While we intensively discuss risky economic dependencies and anxiously watch China’s increasingly rougher tone towards Taiwan, we patiently wait for the China strategy of the German government. Originally, a national security strategy should already have been drafted in the first year of the German government coalition. Which was then supposed to be followed by the China strategy. But so far, neither paper exists.
The individual government parties use the time to define their positions. Currently, it is the turn of the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP). For example, it wants a stress test for the economy and infrastructure, and to pool China expertise. In his analysis, Finn Mayer-Kuckuk finds astonishing parallels between the Liberals and the positions of the Greens.
A visitor who would not even be allowed to enter the USA will arrive in the UK this Sunday. The governor of the autonomous province of Xinjiang, Erkin Tuniyaz, is traveling to London on behalf of the Chinese government. He plans to meet representatives of the British Foreign Office. Geneva and Brussels are also on his itinerary. His visit is an insult to Uyghur lobby groups, human rights organizations and German and British MPs because Tuniyaz bears particular responsibility for the crimes against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Marcel Grzanna describes the background and reactions.
High-resolution footage captured by reconnaissance aircraft offers the US military new information about the Chinese balloon. They show antennas capable of intercepting communications – equipment that weather balloons typically do not carry. The fairytale of a weather balloon never convinced anyone, anyway. Michael Radunski analyzes the latest developments surrounding spherical aircraft and the implications.
This week’s China Perspective is about military service in times of saber rattling. A new reservist law will come into force in March and is unsettling young Chinese, as our Chinese author writes. The army offers promising students from poorer families a chance for free education. This makes the military an attractive choice during peacetime. But what if a violent “reunification” with Taiwan could become a reality?
Blacklisted in the US, at least accepted as a guest in Europe: The governor of the autonomous province of Xinjiang, Erkin Tuniyaz, is traveling to London next Sunday on behalf of the Chinese government, where he is expected to meet with representatives of the British Foreign Office. Exactly one week later, Tuniyaz then wants to make an appearance in Brussels to launch a diplomatic charm offensive with the EU member states.
Uyghur lobby groups, human rights organizations, as well as German and British MPs, harshly criticized the visit. Tuniyaz has been sanctioned by the United States for two years for his role in the human rights violations against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. The US government even refers to Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs as genocide. The EU, on the other hand, has so far limited sanctions to four lower-ranking Xinjiang officials, while Tuniyaz is still allowed to enter.
Clear criticism of the visit comes from the EU Parliament. “The governor of Xinjiang is partly responsible for the human rights crimes that the Chinese leadership is still committing in the autonomous region,” MEP Reinhard Buetikofer (Greens) told China.Table. “Talks with China must continue. But that excludes people who, like Erkin Tuniyaz, are personally so closely involved in these crimes.”
Buetikofer, who is also a member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) and chair of the EU Parliament’s China delegation, believes the Chinese attempt is a sign that the strong criticism of China’s human rights crimes in recent years is having an effect. “Beijing feels compelled to respond. But I don’t think too many international actors will let the wool be pulled over their eyes,” he said. Buetikofer himself was, in turn, sanctioned by Beijing in 2021 after Brussels sanctioned Xinjiang officials.
Criticism also came from the German parliament. “I think this visit is extremely problematic. Offering the governor of Xinjiang a platform would send the wrong signal,” as human rights politician Peter Heidt (FDP) told China.Table. Heidt also believes that Beijing wants to downplay the situation in Xinjiang.
Frank Schwabe (SPD) warns that the Chinese side could exploit the visit for propaganda purposes. “I hope that the Europeans will take a well-prepared, unambiguous communication strategy with them into these talks. Nobody can make the mistake of being misled by the Chinese narrative.”
The office of the UN Commissioner for Human Rights accused the Chinese government of committing crimes against humanity for the first time last year. The background to this is a years-long re-education campaign that saw millions of people in Xinjiang detained in internment camps. These camps included systematic physical and psychological torture, rape and forced labor.
