together with the next generation change, according to Strand Consult.
A completely different question is whether a complete abandonment of Huawei is necessary and desirable. So far, security experts have not proven any bad intentions on the part of the company in terms of large-scale espionage or sabotage. China could also strike back – and it is, after all, the largest market for numerous German product groups. The government’s declaration of censure against Huawei is, above all, an act of trade war and industrial policy. As a pure security policy decision, a ban on Chinese network equipment would, in any case, have little credibility. Biden is clearly willing to continue being tough on China – and is leaving Donald Trump’s decisions in place for now.
The EU Commission waited a good seven weeks before publishing the details of the investment agreement with China (CAI). The annexes now published with the details of market access show that the European Union is making progress in manifesting the oft-mentioned “level playing field”, for example, in the manufacturing sector and private healthcare – but that major negotiating successes beyond this have not been achieved. In some areas, the agreement falls short of expectations.
EU Vice-President and Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis said that the CAI will rebalance EU-China investment relations “in Europe’s favor”. The CAI will help level the playing field and create more market opening for EU companies and investors. Dombrovskis praised the CAI’s “clear and enforceable regulatory framework”. This would offer EU companies better access and more certainty when investing in China.
The People’s Republic is making “significant commitments in the manufacturing sector“, the EU Commission stressed when publishing the annexes. Accordingly, this manufacturing industry accounts for more than half of the total EU investment in China. This includes 28 percent for the automotive sector and 22 percent for the basic materials sector, according to the Commission. “China currently has no commitments to the EU in this area,” the Brussels-based authority stressed.
The annexes to the CAI that have now been published contain the details of market access on the European and Chinese sides. There are no changes to the political agreements on the agreement – for example, the much-criticized sustainability chapter, which deals, among other things, with the implementation of core standards of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and forced labor.
The so-called commitment schedules of the annexes are complex – for the Chinese side, they comprise 93 pages, for the European 175 pages. Both negotiating sides had agreed to adopt a “hybrid approach” – the annexes list so-called negative and positive lists. The negative list approach means that the relevant commitments are made for all sectors except those that are explicitly excluded. For the sectors in a positive list, both sides commit not to impose quantitative restrictions in the specified areas.
And the restrictions take up no small amount of space in the CAI Annex text: For example, most automotive companies will be exempt from the joint venture constraint from 2022, and China is also committed to market access for alternatively powered vehicles – but there are limits. New car factories with internal combustion engines are banned, and expansion is severely restricted. Electric car plants are limited to provinces where electric car production quotas have already been exceeded. Exceptions will be made for investments of more than $1 billion. In other words, there will be no foreign start-ups, Chinese or already established companies will be given a clear advantage in the sector.
In other areas, foreign investment remains severely restricted. These include, for example, rare earth exploration, geological mapping – and also the nuclear energy sector. “Chinese control is required for foreign investors to invest in the construction or operation of nuclear power plants,” the relevant annex states. Foreign investors are also “not allowed to invest in exploration, mining, purification, conversion, isotope separation”.
After the publication of the annexes, there was increased criticism of the details on the media sector – which is often underestimated or given little attention. For China, however, the sector is particularly important when it comes to so-called “soft power”. Through television or radio programs, but also films and news journalism, Beijing is trying to increasingly shape China’s image in a positive way in the EU. With the CAI, the Chinese side has now cemented the fact that Beijing has access to European media companies through investments – but the other way around, there are tough restrictions for foreign media in the People’s Republic.
On Friday, the EU Commission stressed that there are no new rights for Chinese investors in the media sector. However, the EU states and their media regulators can still take action against Chinese broadcasters, for example, due to security concerns, as was recently the case with CGTN. With regard to the individual EU states, there are stipulated differences in the CAI regarding the treatment of Chinese investors in the media sector.
