Criticism of the re-education camps in Xinjiang has become louder and louder. So loud, in fact, that the provincial governor Erkin Tuniyaz called off his planned trip to Europe on short notice. Now the central government in Beijing is changing its strategy in Xinjiang, as Marcel Grzanna points out in his analysis: Instead of detaining people in camps, they are simply sentenced to prison.
What may sound like an improvement for the Uyghurs turns out to be a cynical adjustment of cruel repression. Any international objections to prison sentences are easier to justify by referring to local legislation. The repressions do not abate, they simply don a new guise.
The high-tech company Huawei is also developing a new strategy. Severely affected by increasing US sanctions, the network supplier from Shenzhen has found a new business field: the automotive sector. Here, it also has its sights set on German manufacturers. In any case, company CEO Yu Chengdong is once again bursting with self-confidence: Those who do not cooperate with the tech giant run the risk of going under.
Christian Domke-Seidel that not everything is going according to plan, however. Wang Jun, head of the automotive branch and the self-driving car product division at Huawei, already had to resign from his post.
The number of Uyghur detained in the re-education camps in Xinjiang has apparently decreased drastically. Investigations by Xinjiang researchers suggest that only a few tens of thousands of people may still be detained in these camps. However, the number of legally convicted prisoners in local prisons has simultaneously climbed dramatically to several hundred thousand.
“We can say with a fair degree of certainty that most of the people who were in the camps are out by now,” says anthropologist Rune Steenberg from the Czech University of Olomouc. “The camps have served their purpose. The experiences in the facilities have intimidated these people. They now hover over their heads like a constant threat,” says Steenberg.
Steenberg estimates the number of individuals who have been sentenced to disproportionately long prison terms to be as high as 300,000. Those who are serving prison sentences most likely do so for exaggerated reasons that would not have been considered valid grounds for imprisonment in democratic states – including China until a few years ago, according to Steenberg.
In contrast to the detention camps, the intellectual and economic elites of the Uyghurs are said to be primarily affected by the prison sentences. The Chinese government apparently believes that it can control Uyghur society more easily without its elite. Thus, mass detainment no longer seems necessary.
An estimated 15 to 20 percent of the Uyghur population have been sent to Chinese camps over the past ten years: around two million people, including many men of working age, and sometimes entire families. China had long denied the existence of such camps, but ultimately admitted it after official documents, satellite imagery and eyewitness testimonies painted an increasingly accurate picture of the camp network.
New information from Xinjiang now suggests that many of these facilities have been closed or converted into prisons. Steenberg draws his conclusions, among other things, from information from his personal network of 50 to 70 sources throughout the region. People who have been secretly gathering information and passing it on abroad for many years.
He estimates that Western researchers maintain contact with several hundred people in Xinjiang, whom they consider to be credible sources, including for the assessment of recent developments in the region. These are the same sources that previously reported the drastic developments in Xinjiang. These are the same sources that previously provided information about the drastic expansion of the camp network and the mass detentions, Steenberg explains. The information proved accurate and prompted a special report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights last year.
Bjoern Alpermann from the University of Wuerzburg considers the statements about the recent developments “most likely correct”. Alpermann, who has been studying the events in Xinjiang closely for years, says that it is impossible to determine the exact number of inmates. But the trend from camps to prisons is clearly discernible, he says. “On a positive note, one could say that the worst phase is over. In the long run, this shock campaign could not be maintained. Instead, the supposedly unreformable are now locked away,” says Alpermann.
Alpermann notices a change in the control system, which is based on an increased integration of labor into economic structures. Many factories have sprung up around the villages where workers have to spend 24 hours a day and can be much better monitored there. In the private sector, surveillance has been optimized through neighborhood committees and especially through digital monitoring.
Both researchers, therefore, warned not to believe that the repression against the Uyghurs has abated. The World Uyghur Congress (WUC) also fears that the closure of camps could be misinterpreted. “This should not be confused with an improvement of the overall situation. Only the conditions are changing,” says Haiyuer Kuerban, director of the WUC office in Berlin.
The Uyghurs speak of genocide against their people. The US government as well as numerous parliaments of democratic states have also recognized the persecution of the Uyghurs as genocide. China’s propaganda, on the other hand, has been trying for years to portray the re-education of the population as a training program and the arrests as anti-terrorism. The growing criticism of recent years has caught China on the wrong foot, believes Rune Steenberg.