Shortly after the travel plans of the Chinese politician became public, British human rights lawyer Michael Polak lodged a request with the British Attorney General to request an investigation against Erkin Tuniyaz. Polak acted under the mandate of a former Kazakh camp detainee who now lives in the UK. If the Attorney General grants the request, the Chinese politician could theoretically face arrest.
In the meantime, London offered appeasement. The Foreign Office told British MPs that Tuniyaz was neither officially invited by the UK nor “worthy” of an official ministerial meeting. “China’s actions in Xinjiang are, of course, abhorrent and we will not legitimize them in any way,” a member of the minister’s office said. The British Parliament also labels the treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang as genocide.
It is unclear how long Tuniyaz intends to stay in London. He may travel to Geneva in the middle of next week to attend the UN Social Council meeting there.
On Thursday, the US presented new evidence about the suspected Chinese spy balloon downed by US forces off the coast of South Carolina last Sunday. It is now clear that the Chinese balloon was able to intercept communication signals, the State Department announced.
In addition, according to American sources, the balloon was part of an entire fleet of Chinese surveillance balloons that recently crossed more than 40 countries on all five continents.
High-resolution images captured by American U-2 spy planes showed that the Chinese balloon was “clearly for intelligence surveillance and inconsistent with the equipment on board weather balloons”. Apparently, the balloon had multiple antennas to locate and gather communications. In addition, the attached solar panels were so large that they could power a whole range of sensitive monitoring equipment.
Modern sensors, such as those discovered on the Chinese balloon, can track signals relatively easily: For example, data that tells which mobile phones are being used around a military base like the US base in Montana.
This is where the State Department tried to reassure the public on Thursday. It stated that it was ensured that the Chinese balloon could not gather any useful information at nuclear launch sites and other military bases concerned.
Peter Layton has a different opinion. The Griffith University military expert in Queensland, Australia, is convinced that the Chinese certainly managed to gather information, intercept communications and send the data directly to China. However, the US probably was able to intercept the transmission to China. The bottom line: No sensitive data was intercepted and there is no imminent danger.
For this reason – and because the US government wanted to get its hands on the Chinese software – it was decided to let the balloon continue its journey for a while and only shoot it down over a relatively shallow part of the ocean. Although it will prove tricky to assemble the many individual components, by taking a close look at the equipment, army engineers now want to figure out what China is capable of by now. Because in the meantime, Navy divers have recovered the remains of the balloon off the coast of South Carolina. New insights are eagerly anticipated.
And these are urgently needed, as a look at the not-so-distant past shows: According to the US government, at least five flyovers of Chinese spy balloons over American territory have been reported – three during the Trump administration and two during Biden’s administration.
The Air Force General in charge, Glen VanHerck, had to concede, however, that his forces had not directly detected the overflights and also could not subsequently explain the mysterious flying objects in the sky. For this reason, the spy balloons observed during the Trump era had been classified as unidentified aerial phenomena. According to VanHerck, it took years of investigation to prove that they were part of a global Chinese spy balloon fleet.
China expert Andrew Scobel offers China.Table another explanation: priorities. “A balloon floating over a remote area of the United States may not have been considered as important as information about terrorist threats or a North Korean missile test.” Scobel conducts research at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington. He believes that past governments have long underestimated China’s ambitions and also capabilities.
With unusual candor, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted on Wednesday who is the master and who is the student in this case: The recovered components will be analyzed in detail to learn more about the Chinese surveillance program. The knowledge gained from the balloon would then be combined with the observations made in American airspace.
In China, on the other hand, the goal has seemed clear for several years. A 2018 article in the military newspaper Jiefangjun-Bao 解放军报 said: “Near space has become a new battlefield of modern warfare” 临近空间也已经成为现代战争的一个新战场，是国家安全体系的一个重要环节. The aim, it says, is to dominate space at an altitude of 20 to 100 kilometers, with the author noting: ‘This transition zone between air and space is, apart from the occasional passage of rockets, a previously unexplored space for humans.
