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2024-04-17 China-Japan-Koreas
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'China is increasingly connected with Russia': what Scholz came to ask Beijing for
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Gregor Spitzen
[REGNUM] For many German chancellors, relations with China over the years have been a yin and yang: war and peace, trade and boycott, human rights and Realpolitik.
The leaders of the Federal Republic of Germany, since the time of Helmut Schmidt, were well aware of the huge role of China in global geopolitics and trade, and therefore always tried to build relations with Beijing as pragmatically as possible, avoiding slippery topics that could disrupt the fragile consensus.
“We have very good continuity in relations with China when it comes to German chancellors,” says Jörg Wuttke, honorary president of the European Chamber of Commerce in Beijing. “It started with Schmidt, continued under Kohl, and then under Schröder and Merkel, who always tried to recognize China as an equal partner and interact with it on economic issues.”
For their constructive approach and some understanding of the “oriental” mentality in the Middle Kingdom, both Helmut Kohl, who did not pay much attention to the situation with “human rights” in the PRC, and Angela Merkel, who visited China 14 times during her 16 years of rule, were really highly valued.
Olaf Scholz, according to some European experts on China, is viewed in Beijing as “a pragmatist who continues Merkel’s policies through social democratic means.”
Scholz is not the first German chancellor to have to balance good economic relations with political distancing from China. This line has always been a thin line, and the heads of government of Germany, which has powerful exports, had to overcome it. But it was much easier to do this before.
If during Kohl’s time, China’s share in Germany’s foreign trade was just over 1%, then when Angela Merkel left her post in 2021, the Celestial Empire’s share in the German economy was already 10%.
A year later, already in the first year of Scholz’s chancellorship, China bought 30% of the capacity of the seaport of Hamburg, the main trade gateway of Germany, which best characterizes the scale of bilateral economic relations between Germany and China.
THERE WILL BE NO AGREEMENTS
According to statements made in Berlin the day before Scholz's trip, the German government wants to continue doing business with China by developing bilateral relations.
Although many Western partners have criticized Berlin for refusing to follow the pro-American policy of “de-risking” (reducing the level of dependence on Chinese markets, goods or investments), the German government continues to treat China as one of its most important trading partners.
If the breakdown of ties with Russia brought Germany to recession and deindustrialization, then much more extensive trade ties with China, if broken, threaten Germany with real economic collapse. This is well understood both in the Bundeschancellery and even in the Ministry of Economics of Robert Habeck.
Olaf Scholz's visit began in a warm and friendly atmosphere, except for the chancellor's meeting in Chongqing with a third-rate official - the city's deputy mayor. Such a diplomatic heel, experts say, signals that Scholz arrived in China as a supplicant, who, in fact, has nothing to offer his Chinese partners.
There were rumors in Beijing long before the chancellor's visit that no important agreements would be signed.
“Every time the head of the German government came to China, one of the main events was the signing of trade agreements and treaties, but that, unfortunately, is in the past,” says Cui Hongjian, a Europe specialist at Beijing Foreign Studies University.
“Compared with his predecessors, Scholz has to take a broader position,” says Jörg Wuttke of the European Chamber of Commerce in Beijing. “On the one hand, he must continue to develop the German and European economies and protect them from excess capacity, and on the other, solve the geopolitical problem: China is increasingly tied to Russia in the conflict in Ukraine.”
China remains a huge market for large German companies. For example, in the chemical industry, China accounts for half of the world market, and in automobile manufacturing it accounts for about a third.
Unlike companies from other countries, the largest German players in these industries have decided to continue playing in the People's Republic. For example, BASF, Bosch, Daimler and Volkswagen.
It's also about jobs, a key issue for the SPD chancellor, although there is not much of classical social democracy left in Germany's modern, big-business-oriented Social Democratic party.
The main political topics of the Chancellor's visit to China are undoubtedly the Iranian-Israeli and Russian-Ukrainian conflicts.
Although Beijing has made it clear that it will maintain Russia's benevolent neutrality in Russia's operation in Ukraine and will side with Iran in the Middle East conflict, Berlin hopes that it can try to achieve success by calling on China to act on the "correct" side, from the German point of view. side of history.
It is not entirely clear on what such hopes are based, given that so far the appeals of Western politicians, and above all US President Joe Biden, to Xi Jinping have not had any impact on the situation.
That Beijing has no intention of changing its attitude towards Russia was further demonstrated just a few days ago when Xi personally received Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
China shares Russia's position in "maintaining social security and stability," Xi said, pointing to the two countries' joint efforts to "reform" a "rules-based world order" that Beijing and Moscow say is unfairly dominated by the West.
CHINESE DUMPING
China believes it can afford a difficult balancing act between partnerships with the United States and Europe. In Germany, they believe that the less Beijing can count on America and the more it finds itself in an economic crisis, the more the Celestial Empire depends on the EU.
