The verbal saber-rattling ahead of the US-China talks in Alaska was high. As recently as Wednesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken again accused Beijing of undermining human rights in Xinjiang and Hong Kong with “coercion and aggression.” Beijing, in turn, admonished the Biden administration not to interfere in China’s internal affairs. Frank Sieren has the details on how the talks went.
In the South China Sea, however, the saber rattling is no longer just verbal. France held manoeuvres there in early 2021. Germany and the UK are also planning to increase their presence on the ground in order to contain China. Christiane Kühl shows how this fits into Germany’s Indo-Pacific strategy. The EU has also announced a strategy for the region in April.
It may come as a surprise given the COVID-19 pandemic, but 2020 was a boom year on the Hong Kong stock exchange. More than $50 billion was raised in 154 IPOs. The US-China trade war and a new US law also play a role. Gregor Koppenburg and Jörn Petring have the background.
Enjoy the read and have a great weekend,
The frigate “Bayern” will set off from Wilhelmshaven for the Far East in August. On the voyage, the ship is to pass through the South China Sea. In February, France had sent a nuclear submarine to the region and held maneuvers there with the US and Japan. Britain plans to send the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth to the Indo-Pacific for a few months in late 2021. US warships also regularly operate in the South China Sea, for example, as part of the US Operation Freedom of Navigation. The “Bayern” will stay away from US ships as well as from the twelve-nautical-mile zone around Chinese-controlled islands in the waters. These are cautious first steps in the Indo-Pacific, where the armed forces have not been active so far.
For all its caution, however, the voyage of the “Bayern”, like the deployment of the ships of other nations, signals a greater willingness on the part of Europe to make its presence felt in the region, including jointly. In 2020, Germany – along with France and the Netherlands – presented an Indo-Pacific strategy for the first time. Together with France, Germany wants to develop the planned EU strategy for the Indo-Pacific, according to the paper.
The German Indo-Pacific paper is rather broad: German interests include peace and security, the deepening of regional relations, open shipping routes, free trade, and even climate protection. Specifically, Germany wants to intensify cooperation with the Southeast Asian association of states ASEAN – for example by supporting negotiations on a legally binding code of conduct between China and the ASEAN member states for the South China Sea.
The US has attributed growing importance to the region for years, beginning with the “pivot to Asia” under President Barack Obama. The Trump administration released an Indo-Pacific strategy in 2017 that advocates “free and open sea lanes” and opposes “coercive actions by individual countries” – a phrase that US officials, as well as President Joe Biden, often use in connection with China. Biden is likely to stick to the strategy. He announced a strategic rebalancing of the US presence in East and Southeast Asia – and did not rule out further rearmament.
The most important slogan of the strategies is the defense of a “rules-based order” in the region. This includes, for example, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The elephant in the room here is – unnamed – China. Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (CDU), however, suggested on Twitter last week that Bundeswehr deployments in the region may well have something to do with containing China. As early as 2019, Kramp-Karrenbauer had stressed in a speech to students at the Bundeswehr University in Munich: “Our allies in the Indo-Pacific region – first and foremost Australia, Japan, and South Korea, but also India – feel increasingly pressured by China’s claim to power. They want a clear sign of solidarity.”
These are by all means new tones. In the past, Germany has tended to look at the Indo-Pacific from a geographical perspective, Helena Legarda, an expert on China’s security and foreign policy at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) tells China.Table. “And this region seemed very distant. So there is a new approach in Germany and a new understanding of the importance of this region.“
The biggest flashpoint there at the moment is the South China Sea. China claims practically the entire sea. Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam also lay claim to overlapping parts of the sea area. All of them are interested, not least in rich fishing grounds and raw material deposits. The US regards Beijing’s territorial claims as illegal and has in the past repeatedly sent warships into the waters, sometimes shadowed by Chinese vessels.
China, meanwhile, is acting with increasing self-confidence in the region and gnawing away at the status quo bit by bit. Beijing is having reefs built into artificial islands and erecting military installations on them. Beijing leaves no doubt that it intends to defend these islets. “China’s new coast guard law gives the coast guard many more powers to enforce China’s territorial claims and allows it to fire on ships in disputed waters,” Legarda says. China counts the South China Sea among its “core interests”.
Legarda doesn’t think China wants to provoke a war. “But it could easily happen in a number of ways – such as accidents, miscalculations, or actions by China that lead to retaliation by others.” The situation is complicated because there is no clear solution. “It is possible that compromises on joint resource exploration or fisheries may be found at some point,” Legarda says. “But when it comes to sovereignty, I don’t see China willing to compromise.”