The CAI also imposes restrictions in the area of private healthcare: For example, EU companies can only invest in medical facilities in the form of a joint venture. This is limited to eight cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Suzhou, as well as Hainan Island. “The majority of the joint venture’s doctors and medical staff, as well as foreign-owned hospitals and clinics, must be Chinese nationals,” the agreement states.
Foreign investment in non-governmental and charitable organizations is prohibited without Chinese permission. NGOs founded abroad are not allowed to have a permanent branch in China – critics see this as a manifestation of the People’s Republic’s intention to further prevent foreign interference in “internal affairs”.
What happens now? The text of the agreement must now be legally checked and translated into all EU languages. It will then be submitted to the EU Council and the European Parliament for debate and adoption. Ratification is expected in early 2022.
The CAI will still face strong headwinds, especially in the EU Parliament: Reading the annexes to the agreement only “thickens the fog” further, French MEP Marie-Pierre Vedrenne wrote on Twitter. This shows the need for “autonomous measures” and a “legal arsenal”, Vedrenne said. According to media reports, the European Parliament’s monitoring committee will take a closer look at the annexes for the first time next week.
Genocide in Xinjiang – yes or no? This question is increasingly becoming the focus of international discourse and could sooner or later also occupy the German Bundestag. According to reports, the topic is increasingly rumbling in the parliamentary groups after the parliaments in Canada and the Netherlands condemned the Chinese government’s actions against Muslim Uyghurs in the northwest of the People’s Republic as genocide a few weeks ago.
“The reports make it unmistakably clear that dramatic things are going on there. We now have to evaluate how we deal with it conceptually,” says the human rights spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group, Frank Schwabe, in an interview with China.Table. “Other parliaments have created facts. Therefore, we will automatically also have to deal with it promptly.” Regarding the plethora of reports on torture and rape in re-education camps, where around one million Uyghurs are held against their will, Schwabe speaks of “unknown dimensions that were unimaginable to me a few years ago”. Nevertheless: “The debate has only just begun, and we must carefully discuss which terms we use for such unique crimes. The term genocide, at any rate, lacks further capacity for its meaning to be expanded upon.”
Meanwhile, the new US administration is also using the term in official statements. White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the “genocide against the Uyghurs” will be a “direct topic of conversation” with the Chinese when Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets his counterpart Wang Yi for the first time in Alaska this Thursday. The genocide designation is more than a rhetorical quibble. It is considered a criminal offense in international law under the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which must be punished.
The chairwoman of the Human Rights Committee in the German Bundestag, Gyde Jensen (FDP), had recently said that she could understand, based on the facts, why governments would conclude that it was genocide. Michel Brandt (die Linke) is more reserved, speaking instead of an “ethnocide”. This refers to the eradication of the cultural identity of a population group. Internment, mass surveillance, repression, and reports of forced sterilizations are cause for great concern. “To get a full picture of what is going on in Xinjiang our group supports the sending of a UN mission to the region. We consider it the Chinese government’s duty to cooperate and continuously admonish this”, said Brandt to China.Table. The central goal is to improve the human rights situation in Xinjiang. Representatives of the CDU and AfD did not respond to questions on the issue.
The strongest instrument at the Bundestag’s disposal is a resolution that would recognize and condemn genocide in Xinjiang. A draft to this effect could be introduced by both the governing coalition and the opposition. Regardless of the likelihood of success of such a draft, however, the imminent end of the legislative period could prove to be a brake on such an initiative. With the federal election on the horizon and only a few weeks of sessions remaining until Parliament’s summer recess, time is running out. This could trigger fears that a resolution will be decided hastily. Such a delay would certainly suit the Chinese because it would speed up the debate in their favor.
The last time the Parliament explicitly described the crimes of the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians and other Christian minorities with up to 1.5 million victims as genocide was almost five years ago when it drafted a corresponding resolution. Turkey’s reactions at the time were angry protests. That the People’s Republic of China would simply accept a resolution on Xinjiang is probably out of the question. Even on much lesser occasions, Chinese diplomats issue threats against German MPs or complain to Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble. This was the case, for example, when the Bundestag debated the human rights situation in the region in a consultation in 2018. The People’s Republic also regularly threatens other states with economic consequences if Beijing’s repressive policies towards third parties are critically assessed there. It always refers to internal affairs, from which other countries should keep out of the way.