Nevertheless, Beijing categorically refuses to feel dependent and continues to flood the European market with cars, solar modules and other goods produced at dumped prices.
According to some EU experts, China is playing with fire by underestimating the capabilities of European regulators, who may lose patience by responding to China with prohibitive tariffs and other anti-dumping measures.
During his trip, Olaf Scholz expressed support for open car markets in Europe for Chinese cars, but called for equal access to the Chinese market for European cars.
“The one thing that should always be clear is that competition must be fair,” Scholz said during a talk with students at Tongji University in Shanghai. “In other words, no dumping, no overproduction and no copyright infringement.”
In Brussels, however, things are not viewed as rosy as in Berlin. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen claims that China is currently experiencing “a dramatic overproduction of electric vehicles coupled with huge government subsidies”, and therefore the US, Brazil, Mexico and Turkey have already closed their markets from Chinese electric cars.
“The EU cannot be the only market that remains open to Chinese overproduction,” von der Leyen said. “We must not allow the same thing to happen in Europe as with solar panels: European manufacturers are unfairly forced out of the market due to dumping prices subsidized by the state, and as a result, production goes to China.”
In September, von der Leyen announced an antitrust investigation into market distortions caused by Chinese subsidies.
If the investigation finds that China is violating trade laws, the EU could impose punitive tariffs.
However, the German Automotive Industry Association (VDA) has already opposed the idea of the overly proactive President of the European Commission, trying to avoid a trade conflict with China for fear of jeopardizing many jobs in Germany tied to cooperation with the Middle Kingdom.
INCOME FROM THE MIDDLE EAST
Iran's strike on Israel significantly changed the political priorities of Scholz's meeting with Xi and Chinese Prime Minister Li Qian on Tuesday morning.
Initially, Beijing's role in the Ukraine conflict and China's excess production capacity were on the agenda.
Now Scholz wants to convince the country's leadership to use its influence on Iran to de-escalate the conflict in the Middle East.
Middle East expert Ahmed Abuduh of the British think tank Chatham House says China's leadership views both the Iranian drone attack on Israel and attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in the Red Sea as consequences of the war in Gaza.
With this position, China wants to increase pressure on the United States to use its political weight against Israel to end the war.
In turn, the US’s constant calls for China to use its influence on Tehran are, according to a British analyst, an attempt by Washington to “draw attention to China’s inaction and selfish behavior.”
Since the US is well aware of China's limited influence on Iran, the main purpose of the constant demands is to show countries in the region that "Beijing is an unreliable partner, and the US is the only power that can guarantee regional security," Abuduh continues.
Beijing could ask Tehran to show restraint and then leave everything as it is, Abuduh said. Ultimately, it is not in China's interest to escalate the conflict in the Gulf region.
This could jeopardize the rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia that China sees as a diplomatic success.
“If the situation worsens, it will have a serious impact not only on China, but also on the entire regional situation and global security, which China does not want,” said Zhu Yongbiao, a professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations at Lanzhou University.
In recent years, China's leadership has been expanding its influence in the Middle East. It wants to secure access to energy resources and markets - especially in the face of growing geopolitical tensions.
Between 2017 and 2022, Chinese merchandise trade with the region nearly doubled. The People's Republic gets nearly half its crude oil from Gulf countries, including Iran, which the West has imposed sanctions on.
China has become the most important trading partner for many Gulf countries. It is logical that this strengthens Beijing’s political influence in the region.
China is trying to capitalize on this: the state wants to fill the power vacuum left by the United States in the region and find allies for a new world order without American dominance.
GERMANY'S EXPECTATIONS ARE CLEARLY TOO HIGH
The Chinese side, judging by the non-verbal signals sent through diplomacy, clearly does not perceive Scholz’s visit as fateful and breakthrough, capable of turning the page in relations between the two countries and bringing them to a qualitatively new level.
China knows that Europe, which has been in a state of economic crisis since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, cannot afford to risk its relations with the Middle Kingdom, and therefore makes maximum profit by actively dumping its high-tech products on the European market. China is clearly not going to give up its strategic alliance with Russia.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Chinese President Xi Jinping
It is also unlikely that Beijing in the Middle East conflict will abandon its important ally and trading partner in the region - Iran, which is opposed to Israel, which has turned on the “berserker” regime and, with its actions in Gaza, has alienated most of the civilized world community.
However, Olaf Scholz’s visit still achieved one important goal. A year later, the polite, diplomatic and good-natured Scholz, acting as a supplicant, managed to smooth out the negative impression from the visit of Foreign Minister Annalena Bärbock, who tried in a defiant manner to lecture her Chinese colleagues on the nature of democracy and almost provoked an unprecedented cooling in German-Chinese relations.
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Posted by badanov 2024-04-17 00:00||
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