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In 2016, the chair of the Human Rights Committee of the German Parliament was told he would not be allowed to visit China with the rest of the committee if he did not delete a report from his home page on Tibetan flags being hoisted at German town halls. The committee refused to go on the trip.
Academia
More than one hundred thousand Chinese nationals live in Germany, most of them students. Intense exchanges take place between universities, research institutes,
and think tanks, as well as between scholars in many areas, both natural and social sciences. Similar to academics from other countries, several German researchers and academics with a reputation of being critical toward the Chinese government have been denied visas or access to interlocutors in China. China in general targets junior scholars for cultivation. Contacts are initiated from China with invitations to join research projects, apply for grants, attend conferences, and write articles with the promise that they will be published.
A notable instance of coercion occurred when the publishing company Springer Nature removed an estimated one thousand publications from its Internet catalog for China because their titles might not coincide with official political positions of Beijing. So far, Springer has yet to reverse its decision, unlike Cambridge University Press in a similar instance.
German universities host twenty Confucius Institutes (out of approximately 160 in all of Europe). Like their counterparts elsewhere, they invest more in gaining general sympathy in German civil society through cultural activities than in advancing an overtly political agenda (which does occur, although rarely). There are fifty-eight Chinese Students and Scholars Associations in Germany that are well organized and seemingly well funded.
Civil Society
Chinese officials regularly complain about the negative attitude toward China in the German public, proven by polls, but do not yet tackle the problem directly. Activities in the PRC by German nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and political foundations are increasingly confined in their activities, not only through China’s new NGO law but also because former Chinese partners are reluctant to cooperate.
In a letter to the interior ministries of German federal states, the Chinese embassy requested that communities be asked not to hoist Tibetan flags on Tibet Day (March 10). In some cases, ministries complied, but in the majority of cases they did not. Almost none of the communities complied. The Chinese embassy in Berlin
Appendix 2
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