Shortly after taking office, China’s President Xi Jinping decreed a radical modernization of the country’s air force. Here it is important to know that Xi is also chairman of the Central Military Commission, and thus commander-in-chief of the Chinese armed forces. In this function, he urged the country’s air force in 2014 to “speed up air and space integration and sharpen their offensive and defensive capabilities.” China’s military experts subsequently identified “near space” as a crucial link.
America is currently seeing in its own skies how advanced the Chinese have become since then.
The FDP parliamentary group in the German Bundestag has published its own position paper on China. The main idea of the paper is to prepare Germany for possible crisis situations with Chinese participation and to strengthen Germany’s negotiating position vis-à-vis the People’s Republic. Among other things, the Free Democrats call for
The FDP considers a fundamental realignment of Germany’s foreign and economic strategy to be overdue. “We agree that our China policy must change, just as China has changed under Xi Jinping,” Johannes Vogel, First Parliamentary Secretary of the FDP parliamentary group, told China.Table.
Thanks to the draft China strategies from the economy and foreign ministries, the Greens have a head start in the German government coalition. Now the FDP is stepping out of the woodwork. The paper sounds like it can reach a consensus with the existing proposals on key points. As expected, free trade, entrepreneurship and networking with liberal democracies take up an important part for the FDP. The last time the Social Democratic Party (SPD) contributed a position paper was in 2020, i.e. before its “Zeitenwende”.
The key aspect of the position paper is to strengthen both Germany and Europe in economic and political competition. Only those who stay economically relevant will be able to have a say in the future and will be taken seriously, is the main message. Therefore, the FDP demands better general conditions for research and development. In typical liberal fashion, this is followed by a call for more entrepreneurial freedom and “unleashing the middle class”.
The FDP is particularly worried about a lack of knowledge about China in Germany. The idea is to create “hubs” where knowledge is systematically gathered. However, the party also sees the decentralized organization of science in a liberal democracy as an advantage. This would result in a greater diversity of information sources. However, it also warns that science should not cooperate blindly.
To ensure that Germany is “more capable of deterrence” in potential conflict scenarios, important players are to undergo stress tests in the future – just like banks have to do for potential financial crises. This particularly would include mobile communications, Vogel says. The paper also lists industry, transport, ports and railways, energy supply and data networks. Companies and authorities from these sectors are to be involved in the stress test exercise.
Here, the FDP warns against misunderstanding technical empowerment as a pursuit of self-sufficiency. Accordingly, trade with other technically advanced countries is more important than ever.
On a global level, the FDP envisions the creation of a global “alliance of democracies” that better cooperates than ever before in order to stand up to China. These countries should exemplify the rule of law and strengthen trade between them. In this way, not only an economic but also a “value area” is supposed to be created.
The Liberals see the conclusion of free trade agreements as a key step in this respect. However, ethical standards for countries of the Global South should not be too strict in order to make agreements possible in the first place.
Taiwan, too, plays a big role in the paper: As a partner in Asia and as a possible theater of a catastrophic conflict with China. The FDP calls for the island’s integration into more international organizations such as the aviation organization ICAO, Interpol or the World Customs Organization WCO. China rejects Taiwan’s membership in these bodies. In light of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the FDP believes it will be important to take China’s threats seriously.
Fluffy, swift and with a fine nose: There is no denying that squirrel detectives can easily compete with police dogs as the cutest members of the force. In Chongqing, the police are now using squirrels to detect drugs.
The training of six squirrels has already finished and they are now able to assist in complicated drug trafficking cases. They dash through crowded warehouses in no time, explore even the smallest nooks and crannies and climb high shelves. This allows the cute sleuths to sniff out even the cleverest drug stashes that their four-legged colleagues cannot reach.
China uses more than 120 dog breeds to enforce its zero-tolerance drug policy. However, the deployment of squirrels is new. The number of nuts they received as a treat during their training is not known.