This is another reason why the government has started to significantly reduce the size of the detention center system. International opposition to prison sentences is easier to counter by referring to local laws. However, these offenses often seem staged or even downright grotesque: Downloading Western messengers or apps for transferring large amounts of data can already be a reason for imprisonment. Sharing and listening to foreign songs can also be interpreted as subversion.
At first glance, it’s just a staffing change. Huawei is laying off Wang Jun. He headed the automotive operations and the self-driving car product division. A closer look, however, reveals the magnitude of the decision. Because Huawei sees the automotive business as a central pillar of its future business model. Also, because new and even tougher sanctions will ultimately disrupt the network equipment business.
US sanctions are the new normal for Huawei, Eric Xu said in a New Year message addressed to employees. “In 2022, we successfully pulled ourselves out of crisis mode,” said Huawei’s chairman. The total revenue was 91.5 billion US dollars. Huawei is thus back on the road to success. But another truth is that sales were still around 100 billion US dollars in 2021. And in 2020, before the US sanctions took full effect, it was as high as 140 billion US dollars.
If the US government has its way, Huawei will soon be in even deeper trouble. Until now, there have been exemptions for US companies that wanted to do business with the Chinese company. Especially the chip producers Intel and Qualcomm used these trade licenses. But these exemptions are to be dropped in the future.
Huawei started to diversify its business model at breathtaking speed. The company sees an opportunity to tap into new revenue streams, especially in the automotive sector. To this end, Huawei devised two different product strategies: Huawei Inside, which is aimed at consumers, and Huawei Smart Selection as a service for business customers.
Huawei Inside (HI) is the group’s smart car control system. Huawei Smart Selection, on the other hand, is a distribution channel that Huawei offers to various developers in return for a say in development and marketing. Both solutions are considered competing products internally.
The dismissed Wang Jun was in charge of Huawei Inside. He failed to achieve the company’s targets. Now, Huawei wants to focus on the Smart Selection solution. According to its own information, a car alliance is to be created for this purpose. The blueprint for this is the cooperation with the Chinese carmaker Seres, whose vehicles are also offered in Huawei shops. The operating system is made by Huawei.
Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei Technologies Consumer Business Group, told Caixin Global that the car market is facing a drastic change like the one the mobile phone market underwent ten years ago. Companies that would cooperate with Huawei in the Smart Selection Alliance will belong to the few survivors in the sector, he confidently predicted.
This confidence has its reasons. Last year, 2022, sales of Seres cars increased six-fold to 80,041 units. In 2025, the Smart Selection model is expected to turn a profit for the first time, according to Yu. To achieve this, Huawei wants to focus on premium vehicles above 200,000 yuan (about 29,000 US dollars). At a lower price, the group would generate losses.
With Chery, JAC Motors and CATL, Huawei has already formed new partnerships to advance its project. However, Huawei rules out the possibility of developing its own electric car in the future, Yu adds. With Audi and Volkswagen, German manufacturers have also been cooperating with Huawei on vehicle development (both since 2018).
Even before the US sanctions, the Communist Party wanted to make the country less dependent on foreign, high-tech industries. The Made in China 2025 program is a detailed strategy for the technological modernization of China’s industry. Thanks to ‘Made in China 2025’, Chinese companies made considerable progress in the production of high-performance chips.
A paper by Horst Loechel is dedicated to this strategy. He is a professor of economics and director of the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management and an honorary professor at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS). “The most likely outcome of the ‘Made in China 2025’ strategy is therefore, as other analyses have already pointed out, the continued rise of national champions.” Loechel is certain that this will also include Huawei.
China plans to build dozens of new coal-fired power plants. This is according to an analysis by the two think tanks Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Global Energy Monitor (GEM). The responsible authorities reportedly approved plants with a total capacity of 106 gigawatts last year. That is four times as many as in the previous year and translates into two power plant approvals per week.
China’s new coal boom is a bitter setback in the fight against climate change. The People’s Republic already emits more than twice as much carbon as the second-largest emitter, the United States.
“The speed at which projects progressed through permitting to construction in 2022 was extraordinary,” said GEM analyst Flora Champenois. Many projects received both approvals and funding within a few months, she said.
However, there are also important reasons for the expansion: According to the government, the new plants will ensure the stability of the power grid and minimize the risk of blackouts: In mid-2021, the country experienced numerous blackouts due to coal supply problems. In 2022, long droughts resulted in a breakdown in hydroelectric power generation. Energy security has been high on Beijing’s agenda ever since.
