Beijing does not forget. Beijing is unforgiving. And Beijing punished. After Christian Lindner stopped in Hong Kong with a delegation on a trip to Asia in July 2019, there was massive criticism. The People’s Republic was also on Lindner’s itinerary at the time. However, the fixed appointments there were canceled a few hours before the start by the communist leadership.
At the time of Lindner’s visit to Hong Kong, around two million people took to the streets there to protest against the Chinese ruler’s plan to grant autonomous special rights to the financial metropolis.
In the meantime, the People’s Republic has in fact broken all the treaty commitments it had made internationally and to Hong Kong. The representatives of the democracy movement are in prison. Even the city’s ninety-plus-year-old cardinal was briefly imprisoned by Beijing’s atheist leadership for his pro-democracy sympathies.
Lindner is punished for a colleague’s visit to Taiwan
In February this year, a delegation with Federal Research Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger (FDP) visited democratic Taiwan. The nomenklatura in Beijing sees the independently governed country as part of the People’s Republic. Dictator Xi Jinping has repeatedly threatened to conquer the island. But the truth is that Taiwan, whose full name is the Republic of China, has never been under the rule of the People’s Communist Republic. But Beijing threatens and punishes anyone who seeks closer relations with the democratic republic, just as they did in Hong Kong.
After the visit of US politician Nancy Pelosi in early August 2022, the Chinese navy blocked the island for a few days and fighter jets crossed the Taiwan Strait. Only US intervention, which sent two destroyers through the Straits, ended the Beijing spectacle. It was just a matter of a war breaking out.
In this sense, the cancellation of the visit by FDP Finance Minister Christian Lindner to Beijing this week should be seen as punishment for Stark-Watzinger’s visit to Taiwan. Beijing has noticed that the governing parties FDP and Greens, unlike the Social Democrats, are distancing themselves from the Chinese dictatorship and demanding human rights and civil liberties. A uniform response from the federal government to the affront to the nomenklatura is therefore not to be expected, but rather a deepening rift.
Scholz is listed in Beijing as an asset of the People’s Republic
To date, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) has not explained why he allowed a Chinese state-owned company to invest in a part of the Port of Hamburg that is part of the German security infrastructure. Criticism rained down from everywhere: from Hamburg, from Berlin and from Brussels. But Scholz remained undeterred and has been listed in Beijing as an asset of the People’s Republic ever since. With him and Emmanuel Macron, Xi Jinping has the two most important heads of government in continental Europe in his hands.
The affront to the federal government should now be countered accordingly, for example by postponing the government consultations between Germany and the People’s Republic scheduled for June 20th. But nothing will probably come of it, since the governing parties are not pulling in the same direction when it comes to Beijing. This is made particularly clear by the fact that the China strategy that has been announced for a long time has still not been decided and published.
The FDP has done everything right when they are punished by Beijing
Political Berlin feels Beijing’s hot breath on the back of its neck. A value-based foreign policy, as the Greens are striving for, is becoming increasingly difficult in view of the resistance in the SPD and Beijing’s aggression. For the FDP, it is true that they have done everything right when Beijing punishes them for doing so.
In any case, the tale of a sudden deadline bottleneck at the Chinese finance minister, in which Beijing is trying to disguise the affront, is unlikely to be taken at face value in Berlin.
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