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make some inroads into the mainstream German press. China Daily’s advertisement supplement, China Watch, is published in only one daily, after readers protested its inclusion in another paper. In 2017, China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency partnered with a German firm, the German Television News Agency or DFA, to provide soft features about how important China is to Germany. Called Nihao Deutschland, the program has been criticized as propaganda in the mainstream German press.*
Reaction
It is in business, the one area of tangible Chinese influence efforts, where pushback has begun in Germany. Chancellor Merkel and French president Emmanuel Macron have initiated discussions with businesses and the EU Commission on ways to establish stricter investment screening procedures and to push for more reciprocity for European firms in China. In April 2018, the second chamber of the German parliament (representing the federal states) passed a resolution to lower the threshold at which the government may intervene in foreign direct investment (FDI) projects in Germany.
The measure was Clearly targeted at China. As for the EU, the German government has supported language that criticizes the BRI concept for hampering free trade and putting Chinese companies at an advantage.°*
Conclusion
Many of the coercive actions documented here are for the most part measures one might imagine German diplomats abroad also adopting. What raises questions are
the size of China’s activities and its objectives. China can wield massive resources in pushing its public diplomacy agenda. This can turn German and European partners into pawns. The outsize dimension of China’s influence efforts can render them improper or even illegitimate. China’s efforts on the investment side often involve draining technical know-how from German firms. On the political side, its support of Central European countries has been carried out with the aim of dividing the primary political organization of Europe, the EU. Neither of these can be regarded as proper and legitimate behavior between states.
The risk of Chinese interference in Germany is serious in the medium to long term, even though so far it is mainly an indirect one and German society by and large has proven sufficiently resilient. A preliminary recommendation on how to prevent the problem from becoming more serious would be to focus on more cohesion, exchange, and transparency among countries concerned, first of all within the EU. This will
take time and effort, considering that some countries in Europe (such as a few Eastern European nations along with Greece) hope to use their support of China’s political or technological goals to lure Chinese investment. Still, as a leader of Europe, Germany— along with France—needs to initiate a broad-based discussion among the public and
Appendix 2
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020623