Guten tag, China!
Lan Xinzhen

WWHILE many people in China wouldn’t be able to tell the German flag apart from a flag of another European country, most certainly would be able to identify the Volkswagen logo. This German automobile brand, the first to cooperate with Chinese auto makers, is well known in China, even in rural areas.
Although nearly all of the famous international auto brands have entered the Chinese market during the past two decades and are competing with Volkswagen, the prestige of Volkswagen has not been dampened. According to statistics of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, during the January-August period of 2007, among the top 10 auto brands with the largest sales volumes in the Chinese market, the Santana and Jetta makes produced by Volkswagen’s joint ventures in China ranked first and second. This ranking has not changed in the past 20 years.
Other German companies and brands have also entered China since the reform and opening-up drive in the late 1970s. In a survey from BBDO, one of the world’s leading advertising agencies, the image value of Germany brands among Chinese consumers reached 72 percent, higher than that of Japanese and U.S. brands. The survey also shows that among German brands in China, Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz ranked first in brand awareness with a rate of 96 percent. BMW and Siemens rank second (95 percent) and Audi third (92 percent), followed by Adidas (84 percent), Porsche (81 percent), Puma (63 percent), METRO (33 percent) and NIVEA (30 percent).
Chinese consumers commend German products for their reliable quality. With regard to social accountability, German companies are deemed as one of the best by Chinese consumers. Figures from China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) show that there are more than 2,600 German companies investing in China.
Early bird
In November 1982, Volkswagen reached an agreement with the former Shanghai Tractors and Automobiles Co. for trial production of 100 Santana sedan cars. This was the first time that China introduced auto production from a foreign company. Today, Volkswagen has two joint ventures in China-Shanghai Volkswagen, which makes Santana cars, and FAW-Volkswagen in Changchun, producer of Jetta-with a total annual output of 500,000 units. Of the 17,000 employees of the two joint ventures, 99 percent are Chinese. Over the last two decades of development, Volkswagen once occupied 80 percent of China’s auto market share.
“Success of Volkswagen in China has benefited from its localization policy to a large extent,” Yang Weiguo, researcher at the Institute of European Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told Beijing Review.
Although Volkswagen is the best-known German company in China, the earliest arrival was not Volkswagen, but Siemens. The first contract between Siemens and China was inked 135 years ago in 1872, when Siemens sold Pointer telegraphs to China. At that time, such equipment was a “hi-tech” product. Later, Siemens received other orders, such as for the lighting system in Shanghai, the submarine communications cable from Shanghai to Hong Kong laid in 1897 and the first streetcar line of Beijing built in 1904.
In August 1980, Siemens restarted its business in China, shortly after China implemented its reform and opening-up policy. Now, the products Siemens provides to the world are also offered to China, from mobile phones to medical-use computer scans, from railway technologies to power plant equipment.
By the end of the 2006 fiscal year (September 30, 2006), long-term investment made by Siemens in China had topped 15 billion yuan ($2 billion), and in the fiscal year 2006, its sales volume in China reached 50.4 billion yuan ($6.72 billion). With more than 70 operating companies, 60 representative offices and over 43,000 employees in China, Siemens has become one of the country’s foreign-funded companies with the largest number of employees.
Investment continues
On September 7, 2007, the German Confederation of Small Business and Skilled Crafts-China International Purchase Center was set up in Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, aimed at expanding the China-Germany economic and trade platform and helping German small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) speed up their connections with the Chinese market.
Indicated by the figures of the MOFCOM, in the last two years, mutual investment between China and Germany has increased, and investment made by German companies in China has been rapidly increasing.
By April 2007, over 5,500 German investment projects had been approved since 1980. Most of these projects are for production with large investment volumes and a high technological level. Since China’s reform and opening-up, paid-in capital from German companies has been $15.66 billion. In the first four months of 2007 alone, paid-in capital from Germany reached $2.22 billion, surpassing the respective total of 2005 ($1.53 billion) and 2006 ($1.98 billion). Among the total German investment in China, 90 percent has gone to the three major economic areas: the Yangtze River Delta centered on Shanghai, northeast China, and the Pearl River Delta centered on Hong Kong and Guangzhou.
Lu Bo, Deputy Director of the Department of World Economy and Trade of the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation affiliated with MOFCOM, points out that German companies have major advantages when utilizing the Chinese market with their high-quality products, advanced technologies and abundant capital. Cooperation between China and Germany in the investment area, especially in the fields like new and high technologies, as well as advanced equipment, holds great potential.
Germany is China’s largest European source of technology, after only the United States and Japan in the entire world. In the first quarter of 2007, China and Germany signed 270 contracts for technology introduction worth of $86.11 billion.
SME Spearheading
Automobiles, mechanical devices and electronic equipment, as well as chemicals are the three pillar industries of Germany where SMEs account for over 99 percent of the total. SMEs in the three industries are also the first to make their way into China.
Ernest & Young, a German accounting firm, conducted a survey on the economic and trade cooperation of German SMEs with China in 2006. The results indicated that more and more German SMEs have become aware of the huge potential of China and intend to transfer their production bases to China in the medium or long term. The survey also showed that 17 percent of German SMEs have direct economic and trade relations with China; 26 percent of German SMEs think that the rise of the Chinese economy has brought them positive influences; and 50 percent of German SMEs with economic and trade relationships with China have positive opinions of the Chinese market.
To German entrepreneurs, China is full of opportunities. The fierce international competition in the Chinese market forces German companies to strengthen their investment in China. For example, because of the intensive competition pressure from U.S. and Japanese automakers, as well as domestic Chinese companies, DaimlerChrysler has been preparing to establish its Northeast Asia Headquarters in Beijing.
In Yang’s opinion, what’s more important is that the two countries have a highly complementary economic relationship. According to Yang’s estimation, by 2010, the direct investment made by German companies in China will double, reaching $30 billion.
Positive influences
The Chinese auto industry is most influenced by Germany. Before the production of Santana cars, Volkswagen sent Chinese engineers and mechanics to factories based in Germany and Brazil for training. Since that time, before production of new models such as Jetta, Passat and Polo, Chinese employees of Volkswagen have received field training overseas or in domestic factories.
“German companies invite Chinese technical and research personnel to Germany for advanced studies and training, so that the latter can learn not only new technologies, but also new management expertise,” said Wang Jinzhen, Director of the International Relations Department of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade. Prior to cooperating with Volkswagen, Chinese auto industry was of a limited scale and lacked professionals. Yet 10 years later, the Chinese auto industry has improved in terms of scale as well as quality and management levels.
Yang believes that the impacts brought by German companies to China have been positive. Beside advanced technology and management, they have served as an important tax source for the Chinese Government. At the same time, German companies have provided a large number of job opportunities to China.
As China strengthens its efforts in environment protection, advanced German environmental technology has enormous opportunities. China increasingly needs advanced environment-friendly technologies and has created favorable policies for them, making it the largest market for such products in the world. This will attract more and more German companies engaged in environment protection to enter China and cooperate with Chinese companies. Sino-German cooperation in environment protection technologies will be a major highlight in the economic cooperation between the two countries in the future.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item)