However, the authors of the CREA-GEM study disagree: “This justification doesn’t hold water, however, as the plants are intended to run at baseload utilization, and these specific provinces are laggards in growing clean energy generation to meet their demand growth.”
A plausible reason, on the other hand, is the still under-developed power grid. This is why many provinces prefer to build their own coal-fired power plants instead of purchasing electricity from other parts of the country.
The total capacity of 106 gigawatts now approved is the largest since 2015 – the year China’s government signed the Paris climate agreement along with around 200 other countries. And for comparison, all coal-fired power plants in Germany have a combined total installed capacity of just under 40 gigawatts. rad
Billionaire Bao Fan, who was reported missing about a week and a half ago, is apparently being held by Chinese authorities. His Hong Kong-based investment bank China Renaissance issued a statement to that effect on Sunday. The bank said its founder is currently part of an official investigation and would cooperate with authorities in the People’s Republic. The bank also announced its intention to cooperate “properly” with the authorities.
The weekend’s report confirmed assumptions that Bao had by no means been the victim of a violent crime, but had been temporarily abducted by Chinese authorities. Chinese authorities regularly use the expression “cooperating” in an investigation to explain the sudden disappearance of prominent individuals from business and society. This usually veils a threat to the people concerned.
The Chinese government forces influential figures to “cooperate” if they are deemed too powerful or rebellious. The most recent disappearance was Alibaba founder, Jack Ma, two years ago. Before that, Guo Guangchang of Fosun or Ren Zhiqiang of Huayuan Real Estate Group went missing. Ren had called Xi Jinping a clown for his Covid policy and has been in prison ever since.
However, the exact reasons behind Bao Fan’s disappearance are not yet known. But the fact that he could not contact his family or employees indicates that he is unable to act freely.
In mid-February, the bank announced via the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that it was unaware of the whereabouts of its CEO and that it could not establish contact with Bao. The share price of the bank, which is mainly active in investment banking and asset management, had subsequently crashed. grz
China has rejected recent reports that the Coronavirus may have been the result of a laboratory accident. Beijing’s foreign office spokeswoman Mao Ning said Monday in Beijing that the search for the origin of the virus is a scientific matter and should “not be politicized”.
Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US Department of Energy changed its assessment of the origin of the Coronavirus. It now assumes that it could have been caused by a lab accident. However, the ministry suspects this with only a “low confidence“.
The classified report had been submitted to the White House and members of Congress. The US Department of Energy thus shares the assessment of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). However, other US authorities continue to believe that the virus was likely transmitted naturally.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the conclusion drawn by the Ministry of Energy is based on new evidence. However, the report does not specify what kind of evidence it is. The Energy Department’s assessment is significant, because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of US national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.
Beijing, on the other hand, said at the beginning of the week that the investigation carried out by the World Health Organization (WHO) together with Chinese scientists in Wuhan in 2021 had already concluded that a laboratory accident was “extremely unlikely”. The spokeswoman of the Chinese Foreign Ministry demanded that the laboratory theory should finally be put to rest and that China should be vilified. However, WHO staff at the time had also reported that investigations were severely restricted and that they lacked freedom of movement. rad
Around 200 people expressed their solidarity with the people of Ukraine at Liberty Square in Taipei on the anniversary of the Russian invasion. The rally was organized by the Taiwan Stands With Ukraine group, which was founded shortly after the start of the war on February 24, 2022. Among the marchers were some Ukrainians who fled to the island after the war erupted.
Taiwan is keeping a particularly close eye on the Ukraine war given the threat from Mainland China. In a press statement released on Friday, Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry urged Moscow to “immediately cease military aggression against Ukraine” and “respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity“.
At Saturday’s rally, Taipei City Councilwoman Miao Po-ya said the Ukrainian people had shown their resilience and determination in the fight against Russian forces last year. They not only fight for their country, but also defend global freedom and democracy, the Socialist politician said. She was joined at the rally by the leader of the New Power Party and a spokeswoman for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party. fpe
Tobias ten Brink studies the Chinese system at the Constructor University in Bremen. To be more specific, the dynamic change and contradictions that characterize China’s social and economic system. His opponents are speculation and stereotypes. Ten Brink explains: “I aim to avoid othering China. That means, not seeing processes in China as completely different compared to other emerging economies and capitalist-dominated modernization processes.”