Meanwhile, the discussion about the assessment of the events has been given a new basis by a study of the Newlines Institute. The independent think tank in the US capital Washington, which deals with geopolitical developments, has come to the conclusion, with the participation of 33 international researchers, that the term genocide is appropriate. The English-language paper, titled “The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention”, brings together 55 pages of evidence and circumstantial evidence that the authors believe justifies the definition. The study bundles all the information gathered over the years by scholars, media, and eyewitnesses into a stringent thread of argument and assesses its significance along the lines of the 1948 UN Convention.
In their investigations, the researchers limited themselves to violations of Article II, which lists five acts committed with the intent “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such”. The scholars regard all five acts as proven. They base their assessment on extensively available “primary and secondary sources, including witness testimonies, internal Chinese government statements, documents, statistics, white papers and reports, and various expert analyses and scholarly works.” China’s government, however, dismisses any criticism of its actions, defending its policies as a “war against extremism, terrorism, or separatism”.
The rhetoric of Chinese officials is indeed bellicose, as the study reveals. On several occasions, officials have made statements such as “wiping out tumors”, “wiping them out completely”, “destroying their roots and branches”, “rounding everyone up” or “showing absolutely no mercy”. The means China uses are surveillance, criminalization, destruction of Uyghur culture, internment and forced labor, “systematic forced abortions and sterilization of Uyghur women of childbearing age”, and the “forcible separation of Uyghur children from their parents”.
Sanctions against Chinese officials for human rights abuses in Xinjiang are reportedly under consideration within the European Union. Four individuals and one entity are to be placed on a list for punitive measures, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing EU diplomats. According to the report, the sanctions will be decided at the meeting of EU foreign ministers at the end of March. The European External Action Service did not confirm the reports at first.
Things haven’t been running smoothly between Sweden and China for a long time. The saga of a small Swedish-Chinese publisher imprisoned in China poisoned relations. The Chinese ambassador in Stockholm was a constant critic of Sweden’s media. And then, in October 2020, Sweden barred Chinese telecom equipment suppliers Huawei and ZTE from building 5G networks. “The Swedish Security Service believes that the Chinese state and security services can influence and pressure Huawei,” the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority announced in unusually strong terms, repeating the words for ZTE. A Beijing foreign office spokesman immediately threatened to harm Swedish companies in China.
Bilateral relations have thus hit bottom. And this is despite the fact that Sweden’s policy does not really differ from that of most EU states. According to a “Policy Intentions Mapping” by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) from September 2020, Sweden, like most EU states, is in favor of finding a “common EU position on China that – pragmatically – considers China as a partner or a rival, depending on the issue”. Also, according to ECFR, Stockholm is in favor of limiting Chinese investments only in strategic sectors – precisely areas such as 5G. Only Finland, Denmark, and Hungary are against any restrictions.
The very special problems between China and Sweden began in 2015, when Swedish-Chinese publisher Gui Minhai disappeared from Thailand – and shortly afterward appeared on Chinese state television. Sweden’s observers assumed it was a coerced confession – because Gui, along with three other men, ran a small publishing house in Hong Kong that sold books full of snappy stories about the private lives of China’s political leaders. The other three, as well as the bookseller who sold their books in Hong Kong, also disappeared in mainland China at the same time. In February 2020, Gui was sentenced to ten years in prison for allegedly passing state secrets abroad. Sweden sought Gui’s release and departure for years to no avail; the case repeatedly triggered diplomatic skirmishes.
