First it was the war in Ukraine, which questioned Germany’s dependence on Russian gas, and now the allegations that China, Germany’s largest trading partner, committed serious human rights violations in Xinjiang.
German Greens deputy Anton Hofreiter does nothing about it: “German prosperity stems from the fact that we buy cheap raw materials from one dictatorship, Russia, and then manufacture products that we then sell to another: China. This has to end” (1).
No country in the European Union is as economically interconnected as China and the Federal Republic of Germany: Initially Germany was the stronger of the two economically, but now it’s the opposite.
While the Federal Republic is currently only China’s sixth-largest trading partner, China has been Germany’s most important trading partner for eight years.
Numerous German companies such as Siemens, Volkswagen, Daimler or BASF have been betting big on the Asian giant from the start. But not only large companies, many other midsize and supply companies saw a business opportunity there.
According to Der Spiegel, Germany’s exports to China have increased by more than 4,700 percent over the past three decades. And after the 2008 financial crisis, the German economy benefited from Beijing’s multi-billion dollar infrastructure programs.
China’s rapid recovery from the coronavirus pandemic ultimately saved the German economy from a bigger crash than it ever experienced.
German industrialists would go crazy over the steady progress of China, the modernization of its infrastructure, the Beijing regime initiating the New Silk Road.
But China is rapidly becoming independent of imported technology and creating its own technology at the expense of the Germans: first in the solar panel industry, then in high-speed trains: both heavily subsidized by Beijing.
As in the case of Russia, successive German governments, whether Christian Democrats or Social Democrats, believed in the famous “Wandel durch Handel” slogan, which said that trade helps transform countries democratically.
However, this was not the case for Russia and China, which developed in the opposite direction. The latter country in particular, with the current president Xi Jinping, has become a State that puts all its citizens under the strictest and constant surveillance, thanks to the latest technological advances. Something that does not seem very important to Western industrialists who always prefer to look the other way, who have factories or dependencies in that country.
For example, the German company Volkswagen, the world’s largest automaker, sells about 40 percent of its production and has a factory in the exact condemned Xinjiang region.
The new coalition of social democrats, greens and liberals headed by Olaf Scholz now aims to place respect for human rights at the center of negotiations with China and reduce the Asian country’s existing trade dependence, as with Russia.
The pressure on this issue comes first and foremost from the Greens, who are dedicated to a somewhat idiosyncratic but energetic defense of human rights: they have agreed to sign a contract with the United Arab Emirates as an alternative to Russian gas. It is not a complete example of a democratic regime.
In any case, the three coalition parties find it impossible, among other things, to break away completely from China because, as they explained, you have to rely on this great economic power if you want to achieve the Paris summit’s goals on climate change. climate.
At the same time, there are those who wonder why these leaked documents that talk about serious human rights violations by the Uyghurs are coming out just now, when an open trade war between the United States and China was a known thing. however, for a long time.
The main character in this story is Adrian Zenz, a German anthropologist and evangelical who immigrated with his family to the United States and works on the salary of a private American anti-communist foundation: “Communism Victims Memorial Foundation”.
Claiming to have obtained documents from the Zinyang police archive from an anonymous source, Zenz has been investigating human rights violations in Zinyang and Tibet for a while.
Contrary to what happened to her in the US, she admits that she has recently felt very alone with her issue in Europe.
(1) Quoted in the journal Der Spiegel.