While we intensively discuss risky economic dependencies and anxiously watch China’s increasingly rougher tone towards Taiwan, we patiently wait for the China strategy of the German government. Originally, a national security strategy should already have been drafted in the first year of the German government coalition. Which was then supposed to be followed by the China strategy. But so far, neither paper exists.
The individual government parties use the time to define their positions. Currently, it is the turn of the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP). For example, it wants a stress test for the economy and infrastructure, and to pool China expertise. In his analysis, Finn Mayer-Kuckuk finds astonishing parallels between the Liberals and the positions of the Greens.
A visitor who would not even be allowed to enter the USA will arrive in the UK this Sunday. The governor of the autonomous province of Xinjiang, Erkin Tuniyaz, is traveling to London on behalf of the Chinese government. He plans to meet representatives of the British Foreign Office. Geneva and Brussels are also on his itinerary. His visit is an insult to Uyghur lobby groups, human rights organizations and German and British MPs because Tuniyaz bears particular responsibility for the crimes against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Marcel Grzanna describes the background and reactions.
High-resolution footage captured by reconnaissance aircraft offers the US military new information about the Chinese balloon. They show antennas capable of intercepting communications – equipment that weather balloons typically do not carry. The fairytale of a weather balloon never convinced anyone, anyway. Michael Radunski analyzes the latest developments surrounding spherical aircraft and the implications.
This week’s China Perspective is about military service in times of saber rattling. A new reservist law will come into force in March and is unsettling young Chinese, as our Chinese author writes. The army offers promising students from poorer families a chance for free education. This makes the military an attractive choice during peacetime. But what if a violent “reunification” with Taiwan could become a reality?
Blacklisted in the US, at least accepted as a guest in Europe: The governor of the autonomous province of Xinjiang, Erkin Tuniyaz, is traveling to London next Sunday on behalf of the Chinese government, where he is expected to meet with representatives of the British Foreign Office. Exactly one week later, Tuniyaz then wants to make an appearance in Brussels to launch a diplomatic charm offensive with the EU member states.
Uyghur lobby groups, human rights organizations, as well as German and British MPs, harshly criticized the visit. Tuniyaz has been sanctioned by the United States for two years for his role in the human rights violations against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. The US government even refers to Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs as genocide. The EU, on the other hand, has so far limited sanctions to four lower-ranking Xinjiang officials, while Tuniyaz is still allowed to enter.
Clear criticism of the visit comes from the EU Parliament. “The governor of Xinjiang is partly responsible for the human rights crimes that the Chinese leadership is still committing in the autonomous region,” MEP Reinhard Buetikofer (Greens) told China.Table. “Talks with China must continue. But that excludes people who, like Erkin Tuniyaz, are personally so closely involved in these crimes.”
Buetikofer, who is also a member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) and chair of the EU Parliament’s China delegation, believes the Chinese attempt is a sign that the strong criticism of China’s human rights crimes in recent years is having an effect. “Beijing feels compelled to respond. But I don’t think too many international actors will let the wool be pulled over their eyes,” he said. Buetikofer himself was, in turn, sanctioned by Beijing in 2021 after Brussels sanctioned Xinjiang officials.
Criticism also came from the German parliament. “I think this visit is extremely problematic. Offering the governor of Xinjiang a platform would send the wrong signal,” as human rights politician Peter Heidt (FDP) told China.Table. Heidt also believes that Beijing wants to downplay the situation in Xinjiang.
Frank Schwabe (SPD) warns that the Chinese side could exploit the visit for propaganda purposes. “I hope that the Europeans will take a well-prepared, unambiguous communication strategy with them into these talks. Nobody can make the mistake of being misled by the Chinese narrative.”
The office of the UN Commissioner for Human Rights accused the Chinese government of committing crimes against humanity for the first time last year. The background to this is a years-long re-education campaign that saw millions of people in Xinjiang detained in internment camps. These camps included systematic physical and psychological torture, rape and forced labor.