Ten Brink uses innovation as an example to explain what he means by this: China used to be the workbench of the world, and like in other industrialization processes, the exploitation of cheap labor was decisive for economic growth. But in order to be successful in the long term, China needs to produce at a higher quality, just like other countries. And that takes ideas and research, ten Brink explains.
That is why China is pursuing a very active industrial and innovation policy, also in close cooperation with its own companies. The fact that technological innovation in China is partly decreed from the top is not automatically counterproductive, ten Brink believes. The West must learn that democracy and freedom are not the only guarantors of technological innovation. “It seems professors or engineers developing batteries for electric cars don’t necessarily need the right to vote to pursue their work,” ten Brink says. And he recalls that a key driver of innovation in the United States was the command economy of the military.
Ten Brink himself has been following China’s rise since the 2000s. In the beginning, ten Brink explored the big questions, first as a doctoral student in Frankfurt and later as a lecturer and researcher in Cologne, New York, and Guangzhou: What kind of capitalism is developing in China, and what are the sources of China’s rapid growth? He looked for them in his postdoctoral dissertation on China’s Capitalism, which gained wide acclaim in 2019 after being published by the prestigious University of Pennsylvania Press.
He always carries what he calls his “political economy spotlight” with him. Because looking at the connection between political, economic and social actors is key to his approach. This is also what ten Brink does in his research on China’s social system.
For ten Brink, the low wages of migrant workers are still a competitive advantage for China. But in order to boost domestic demand, it would be a sensible instrument to provide better protection not only for urban employees but also for migrant workers and the rural population. Ten Brink compares: This was also gradually achieved in other industrialized countries and can only be implemented in China in the face of resistance from companies.
Whether this will happen is up to the Communist Party, which ten Brink calls a “relatively effective authoritarian agency for the promotion of economic modernization”. This is not only a clever way of putting it but also disagrees with those who see the Xi Jinping era as an absolute break. After all, the active role of the state in the economy is nothing new, according to ten Brink. “This has increased with Xi Jinping, but it did not start with him. A core idea is still: growth by any means.” Jonathan Lehrer
With the end of Covid restrictions, Chinese tourists have begun to return to international tourism hotspots. Here, two ladies pose hearts in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Criticism of the re-education camps in Xinjiang has become louder and louder. So loud, in fact, that the provincial governor Erkin Tuniyaz called off his planned trip to Europe on short notice. Now the central government in Beijing is changing its strategy in Xinjiang, as Marcel Grzanna points out in his analysis: Instead of detaining people in camps, they are simply sentenced to prison.
What may sound like an improvement for the Uyghurs turns out to be a cynical adjustment of cruel repression. Any international objections to prison sentences are easier to justify by referring to local legislation. The repressions do not abate, they simply don a new guise.
The high-tech company Huawei is also developing a new strategy. Severely affected by increasing US sanctions, the network supplier from Shenzhen has found a new business field: the automotive sector. Here, it also has its sights set on German manufacturers. In any case, company CEO Yu Chengdong is once again bursting with self-confidence: Those who do not cooperate with the tech giant run the risk of going under.
Christian Domke-Seidel that not everything is going according to plan, however. Wang Jun, head of the automotive branch and the self-driving car product division at Huawei, already had to resign from his post.
The number of Uyghur detained in the re-education camps in Xinjiang has apparently decreased drastically. Investigations by Xinjiang researchers suggest that only a few tens of thousands of people may still be detained in these camps. However, the number of legally convicted prisoners in local prisons has simultaneously climbed dramatically to several hundred thousand.
“We can say with a fair degree of certainty that most of the people who were in the camps are out by now,” says anthropologist Rune Steenberg from the Czech University of Olomouc. “The camps have served their purpose. The experiences in the facilities have intimidated these people. They now hover over their heads like a constant threat,” says Steenberg.
Steenberg estimates the number of individuals who have been sentenced to disproportionately long prison terms to be as high as 300,000. Those who are serving prison sentences most likely do so for exaggerated reasons that would not have been considered valid grounds for imprisonment in democratic states – including China until a few years ago, according to Steenberg.
In contrast to the detention camps, the intellectual and economic elites of the Uyghurs are said to be primarily affected by the prison sentences. The Chinese government apparently believes that it can control Uyghur society more easily without its elite. Thus, mass detainment no longer seems necessary.