Then in September 2018, a dispute between three Chinese tourists and a hostel in Stockholm caused an absurd diplomatic row. According to the hostel, the group had arrived around midnight many hours before their booking was due to start. The hostel initially made them wait in the lobby, but then asked them to leave as they were ranting loudly – and eventually called the police. Videos showed police officers carrying the family into the street, with the son yelling in English, “This is killing!” China’s ambassador to Sweden, Gui Congyou, demanded an apology from the police officers and TV station SVT over a satirical broadcast about the incident. A foreign office spokesman in Beijing also called the broadcast a “gross insult and a vicious attack on China and the Chinese people”.
Nerves were apparently on edge: Ambassador Gui repeatedly complained about Swedish coverage of China and threatened Sweden’s culture minister with an entry ban at the end of 2019 over an award ceremony for publisher Gui. “We will never back down from such a threat. Never,” Prime Minister Stefan Löfven said. “We have freedom of speech here. Period.” Sweden’s foreign ministry summoned the ambassador dozens of times over his outbursts – but rejected opposition calls for the diplomat to be expelled.
All this has not been without consequences. In a survey by the Pew Research Center, around 70 percent of Swedes had a negative opinion of China at the end of 2019. Globally, only Japan had more, at 85 percent. As recently as 2018, Swedes had a more positive view of China than people in Germany, Italy, or France.
“At least since 2018, Sweden’s bilateral relations with China appear to be at an all-time low,” Jerker Hellström, director of the Swedish Center for China Studies, wrote in a mid-2020 review of relations in recent years. Still, “the impact on trade relations between Sweden and China seems to have been limited”. Economically, things went well nonetheless: Sweden’s exports to China increased during that period, erasing the earlier trade deficit. Conversely, since Volvo’s takeover by Chinese carmaker Geely in 2010, more and more Chinese investment poured into Sweden, which was initially welcomed with open arms – partly because of the success of the Volvo takeover. In 2018, Geely added a minority stake in truckmaker AB Volvo – the largest Chinese investment in the country to date at $3.3 billion. In 2019, China’s internet giant Tencent acquired music platform Spotify for $2.3 billion.
In 2018, however, a debate about political naivety towards China flared up in the face of these acquisitions, as Hellström recalls. Among the biggest warnings was Lars Fredén, Sweden’s ambassador to Beijing from 2010 to 2016. Hellström quotes a paper Fredén gave at a 2019 workshop: “Sweden is a unique combination in the West of high technology – which often has direct military applications – and boundless naivety.” Since then Sweden has improved its expertise on China and is seriously engaged in an institutionalized China strategy – bilaterally and also within the EU framework.
Huawei’s exclusion could also be a consequence of the naivety debate. Huawei sued several times against its exclusion from 5G deployment – but lost in court. The auction of 5G licenses went ahead in January 2021 without Huawei and ZTE. But now, there is criticism from the business community. Börje Ekholm, head of Huawei’s Swedish rival Ericsson criticized Huawei‘s exclusion and expressed concern about its own 5G business in China; whether rightly or not is uncertain so far.
A German children’s book from the Carlsen publishing house tried to explain the coronavirus. In it, there was a sentence that at first glance seemed harmless: Children are told that the virus that has turned our lives upside down, leading to drastic restrictions on everyday life, unemployment, and financial hardship for parents, and the loss of friends and family members, comes from China.
German-Chinese parents instantly feel a bitter sting when they read this sentence because they can see their children in daycare groups and elementary school classes (the book series is recommended for reading aloud from age three) hearing these words read aloud to their classmates. They know that their children will feel shame and confusion that the country from which one or both of their parents come from has caused so much terrible and evil, global catastrophe, disease and death.
Children’s brains are highly sensitive at an early age to social exclusion and the dangers of standing out because of otherness. In evolutionary terms, it makes sense: Those who stand out, especially negatively, become the social group’s target because full membership and positive recognition are denied. Often, then, the counter-reaction is to distance oneself from one’s Chinese or Asian identity. “I’m not Chinese!” or shouting “I hate China!” is then often a sad migrant survival strategy to avoid scorn and teasing from other classmates. I know this because I was one of these German-Chinese children myself.