This also applies to Taiwan. Beijing sees the island as an inseparable part of the People’s Republic of China and has never ruled out reunification by force. The US sells Taipei defensive weapons and regularly sends ships through the Taiwan Strait, most recently the warship “USS John Finn”. US Admiral Philip Davidson, who is responsible for the Asia-Pacific region, even warned of a Chinese attack on Taiwan by 2027.
The fact that the Europeans are now joining the Americans in the region certainly carries weight from the perspective of the littoral states. “If the Europeans demonstrate their ability and willingness to act as a naval power in the Indo-Pacific, China will have no choice but to change its deployment plans with regard to Taiwan and the South China Sea,” comments Hiroyuki Akita in the Japanese magazine Nikkei Asia, for example. “The Chinese military must assume that Britain, France, and Germany, as well as Japan and Australia, will provide some form of support to US forces in the event of a conflict.” This would raise the decision threshold for Chinese military adventures, Akita believes.
This is precisely the kind of cooperation Beijing, therefore, wants to prevent. “One of Beijing’s biggest concerns is the potential of a coalition of Western states working together to confront China or contain its rise,” Legarda says. “This is one of the reasons why China keeps stressing the strategic independence of the EU.” The militaries of the littoral states – India, Japan, or South Korea – are also stronger than commonly believed, writes Salvatore Babones of the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney in the US journal Foreign Policy. “The US can provide equipment, technology, or training,” Babones says. “But China’s neighbors can and should take the lead in protecting their own neighborhoods.” So China’s unstoppable advance is by no means a foregone conclusion.
China has a new street sweeper. Since the Spring Festival, the feature film “Hi, Mom” (你好, 李焕英) has been clearing the country’s box office. It grossed ¥5.27 billion (about €700 million) in barely five weeks by last Tuesday and is expected to be distributed internationally.
The film starts with a flashback to a severe traffic accident 20 years ago. Its main character Li Huanying is cycling with her daughter Jia Ling in the back seat when they are hit by a truck. The mother dies.
“Hi, Mom” is based on a true story. Daughter Jia Ling was 19 years old when her mother died in an accident in 2001. The stage performer celebrated in China for her sketches and slapstick, not only wrote the script. She also directed and plays herself in the film, which she dedicates to finding her mother’s personality. The flick hit so hard that bootleg copies immediately appeared online. The recordings from cinemas are in miserable sound quality with shadows of spectators flitting through the picture.
The story tells a trip back in time. Jia Ling literally falls from heaven to earth. She finds herself in 1981 China, posing as a cousin to her mother and becoming her mother’s confidante. Jia wants to improve her life, even tries to set up the still unmarried young worker “with a good match”.
This does not go off without comic complications. Despite its slapstick interludes, the film is too emotional for European tastes. It presses the tear glands with its thickly applied homage to the mother. This makes it a huge success among young Chinese women born in the 1990s and 2000s. The British “Guardian” writes that it strikes a chord with them because it starts a debate about the role of women, about motherhood and parenthood.
Success has other fathers. Looking back, “Hi, Mom” awakens nostalgic feelings of the “golden” 80s in parents of millenials, especially in those over 50. Jia falls right into the spirit of optimism after the Cultural Revolution, that from now on, things will be better, freer, and more individual in China and that people are on their way to new shores.
Many inserts tie in with these ideas. People enjoy simple pleasures. Neighbors meet in front of the first privately purchased black-and-white television Jia procures for her mother. She also buys her movie tickets for an arranged date that goes awry. The cinema is showing “Lushanlian”, China’s first film that dares to show a kissing scene. Everything is full of splashes of color, like the mother’s brightly colored dress, which stands out from the crowd of factory workers, who are still dressed in the monochrome “Mao” uniform with their drilled trousers.
For young Chinese, to whom Beijing’s shrill propaganda with nationalist undertones instills the idea that they live in a country whose future as a world power is a foregone conclusion, these are alien images. For their parents’ generation, however, the film nostalgia for the 80s, which has become fashionable in recent years. Many are on an inner flight from the insistence with which China’s current leadership is forcing the “new era of socialism under Xi Jinping” on them as “their dream”.
