Emmanuel Macron visited Beijing with 60 business leaders in tow, clearly playing the good cop. Ursula von der Leyen appeared more as a bad cop. Has the strategy of the French President and the President of the European Commission paid off?No. China escalated the situation in the Taiwan Strait shortly after their departure. Although the […]
The Japanese have cherry blossoms. The people of Qingdao, on the other hand, are proud of their pear trees. Wearing traditional Han Dynasty clothing, they are currently celebrating the pear blossom – even if it doesn’t shimmer quite as pink as the Japanese ornamental cherry.
What Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen are planning for their visit to Beijing could be a diplomatic masterstroke – or it could end in a fiasco.The French president apparently believes in the good in Xi Jinping and hopes that he can have an appeasing effect on aggressor Putin, possibly even as a mediator. […]
The political relationship between China and Japan has been strained for a long time. Time and again disputes arise over islands in the East China Sea and not least over a supposedly unsatisfactory apology by Japan for its crimes in China committed during World War II.But for the most part, Japan managed to keep the […]
If you walk along Shanghai’s famous Waitan (外滩, The Bund) waterfront today, you will see luxury boutiques on one side, and the skyline of Shanghai’s Luijiazui financial district in Pudong across the Huangpu River on the other. The atmosphere there does not exactly feel like walking in a communist country. Formally, China, the world’s second-largest […]
From the Western and especially the Ukrainian perspective, the images could not be worse. Xi and Putin, apparently happy and united, pledge their “eternal friendship”. The mood is: Together against the West. This sentiment unites the former rivals. With these images from Moscow, a bloc is forming that will divide the world like we have […]
German automakers currently do not have an easy time in China. On the one hand, there is the Xinjiang risk: Although VW, in particular, has been assuring for months that none of its suppliers is involved in the human rights violations by the Chinese state against Uyghurs, a new study nevertheless identifies prison and internment […]
That the German government wants to ban Huawei technology from 5G networks was somewhat lost in China in view of the flood of news surrounding the National People’s Congress at the beginning of the week. But in the meantime, the topic is being hotly debated in the People’s Republic, especially on social media.However, the leadership […]
The annual National People’s Congress (NPC) has begun. With 3,000 delegates, it is theoretically the largest legislative assembly in the world. But in reality, they do not have much to say. They rubber-stamp what the party leadership hands them. The new personnel tableau after the departure of the previous Premier Li Keqiang and the experienced […]
Just a year ago, the Chinese leadership had warned developers and investors: “No more excesses.” State and Party leader Xi Jinping himself reprimanded them: “Houses are for living, not for speculating.” But there is no sign of the supposed turnaround toward moderation in the real estate market. The government is falling back into old patterns […]