The Port of Hamburg gets its China deal. Thanks to Olaf Scholz. The Chancellor will soon have to pay a price for his lonely decision. If he likes his government.
Has anything like this ever happened before? A Chancellor pushes through a decision against his own ministers, against his two coalition partners, against his own secret services, against the European Commission, against the French President. And against your own promise too.
Olaf Scholz, who constantly warns against German going it alone during the Ukraine war, is now going it alone when it comes to China, the next authoritarian state. And that in order to enable a Chinese state-owned company to have a 24.9 percent stake in a terminal in the Port of Hamburg. Is Scholz still chancellor or the mayor of Hamburg again?
“There remains a mistake.” Says Rebecca Lang, the head of the Greens. It’s “completely wrong,” says Katrin Göring-Eckardt, the Greens’ Vice-President of the Bundestag. “It’s certainly not a cross-departmental strategy for China,” says Britta Hasselmann, leader of the Greens. It’s “damage limitation,” says Irene Mihalic, the Greens’ parliamentary secretary. “Damage limitation” was what Franziska Brandtner, the Green State Secretary to the Green Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck, first called it. That was yesterday, in the Economic Committee, behind closed doors.
Whose damage is being limited here: that of the Chancellor, because it would have been tantamount to a vote of no confidence if the Green Ministers had refused to support Olaf Scholz? The damage of the coalition that, if only the Greens had followed their convictions, would have ended? Or the damage to Germany if China had received 35 and not just under 25 percent, and with it the crackdown on the management.
The Greens are pissed off, they think they’re right. They can do that too, because they have the coalition agreement jointly decided by the traffic light groups on their side. It provides for a paradigm shift in foreign policy. A break with Angela Merkel’s “business first”, as the Green Federal Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called it. Baerbock now calls China a “system rival”. Merkel would never have done that.
In any case, there can be no question of a value-based foreign policy with the China port deal, Scholz and Baerbock are throwing their values overboard. Marcel Fratzscher, the economist, who is certainly not a Christian Democrat, is pointing this out mercilessly. Value-based foreign policy means taking the constitution of the trading partner into account when making foreign and trade policy decisions.
And that is clear in the case of China: China has just changed from an authoritarian state to a dictatorship, as Union foreign policy expert Norbert Röttgen points out. The dictator, Xi Jinping, now in his third term against the original constitution, demonstratively has his predecessor Hu Jintao, who, as the constitution stipulated, only had two terms, carried away at the CP party congress.
One can no longer have any illusions about China’s character. The potentate Xi threatens democratic Taiwan with far-fetched historical fabrications just as the potentate Vladimir Putin threatened democratic Ukraine with far-fetched historical fabrications before he attacked it with his squad of soldiers, murdering and raping.
China locks people in camps in Xiangjin for belonging to a different faith than Han Chinese. It’s a form of racial politics. China is repressing once-free Hong Kong despite promising the world otherwise. And China is using digitization to subject every single person to its “value system”.
The liberal Federal Minister of Justice does what is in his office – and refers to the German constitution. Keeping China at a distance, i.e. away from “critical infrastructure”, is a “question of independence”, i.e. German sovereignty.
In principle, the liberal Minister of Education also said: “Countries without democracy and the rule of law should not be allowed to buy shares in the Port of Hamburg and other infrastructure.” Which does not mean: “Decoupling”, i.e. isolation from China, but only: not making yourself vulnerable to blackmail. Actually a matter of course when dealing with dictatorships. But it was not a matter of course – look at Russia.
In the end, the Greens and the FDP in the federal cabinet allowed Olaf Scholz to do so. Knowing that this would earn them accusations of opportunism in power. But should the coalition at the port of Hamburg fail? In the end it wasn’t worth it to them.
But it is now also clear: Olaf Scholz will have to pay a price for this second de facto policy decision within a very short time. It is already clear which one: Ricarda Lang expects Scholz to speak “plain language” on his upcoming trip to China – not only about human rights, but also about the differences in the system. And she demands that Annalena Baerbock can push through the new, tougher, far less concessional China strategy in the government that she is currently working on.
The next major conflict is thus looming in the coalition. Does Germany side with its most important ally, the USA, who wants to isolate China and therefore block its (semiconductor) future? Or can China – keep it up – remain this extremely important trading partner, one that opens the door to the Middle Kingdom for more and more German companies? The then: What? – allowed to sell there? In general: When does “critical infrastructure” start? What about Huawei and its “attack” on the German networks? Is it a 5G “attack”?
The good thing about the Hamburg-China debate, as one of the Berlin coalition members put it, is that “a light is now being shed in the dark”. Most of it went under the radar for years, or at the municipal level like in Duisburg, which hardly anyone in the circling Berlin cosmos was interested in. That’s over now, end of secrecy.
Thanks to the Hamburg Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, the Port of Hamburg gets what it wants – and maybe also needs, in order to be able to stand up to the port competition in Europe.
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