But, the objection goes, the virus does come from China. Why should a true sentence be subject to censorship? I argue that avoiding the sentence in this particular context of children’s reading does not constitute censorship but prevents young children from being cognitively shaped negatively towards a cultural and ethnic group from an early age. A sentence like this is enough to do that, especially when it is presented completely out of context. Research shows that this kind of imprinting starts very early.
Children’s brains, especially those at a young age, seek simple causalities and do not understand geopolitical relationships. Preschool and elementary school children do not know who governs China or what role the Chinese government played in fighting the pandemic. Instead, children’s world horizons are much more concrete and smaller: They know that the classmate who “kind of looks different” is from China. Now, in this book, they are told without further explanation that this stupid virus is coming from China, which is why they are not allowed to meet their friends, why their parents worry and discuss late at night, and why grandma had to go to the hospital.
So their brains connect all these negative, drastic experiences of the past months with concrete people around them who can embody the abstraction “China” for them. Children of this age are not aware that Chinese classmates from daycare or school have nothing to do with the “China” that the sentence in the book refers to. Publishers like Carlsen have to understand that children’s brains cannot process information in the same differentiated way as adults or even teenagers. Therefore, it is not the fault of the children who draw the wrong conclusions from the sentence, but the responsibility of the adults not to contribute to negative cognitive imprints.
The result of this imprinting is the rise of exclusion and teasing of Chinese and Asian classmates, as well as potential dehumanization. At the brain level, studies using fMRI brain scanning methods show that the association of a specific group with a disgusting phenomenon such as a deadly virus leads to empathy rejection and dehumanization of that group. This has consequences not only in terms of exclusion but also in terms of not cognitively understanding (i.e., no longer being able to “mentalize”) that group.
This, I argue, can also have undesirable consequences for later political awareness: If children are shaped from an early age so that they cannot mentalize China, they will not be interested in learning about China and understanding China. Even from the point of view of the biggest China critic, this is not desirable because a lack of mentalization understanding of China ultimately harms Germany. So instead of educating people about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its role in the pandemic, as the defenders of the phrase in the children’s book hope, this shot may backfire.
Above all, it backfires because Chinese-German parents feel dehumanized by Germany as a result of experiences like this. This is described in research as “metadehumanization”, that is, the feeling of being dehumanised by others in society. The problem with metadehumanization is that it can lead to greater hostility and divisiveness, more so than other experiences of exclusion. This is precisely the goal of the Chinese Communist Party: To divide the Chinese diaspora, to give them the impression that the Western democracies they live in do not care about their humanity and representation, and therefore the Chinese Communist Party is the true and only representative for them.
In my book “Vulnerable Minds: The Neuropolitics of Divided Societies”, which will be published this year, I argue that we need to understand and prevent the exclusionary mechanisms that our brains possess universally and cross-culturally so that our divided democracies have a chance to survive into the 21st century. Therefore, it should also be Germany’s goal at the political-strategic level to offer the Chinese diaspora an alternative, democratic-inclusive narrative by which they feel represented and humanized. To ignore the German-Chinese parents and their interests in the whole discussion about the children’s book is tantamount to a double dehumanization: as if their concerns for their children did not count; as if they had no individual, legitimate interest in standing up for their children.
At the same time, this case raises the difficult question of how we should one day communicate the COVID-19 pandemic historically, politically, and pedagogically to the youngest generation. At the moment, no one has clear answers to these questions. Of course, older children should later learn where the virus came from, how this relates to other historical pandemics, what went wrong in this pandemic, and how such an outbreak can be prevented in the future. We need to think about how this can be done without using Asian minorities as scapegoats.
Dr. Liya Yu is a political scientist and writer. She has conducted research on the political neuroscience of racism and dehumanization at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Columbia University in New York. Her book, Vulnerable Minds, will be published in 2021 by Columbia University Press. She lives in Berlin and Taipei.