Blogs and WeChat conspicuously ask, “Why do Chinese people think back to the 80s?” (为什么中国人开始怀念八十年代?). Outspoken answers are quickly shared – often in a cat-and-mouse game with censors: “The 1980s was an age of fireworks and poetry, openness and tolerance, full of genuine feelings, and an era of free and unrestricted thought.” Everything was in awakening mode, from art to music to movies to literature. Among the dozens of authors listed are names of writers now officially reviled and ostracized. For example, the poet Beidao, or Fang Fang, who just wrote her “Wuhan Diary”, which is on China’s index.
Three terms would have characterized the 80s: “Young, sincere and innocent.” (年轻、真诚、单纯). There is a lack of that today, criticizes a blogger under the pseudonym Nuipi Mingming, from whose essay flashes a defiant spirit: In his homage to China’s rock star Cui Jian, who became the spiritual youth symbol of the 1980s, he writes: “Compared to the 1980s, our age is dull and boring, becoming more materialistic and utilitarian. People of courage are fewer, realists are increasing. Rebellious spirits diminish. Genuflectors, sycophants and claqueurs increase. Only those who think about it are decreasing in numbers.”
The 80s are being glorified, objects the critical political scientist Zhang Lifan: “Nostalgic memories won’t bring us back to them.” He often hears intellectuals and people from the 50- to 65-year-old generation exclaiming, “How lucky we were to have lived through that time,” says Michael Kahn-Ackermann, a literary translator and German-Chinese cultural mediator who lives in Nanjing. And in addition, proud words about how they are the last to think for themselves. Beijing has drawn its conclusions from this. The state and the party are concentrating above all on intensifying the ideological education of the young: from kindergarten to university.
The comedic stirring film, which takes as its theme the daughter’s love for her mother, fits – whether intentionally or not – with the nostalgia of many intellectuals for the early days of Chinese reforms and their longings and hopes at the time. Partly because it does, “Hi, Mom” is more than just a box office hit.
To enjoy an all-you-can-eat sushi menu, dozens of people in Taiwan have had their names changed. The trigger was the advertising campaign of a sushi restaurant chain. It had announced that anyone with “Gui Yu”, the Chinese characters for salmon, in their name would get a meal at the restaurant, where they and five of their friends could eat as much as they wanted. Taiwan’s citizens are allowed to officially change their names up to three times.
The verbal saber-rattling ahead of the US-China talks in Alaska was high. As recently as Wednesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken again accused Beijing of undermining human rights in Xinjiang and Hong Kong with “coercion and aggression.” Beijing, in turn, admonished the Biden administration not to interfere in China’s internal affairs. Frank Sieren has the details on how the talks went.
In the South China Sea, however, the saber rattling is no longer just verbal. France held manoeuvres there in early 2021. Germany and the UK are also planning to increase their presence on the ground in order to contain China. Christiane Kühl shows how this fits into Germany’s Indo-Pacific strategy. The EU has also announced a strategy for the region in April.
It may come as a surprise given the COVID-19 pandemic, but 2020 was a boom year on the Hong Kong stock exchange. More than $50 billion was raised in 154 IPOs. The US-China trade war and a new US law also play a role. Gregor Koppenburg and Jörn Petring have the background.
Enjoy the read and have a great weekend,
The frigate “Bayern” will set off from Wilhelmshaven for the Far East in August. On the voyage, the ship is to pass through the South China Sea. In February, France had sent a nuclear submarine to the region and held maneuvers there with the US and Japan. Britain plans to send the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth to the Indo-Pacific for a few months in late 2021. US warships also regularly operate in the South China Sea, for example, as part of the US Operation Freedom of Navigation. The “Bayern” will stay away from US ships as well as from the twelve-nautical-mile zone around Chinese-controlled islands in the waters. These are cautious first steps in the Indo-Pacific, where the armed forces have not been active so far.
For all its caution, however, the voyage of the “Bayern”, like the deployment of the ships of other nations, signals a greater willingness on the part of Europe to make its presence felt in the region, including jointly. In 2020, Germany – along with France and the Netherlands – presented an Indo-Pacific strategy for the first time. Together with France, Germany wants to develop the planned EU strategy for the Indo-Pacific, according to the paper.
The German Indo-Pacific paper is rather broad: German interests include peace and security, the deepening of regional relations, open shipping routes, free trade, and even climate protection. Specifically, Germany wants to intensify cooperation with the Southeast Asian association of states ASEAN – for example by supporting negotiations on a legally binding code of conduct between China and the ASEAN member states for the South China Sea.
