China would like to participate in a container terminal in the port of Hamburg. This causes resentment, even within the traffic light government. China wants to use such investments to determine world trade, but also to influence the policies of the respective countries.
The question of Chinese participation in the port of Hamburg is growing into an internal government conflict. The SPD-led Chancellery reportedly wants the deal, but the Liberals and the Greens are against it.
They say that the port is a security-relevant infrastructure in which a dictatorship like the Chinese should not have any shares. Since the People’s Republic is led by the Communist Party, Xi Jinping would be right at the table when future decisions were made about the well-being of the Port of Hamburg.
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China already holds at least thirty percent stakes in numerous relevant ports in Europe and its vicinity: Genoa, Marseille, Valencia, Bilbao, Le Havre, Rotterdam and Antwerp and Piraeus, as well as in Casablanca, Tangier Port Said and Istanbul.
The aim of the People’s Republic is to use these investments to determine world trade on the one hand and to influence politics in the respective countries on the other.
Of course, shipping also generates profits. The Chinese state can use this to invest in surveillance technologies and other instruments for its own people.
In the People’s Republic the XX. National Congress, a jubilee event in which the personal details agreed in back rooms for the next five years are accepted by acclamation.
In his almost two-hour opening speech, ruler Xi, who will secure his third term in office at the party congress, emphasized that in the coming “difficult years” China must be prepared to be better armed against enemies both externally and internally.
Xi’s vision for the world is an all-powerful China, on which the other nations are economically dependent and which Beijing can consequently dominate at will.
Since Xi Jinping’s radicalization became public knowledge, several countries have sought to escape the octopus of Chinese state capitalism. For example, the Chinese telecommunications group Huawei is not allowed to operate in the United Kingdom and France.
The prospect of being spied on by Beijing in the future and putting critical infrastructure in the hands of a regime that commits genocide against parts of its own population is too dangerous.
In Berlin, the two smaller governing parties clearly see the potential threat that would emanate from a deal in Hamburg.
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The SPD, on the other hand, does not. Chancellor Scholz is about to illustrate that he has learned nothing from the Russian debacle in terms of gas dependency.
By investing in companies that work with robots or artificial intelligence, the People’s Republic wants to tap knowledge from Germany as a high-tech location and channel it to the People’s Republic.
China’s acquisition of the robot company Midea in 2016 marked a turning point in the public and political perception of China. After that, the rules were procured.
In 2018, this led to a Chinese power grid provider not being allowed to acquire a twenty percent stake in the German grid.
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The impression that China could still be kept away from Hamburg is wrong. A Chinese company already owns 99-year lease rights to the port area.
The German Marshall Fund sees one reason why the People’s Republic is interested in the port of Hamburg in that one of the bases of the German Navy is located in its immediate vicinity.
Every ship that departs from there has to go through the port leased by China. The Chinese operating company is said to have worked with the Chinese army in the past, which reinforces the Marshall Fund’s fears.
In view of this situation, it is to be hoped that the Chancellery will give up its campaign for Chinese participation in the Port of Hamburg and join the position of the FDP and the Greens.
Alexander Görlach is Honorary Professor of Ethics at Leuphana University in Lüneburg and Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York. The PhD linguist and theologian is currently working on a project on “digital cosmopolitanism” at the Internet Institute of the University of Oxford and the Faculty of Philosophy at New York University.
Alexander Görlach was a Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Harvard University in the USA and Cambridge University in England. After stints in Taiwan and Hong Kong, he has focused on the rise of China and what it means for East Asian democracies in particular. He has recently published the following titles: “Red Alert: Why China’s Aggressive Foreign Policy in the Western Pacific Is Leading to a Global War” (Hoffmann
From 2009 to 2015, Alexander Görlach was also the publisher and editor-in-chief of the debate magazine The European, which he founded. Today he is a columnist and author for various media such as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the New York Times. He lives in New York and Berlin.