Shortly after the travel plans of the Chinese politician became public, British human rights lawyer Michael Polak lodged a request with the British Attorney General to request an investigation against Erkin Tuniyaz. Polak acted under the mandate of a former Kazakh camp detainee who now lives in the UK. If the Attorney General grants the request, the Chinese politician could theoretically face arrest.
In the meantime, London offered appeasement. The Foreign Office told British MPs that Tuniyaz was neither officially invited by the UK nor “worthy” of an official ministerial meeting. “China’s actions in Xinjiang are, of course, abhorrent and we will not legitimize them in any way,” a member of the minister’s office said. The British Parliament also labels the treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang as genocide.
It is unclear how long Tuniyaz intends to stay in London. He may travel to Geneva in the middle of next week to attend the UN Social Council meeting there.
On Thursday, the US presented new evidence about the suspected Chinese spy balloon downed by US forces off the coast of South Carolina last Sunday. It is now clear that the Chinese balloon was able to intercept communication signals, the State Department announced.
In addition, according to American sources, the balloon was part of an entire fleet of Chinese surveillance balloons that recently crossed more than 40 countries on all five continents.
High-resolution images captured by American U-2 spy planes showed that the Chinese balloon was “clearly for intelligence surveillance and inconsistent with the equipment on board weather balloons”. Apparently, the balloon had multiple antennas to locate and gather communications. In addition, the attached solar panels were so large that they could power a whole range of sensitive monitoring equipment.
Modern sensors, such as those discovered on the Chinese balloon, can track signals relatively easily: For example, data that tells which mobile phones are being used around a military base like the US base in Montana.
This is where the State Department tried to reassure the public on Thursday. It stated that it was ensured that the Chinese balloon could not gather any useful information at nuclear launch sites and other military bases concerned.
Peter Layton has a different opinion. The Griffith University military expert in Queensland, Australia, is convinced that the Chinese certainly managed to gather information, intercept communications and send the data directly to China. However, the US probably was able to intercept the transmission to China. The bottom line: No sensitive data was intercepted and there is no imminent danger.
For this reason – and because the US government wanted to get its hands on the Chinese software – it was decided to let the balloon continue its journey for a while and only shoot it down over a relatively shallow part of the ocean. Although it will prove tricky to assemble the many individual components, by taking a close look at the equipment, army engineers now want to figure out what China is capable of by now. Because in the meantime, Navy divers have recovered the remains of the balloon off the coast of South Carolina. New insights are eagerly anticipated.
And these are urgently needed, as a look at the not-so-distant past shows: According to the US government, at least five flyovers of Chinese spy balloons over American territory have been reported – three during the Trump administration and two during Biden’s administration.
The Air Force General in charge, Glen VanHerck, had to concede, however, that his forces had not directly detected the overflights and also could not subsequently explain the mysterious flying objects in the sky. For this reason, the spy balloons observed during the Trump era had been classified as unidentified aerial phenomena. According to VanHerck, it took years of investigation to prove that they were part of a global Chinese spy balloon fleet.
China expert Andrew Scobel offers China.Table another explanation: priorities. “A balloon floating over a remote area of the United States may not have been considered as important as information about terrorist threats or a North Korean missile test.” Scobel conducts research at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington. He believes that past governments have long underestimated China’s ambitions and also capabilities.
With unusual candor, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted on Wednesday who is the master and who is the student in this case: The recovered components will be analyzed in detail to learn more about the Chinese surveillance program. The knowledge gained from the balloon would then be combined with the observations made in American airspace.
In China, on the other hand, the goal has seemed clear for several years. A 2018 article in the military newspaper Jiefangjun-Bao 解放军报 said: “Near space has become a new battlefield of modern warfare” 临近空间也已经成为现代战争的一个新战场，是国家安全体系的一个重要环节. The aim, it says, is to dominate space at an altitude of 20 to 100 kilometers, with the author noting: ‘This transition zone between air and space is, apart from the occasional passage of rockets, a previously unexplored space for humans.