The US has attributed growing importance to the region for years, beginning with the “pivot to Asia” under President Barack Obama. The Trump administration released an Indo-Pacific strategy in 2017 that advocates “free and open sea lanes” and opposes “coercive actions by individual countries” – a phrase that US officials, as well as President Joe Biden, often use in connection with China. Biden is likely to stick to the strategy. He announced a strategic rebalancing of the US presence in East and Southeast Asia – and did not rule out further rearmament.
The most important slogan of the strategies is the defense of a “rules-based order” in the region. This includes, for example, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The elephant in the room here is – unnamed – China. Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (CDU), however, suggested on Twitter last week that Bundeswehr deployments in the region may well have something to do with containing China. As early as 2019, Kramp-Karrenbauer had stressed in a speech to students at the Bundeswehr University in Munich: “Our allies in the Indo-Pacific region – first and foremost Australia, Japan, and South Korea, but also India – feel increasingly pressured by China’s claim to power. They want a clear sign of solidarity.”
These are by all means new tones. In the past, Germany has tended to look at the Indo-Pacific from a geographical perspective, Helena Legarda, an expert on China’s security and foreign policy at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) tells China.Table. “And this region seemed very distant. So there is a new approach in Germany and a new understanding of the importance of this region.“
The biggest flashpoint there at the moment is the South China Sea. China claims practically the entire sea. Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam also lay claim to overlapping parts of the sea area. All of them are interested, not least in rich fishing grounds and raw material deposits. The US regards Beijing’s territorial claims as illegal and has in the past repeatedly sent warships into the waters, sometimes shadowed by Chinese vessels.
China, meanwhile, is acting with increasing self-confidence in the region and gnawing away at the status quo bit by bit. Beijing is having reefs built into artificial islands and erecting military installations on them. Beijing leaves no doubt that it intends to defend these islets. “China’s new coast guard law gives the coast guard many more powers to enforce China’s territorial claims and allows it to fire on ships in disputed waters,” Legarda says. China counts the South China Sea among its “core interests”.
Legarda doesn’t think China wants to provoke a war. “But it could easily happen in a number of ways – such as accidents, miscalculations, or actions by China that lead to retaliation by others.” The situation is complicated because there is no clear solution. “It is possible that compromises on joint resource exploration or fisheries may be found at some point,” Legarda says. “But when it comes to sovereignty, I don’t see China willing to compromise.”
This also applies to Taiwan. Beijing sees the island as an inseparable part of the People’s Republic of China and has never ruled out reunification by force. The US sells Taipei defensive weapons and regularly sends ships through the Taiwan Strait, most recently the warship “USS John Finn”. US Admiral Philip Davidson, who is responsible for the Asia-Pacific region, even warned of a Chinese attack on Taiwan by 2027.
The fact that the Europeans are now joining the Americans in the region certainly carries weight from the perspective of the littoral states. “If the Europeans demonstrate their ability and willingness to act as a naval power in the Indo-Pacific, China will have no choice but to change its deployment plans with regard to Taiwan and the South China Sea,” comments Hiroyuki Akita in the Japanese magazine Nikkei Asia, for example. “The Chinese military must assume that Britain, France, and Germany, as well as Japan and Australia, will provide some form of support to US forces in the event of a conflict.” This would raise the decision threshold for Chinese military adventures, Akita believes.
This is precisely the kind of cooperation Beijing, therefore, wants to prevent. “One of Beijing’s biggest concerns is the potential of a coalition of Western states working together to confront China or contain its rise,” Legarda says. “This is one of the reasons why China keeps stressing the strategic independence of the EU.” The militaries of the littoral states – India, Japan, or South Korea – are also stronger than commonly believed, writes Salvatore Babones of the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney in the US journal Foreign Policy. “The US can provide equipment, technology, or training,” Babones says. “But China’s neighbors can and should take the lead in protecting their own neighborhoods.” So China’s unstoppable advance is by no means a foregone conclusion.
China has a new street sweeper. Since the Spring Festival, the feature film “Hi, Mom” (你好, 李焕英) has been clearing the country’s box office. It grossed ¥5.27 billion (about €700 million) in barely five weeks by last Tuesday and is expected to be distributed internationally.
The film starts with a flashback to a severe traffic accident 20 years ago. Its main character Li Huanying is cycling with her daughter Jia Ling in the back seat when they are hit by a truck. The mother dies.