An estimated 15 to 20 percent of the Uyghur population have been sent to Chinese camps over the past ten years: around two million people, including many men of working age, and sometimes entire families. China had long denied the existence of such camps, but ultimately admitted it after official documents, satellite imagery and eyewitness testimonies painted an increasingly accurate picture of the camp network.
New information from Xinjiang now suggests that many of these facilities have been closed or converted into prisons. Steenberg draws his conclusions, among other things, from information from his personal network of 50 to 70 sources throughout the region. People who have been secretly gathering information and passing it on abroad for many years.
He estimates that Western researchers maintain contact with several hundred people in Xinjiang, whom they consider to be credible sources, including for the assessment of recent developments in the region. These are the same sources that previously reported the drastic developments in Xinjiang. These are the same sources that previously provided information about the drastic expansion of the camp network and the mass detentions, Steenberg explains. The information proved accurate and prompted a special report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights last year.
Bjoern Alpermann from the University of Wuerzburg considers the statements about the recent developments “most likely correct”. Alpermann, who has been studying the events in Xinjiang closely for years, says that it is impossible to determine the exact number of inmates. But the trend from camps to prisons is clearly discernible, he says. “On a positive note, one could say that the worst phase is over. In the long run, this shock campaign could not be maintained. Instead, the supposedly unreformable are now locked away,” says Alpermann.
Alpermann notices a change in the control system, which is based on an increased integration of labor into economic structures. Many factories have sprung up around the villages where workers have to spend 24 hours a day and can be much better monitored there. In the private sector, surveillance has been optimized through neighborhood committees and especially through digital monitoring.
Both researchers, therefore, warned not to believe that the repression against the Uyghurs has abated. The World Uyghur Congress (WUC) also fears that the closure of camps could be misinterpreted. “This should not be confused with an improvement of the overall situation. Only the conditions are changing,” says Haiyuer Kuerban, director of the WUC office in Berlin.
The Uyghurs speak of genocide against their people. The US government as well as numerous parliaments of democratic states have also recognized the persecution of the Uyghurs as genocide. China’s propaganda, on the other hand, has been trying for years to portray the re-education of the population as a training program and the arrests as anti-terrorism. The growing criticism of recent years has caught China on the wrong foot, believes Rune Steenberg.
This is another reason why the government has started to significantly reduce the size of the detention center system. International opposition to prison sentences is easier to counter by referring to local laws. However, these offenses often seem staged or even downright grotesque: Downloading Western messengers or apps for transferring large amounts of data can already be a reason for imprisonment. Sharing and listening to foreign songs can also be interpreted as subversion.
At first glance, it’s just a staffing change. Huawei is laying off Wang Jun. He headed the automotive operations and the self-driving car product division. A closer look, however, reveals the magnitude of the decision. Because Huawei sees the automotive business as a central pillar of its future business model. Also, because new and even tougher sanctions will ultimately disrupt the network equipment business.
US sanctions are the new normal for Huawei, Eric Xu said in a New Year message addressed to employees. “In 2022, we successfully pulled ourselves out of crisis mode,” said Huawei’s chairman. The total revenue was 91.5 billion US dollars. Huawei is thus back on the road to success. But another truth is that sales were still around 100 billion US dollars in 2021. And in 2020, before the US sanctions took full effect, it was as high as 140 billion US dollars.
If the US government has its way, Huawei will soon be in even deeper trouble. Until now, there have been exemptions for US companies that wanted to do business with the Chinese company. Especially the chip producers Intel and Qualcomm used these trade licenses. But these exemptions are to be dropped in the future.
Huawei started to diversify its business model at breathtaking speed. The company sees an opportunity to tap into new revenue streams, especially in the automotive sector. To this end, Huawei devised two different product strategies: Huawei Inside, which is aimed at consumers, and Huawei Smart Selection as a service for business customers.
Huawei Inside (HI) is the group’s smart car control system. Huawei Smart Selection, on the other hand, is a distribution channel that Huawei offers to various developers in return for a say in development and marketing. Both solutions are considered competing products internally.
The dismissed Wang Jun was in charge of Huawei Inside. He failed to achieve the company’s targets. Now, Huawei wants to focus on the Smart Selection solution. According to its own information, a car alliance is to be created for this purpose. The blueprint for this is the cooperation with the Chinese carmaker Seres, whose vehicles are also offered in Huawei shops. The operating system is made by Huawei.
Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei Technologies Consumer Business Group, told Caixin Global that the car market is facing a drastic change like the one the mobile phone market underwent ten years ago. Companies that would cooperate with Huawei in the Smart Selection Alliance will belong to the few survivors in the sector, he confidently predicted.
This confidence has its reasons. Last year, 2022, sales of Seres cars increased six-fold to 80,041 units. In 2025, the Smart Selection model is expected to turn a profit for the first time, according to Yu. To achieve this, Huawei wants to focus on premium vehicles above 200,000 yuan (about 29,000 US dollars). At a lower price, the group would generate losses.
With Chery, JAC Motors and CATL, Huawei has already formed new partnerships to advance its project. However, Huawei rules out the possibility of developing its own electric car in the future, Yu adds. With Audi and Volkswagen, German manufacturers have also been cooperating with Huawei on vehicle development (both since 2018).
Even before the US sanctions, the Communist Party wanted to make the country less dependent on foreign, high-tech industries. The Made in China 2025 program is a detailed strategy for the technological modernization of China’s industry. Thanks to ‘Made in China 2025’, Chinese companies made considerable progress in the production of high-performance chips.
A paper by Horst Loechel is dedicated to this strategy. He is a professor of economics and director of the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management and an honorary professor at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS). “The most likely outcome of the ‘Made in China 2025’ strategy is therefore, as other analyses have already pointed out, the continued rise of national champions.” Loechel is certain that this will also include Huawei.
China plans to build dozens of new coal-fired power plants. This is according to an analysis by the two think tanks Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Global Energy Monitor (GEM). The responsible authorities reportedly approved plants with a total capacity of 106 gigawatts last year. That is four times as many as in the previous year and translates into two power plant approvals per week.
China’s new coal boom is a bitter setback in the fight against climate change. The People’s Republic already emits more than twice as much carbon as the second-largest emitter, the United States.
“The speed at which projects progressed through permitting to construction in 2022 was extraordinary,” said GEM analyst Flora Champenois. Many projects received both approvals and funding within a few months, she said.
However, there are also important reasons for the expansion: According to the government, the new plants will ensure the stability of the power grid and minimize the risk of blackouts: In mid-2021, the country experienced numerous blackouts due to coal supply problems. In 2022, long droughts resulted in a breakdown in hydroelectric power generation. Energy security has been high on Beijing’s agenda ever since.
However, the authors of the CREA-GEM study disagree: “This justification doesn’t hold water, however, as the plants are intended to run at baseload utilization, and these specific provinces are laggards in growing clean energy generation to meet their demand growth.”
A plausible reason, on the other hand, is the still under-developed power grid. This is why many provinces prefer to build their own coal-fired power plants instead of purchasing electricity from other parts of the country.
The total capacity of 106 gigawatts now approved is the largest since 2015 – the year China’s government signed the Paris climate agreement along with around 200 other countries. And for comparison, all coal-fired power plants in Germany have a combined total installed capacity of just under 40 gigawatts. rad
Billionaire Bao Fan, who was reported missing about a week and a half ago, is apparently being held by Chinese authorities. His Hong Kong-based investment bank China Renaissance issued a statement to that effect on Sunday. The bank said its founder is currently part of an official investigation and would cooperate with authorities in the People’s Republic. The bank also announced its intention to cooperate “properly” with the authorities.
The weekend’s report confirmed assumptions that Bao had by no means been the victim of a violent crime, but had been temporarily abducted by Chinese authorities. Chinese authorities regularly use the expression “cooperating” in an investigation to explain the sudden disappearance of prominent individuals from business and society. This usually veils a threat to the people concerned.
The Chinese government forces influential figures to “cooperate” if they are deemed too powerful or rebellious. The most recent disappearance was Alibaba founder, Jack Ma, two years ago. Before that, Guo Guangchang of Fosun or Ren Zhiqiang of Huayuan Real Estate Group went missing. Ren had called Xi Jinping a clown for his Covid policy and has been in prison ever since.
However, the exact reasons behind Bao Fan’s disappearance are not yet known. But the fact that he could not contact his family or employees indicates that he is unable to act freely.
In mid-February, the bank announced via the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that it was unaware of the whereabouts of its CEO and that it could not establish contact with Bao. The share price of the bank, which is mainly active in investment banking and asset management, had subsequently crashed. grz
China has rejected recent reports that the Coronavirus may have been the result of a laboratory accident. Beijing’s foreign office spokeswoman Mao Ning said Monday in Beijing that the search for the origin of the virus is a scientific matter and should “not be politicized”.
Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US Department of Energy changed its assessment of the origin of the Coronavirus. It now assumes that it could have been caused by a lab accident. However, the ministry suspects this with only a “low confidence“.
The classified report had been submitted to the White House and members of Congress. The US Department of Energy thus shares the assessment of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). However, other US authorities continue to believe that the virus was likely transmitted naturally.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the conclusion drawn by the Ministry of Energy is based on new evidence. However, the report does not specify what kind of evidence it is. The Energy Department’s assessment is significant, because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of US national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.
Beijing, on the other hand, said at the beginning of the week that the investigation carried out by the World Health Organization (WHO) together with Chinese scientists in Wuhan in 2021 had already concluded that a laboratory accident was “extremely unlikely”. The spokeswoman of the Chinese Foreign Ministry demanded that the laboratory theory should finally be put to rest and that China should be vilified. However, WHO staff at the time had also reported that investigations were severely restricted and that they lacked freedom of movement. rad
Around 200 people expressed their solidarity with the people of Ukraine at Liberty Square in Taipei on the anniversary of the Russian invasion. The rally was organized by the Taiwan Stands With Ukraine group, which was founded shortly after the start of the war on February 24, 2022. Among the marchers were some Ukrainians who fled to the island after the war erupted.
Taiwan is keeping a particularly close eye on the Ukraine war given the threat from Mainland China. In a press statement released on Friday, Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry urged Moscow to “immediately cease military aggression against Ukraine” and “respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity“.
At Saturday’s rally, Taipei City Councilwoman Miao Po-ya said the Ukrainian people had shown their resilience and determination in the fight against Russian forces last year. They not only fight for their country, but also defend global freedom and democracy, the Socialist politician said. She was joined at the rally by the leader of the New Power Party and a spokeswoman for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party. fpe
Tobias ten Brink studies the Chinese system at the Constructor University in Bremen. To be more specific, the dynamic change and contradictions that characterize China’s social and economic system. His opponents are speculation and stereotypes. Ten Brink explains: “I aim to avoid othering China. That means, not seeing processes in China as completely different compared to other emerging economies and capitalist-dominated modernization processes.”
Ten Brink uses innovation as an example to explain what he means by this: China used to be the workbench of the world, and like in other industrialization processes, the exploitation of cheap labor was decisive for economic growth. But in order to be successful in the long term, China needs to produce at a higher quality, just like other countries. And that takes ideas and research, ten Brink explains.
That is why China is pursuing a very active industrial and innovation policy, also in close cooperation with its own companies. The fact that technological innovation in China is partly decreed from the top is not automatically counterproductive, ten Brink believes. The West must learn that democracy and freedom are not the only guarantors of technological innovation. “It seems professors or engineers developing batteries for electric cars don’t necessarily need the right to vote to pursue their work,” ten Brink says. And he recalls that a key driver of innovation in the United States was the command economy of the military.
Ten Brink himself has been following China’s rise since the 2000s. In the beginning, ten Brink explored the big questions, first as a doctoral student in Frankfurt and later as a lecturer and researcher in Cologne, New York, and Guangzhou: What kind of capitalism is developing in China, and what are the sources of China’s rapid growth? He looked for them in his postdoctoral dissertation on China’s Capitalism, which gained wide acclaim in 2019 after being published by the prestigious University of Pennsylvania Press.
He always carries what he calls his “political economy spotlight” with him. Because looking at the connection between political, economic and social actors is key to his approach. This is also what ten Brink does in his research on China’s social system.
For ten Brink, the low wages of migrant workers are still a competitive advantage for China. But in order to boost domestic demand, it would be a sensible instrument to provide better protection not only for urban employees but also for migrant workers and the rural population. Ten Brink compares: This was also gradually achieved in other industrialized countries and can only be implemented in China in the face of resistance from companies.
Whether this will happen is up to the Communist Party, which ten Brink calls a “relatively effective authoritarian agency for the promotion of economic modernization”. This is not only a clever way of putting it but also disagrees with those who see the Xi Jinping era as an absolute break. After all, the active role of the state in the economy is nothing new, according to ten Brink. “This has increased with Xi Jinping, but it did not start with him. A core idea is still: growth by any means.” Jonathan Lehrer
With the end of Covid restrictions, Chinese tourists have begun to return to international tourism hotspots. Here, two ladies pose hearts in St. Petersburg, Russia.