Shortly after taking office, China’s President Xi Jinping decreed a radical modernization of the country’s air force. Here it is important to know that Xi is also chairman of the Central Military Commission, and thus commander-in-chief of the Chinese armed forces. In this function, he urged the country’s air force in 2014 to “speed up air and space integration and sharpen their offensive and defensive capabilities.” China’s military experts subsequently identified “near space” as a crucial link.
America is currently seeing in its own skies how advanced the Chinese have become since then.
The FDP parliamentary group in the German Bundestag has published its own position paper on China. The main idea of the paper is to prepare Germany for possible crisis situations with Chinese participation and to strengthen Germany’s negotiating position vis-à-vis the People’s Republic. Among other things, the Free Democrats call for
The FDP considers a fundamental realignment of Germany’s foreign and economic strategy to be overdue. “We agree that our China policy must change, just as China has changed under Xi Jinping,” Johannes Vogel, First Parliamentary Secretary of the FDP parliamentary group, told China.Table.
Thanks to the draft China strategies from the economy and foreign ministries, the Greens have a head start in the German government coalition. Now the FDP is stepping out of the woodwork. The paper sounds like it can reach a consensus with the existing proposals on key points. As expected, free trade, entrepreneurship and networking with liberal democracies take up an important part for the FDP. The last time the Social Democratic Party (SPD) contributed a position paper was in 2020, i.e. before its “Zeitenwende”.
The key aspect of the position paper is to strengthen both Germany and Europe in economic and political competition. Only those who stay economically relevant will be able to have a say in the future and will be taken seriously, is the main message. Therefore, the FDP demands better general conditions for research and development. In typical liberal fashion, this is followed by a call for more entrepreneurial freedom and “unleashing the middle class”.
The FDP is particularly worried about a lack of knowledge about China in Germany. The idea is to create “hubs” where knowledge is systematically gathered. However, the party also sees the decentralized organization of science in a liberal democracy as an advantage. This would result in a greater diversity of information sources. However, it also warns that science should not cooperate blindly.
To ensure that Germany is “more capable of deterrence” in potential conflict scenarios, important players are to undergo stress tests in the future – just like banks have to do for potential financial crises. This particularly would include mobile communications, Vogel says. The paper also lists industry, transport, ports and railways, energy supply and data networks. Companies and authorities from these sectors are to be involved in the stress test exercise.
Here, the FDP warns against misunderstanding technical empowerment as a pursuit of self-sufficiency. Accordingly, trade with other technically advanced countries is more important than ever.
On a global level, the FDP envisions the creation of a global “alliance of democracies” that better cooperates than ever before in order to stand up to China. These countries should exemplify the rule of law and strengthen trade between them. In this way, not only an economic but also a “value area” is supposed to be created.
The Liberals see the conclusion of free trade agreements as a key step in this respect. However, ethical standards for countries of the Global South should not be too strict in order to make agreements possible in the first place.
Taiwan, too, plays a big role in the paper: As a partner in Asia and as a possible theater of a catastrophic conflict with China. The FDP calls for the island’s integration into more international organizations such as the aviation organization ICAO, Interpol or the World Customs Organization WCO. China rejects Taiwan’s membership in these bodies. In light of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the FDP believes it will be important to take China’s threats seriously.
Fluffy, swift and with a fine nose: There is no denying that squirrel detectives can easily compete with police dogs as the cutest members of the force. In Chongqing, the police are now using squirrels to detect drugs.
The training of six squirrels has already finished and they are now able to assist in complicated drug trafficking cases. They dash through crowded warehouses in no time, explore even the smallest nooks and crannies and climb high shelves. This allows the cute sleuths to sniff out even the cleverest drug stashes that their four-legged colleagues cannot reach.
China uses more than 120 dog breeds to enforce its zero-tolerance drug policy. However, the deployment of squirrels is new. The number of nuts they received as a treat during their training is not known.