“Hi, Mom” is based on a true story. Daughter Jia Ling was 19 years old when her mother died in an accident in 2001. The stage performer celebrated in China for her sketches and slapstick, not only wrote the script. She also directed and plays herself in the film, which she dedicates to finding her mother’s personality. The flick hit so hard that bootleg copies immediately appeared online. The recordings from cinemas are in miserable sound quality with shadows of spectators flitting through the picture.
The story tells a trip back in time. Jia Ling literally falls from heaven to earth. She finds herself in 1981 China, posing as a cousin to her mother and becoming her mother’s confidante. Jia wants to improve her life, even tries to set up the still unmarried young worker “with a good match”.
This does not go off without comic complications. Despite its slapstick interludes, the film is too emotional for European tastes. It presses the tear glands with its thickly applied homage to the mother. This makes it a huge success among young Chinese women born in the 1990s and 2000s. The British “Guardian” writes that it strikes a chord with them because it starts a debate about the role of women, about motherhood and parenthood.
Success has other fathers. Looking back, “Hi, Mom” awakens nostalgic feelings of the “golden” 80s in parents of millenials, especially in those over 50. Jia falls right into the spirit of optimism after the Cultural Revolution, that from now on, things will be better, freer, and more individual in China and that people are on their way to new shores.
Many inserts tie in with these ideas. People enjoy simple pleasures. Neighbors meet in front of the first privately purchased black-and-white television Jia procures for her mother. She also buys her movie tickets for an arranged date that goes awry. The cinema is showing “Lushanlian”, China’s first film that dares to show a kissing scene. Everything is full of splashes of color, like the mother’s brightly colored dress, which stands out from the crowd of factory workers, who are still dressed in the monochrome “Mao” uniform with their drilled trousers.
For young Chinese, to whom Beijing’s shrill propaganda with nationalist undertones instills the idea that they live in a country whose future as a world power is a foregone conclusion, these are alien images. For their parents’ generation, however, the film nostalgia for the 80s, which has become fashionable in recent years. Many are on an inner flight from the insistence with which China’s current leadership is forcing the “new era of socialism under Xi Jinping” on them as “their dream”.
Blogs and WeChat conspicuously ask, “Why do Chinese people think back to the 80s?” (为什么中国人开始怀念八十年代?). Outspoken answers are quickly shared – often in a cat-and-mouse game with censors: “The 1980s was an age of fireworks and poetry, openness and tolerance, full of genuine feelings, and an era of free and unrestricted thought.” Everything was in awakening mode, from art to music to movies to literature. Among the dozens of authors listed are names of writers now officially reviled and ostracized. For example, the poet Beidao, or Fang Fang, who just wrote her “Wuhan Diary”, which is on China’s index.
Three terms would have characterized the 80s: “Young, sincere and innocent.” (年轻、真诚、单纯). There is a lack of that today, criticizes a blogger under the pseudonym Nuipi Mingming, from whose essay flashes a defiant spirit: In his homage to China’s rock star Cui Jian, who became the spiritual youth symbol of the 1980s, he writes: “Compared to the 1980s, our age is dull and boring, becoming more materialistic and utilitarian. People of courage are fewer, realists are increasing. Rebellious spirits diminish. Genuflectors, sycophants and claqueurs increase. Only those who think about it are decreasing in numbers.”
The 80s are being glorified, objects the critical political scientist Zhang Lifan: “Nostalgic memories won’t bring us back to them.” He often hears intellectuals and people from the 50- to 65-year-old generation exclaiming, “How lucky we were to have lived through that time,” says Michael Kahn-Ackermann, a literary translator and German-Chinese cultural mediator who lives in Nanjing. And in addition, proud words about how they are the last to think for themselves. Beijing has drawn its conclusions from this. The state and the party are concentrating above all on intensifying the ideological education of the young: from kindergarten to university.
The comedic stirring film, which takes as its theme the daughter’s love for her mother, fits – whether intentionally or not – with the nostalgia of many intellectuals for the early days of Chinese reforms and their longings and hopes at the time. Partly because it does, “Hi, Mom” is more than just a box office hit.
To enjoy an all-you-can-eat sushi menu, dozens of people in Taiwan have had their names changed. The trigger was the advertising campaign of a sushi restaurant chain. It had announced that anyone with “Gui Yu”, the Chinese characters for salmon, in their name would get a meal at the restaurant, where they and five of their friends could eat as much as they wanted. Taiwan’s citizens are allowed to officially change their names up to three times.