Who made Hillary Queen?
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

AMONG SO much about American politics that can impress or depress a friendly transatlantic observer, there’s nothing more astonishing than this: Why on Earth should Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton be the front-runner for the presidency? She has now pulled well ahead of Sen. Barack Obama in both polls and fundraising. If the Democrats can’t win next year, they should give up for good, so she must be considered the clear favorite for the White House. But what has she ever done to deserve this eminence? How could a country that prides itself on its spirit of equality and opportunity possibly be led by someone whose ascent owes more to her marriage than her merits?
We all, nations as well as individuals, have difficulty seeing ourselves as others see us. In this case, I doubt that Americans realize how extraordinary their country appears from the outside. In Europe, the supposed home of class privilege and heritable status, we have abandoned the hereditary principle (apart from the rather useful institution of constitutional monarchy), and the days are gone when Pitt the Elder was prime minister and then Pitt the Younger. But Americans find nothing untoward in Bush the Elder being followed by Bush the Younger. As Americans seem to contemplate with equanimity up to 28 solid years of uninterrupted Bush-Clinton rule, please note that almost no political dynasties are left in British politics, at least on the Tory side. Admittedly, Hilary Benn, the environmental secretary, is the fourth generation of his family to sit in Parliament and the third to serve in a Labour Party Cabinet. But England otherwise has nothing now to match the noble houses of Kennedy, Gore and Bush.
And in no other advanced democracy today could someone with Clinton’s resume even be considered a candidate for national leadership. Wives do sometimes inherit political reins from their husbands, but usually in recovering dictatorships in Latin America such as Argentina, where Sen. Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner may succeed President Nestor Kirchner, or Third World countries such as Sri Lanka or the Philippines — and in those cases often when the husbands have been assassinated. In one democracy after another, women have been enfranchised, entered politics and risen to the top. The United States lags far behind in every way. A record number of women now serve in Congress, which only makes the figures — 71 of 435 House members and 16 of 100 senators — all the more unimpressive. Compare those statistics with Norway’s, where 37 percent of lawmakers are women. In Sweden, it’s 45 percent.
More to the point, women who make political careers in other democracies do it their way, which usually means the hard way. Margaret Thatcher made her way from a lower-middle-class home to Oxford at a time when there were few women there. She then had not one but two careers, as a barrister and as an industrial chemist. She entered Parliament in 1959 and served there for more than 30 years, working her way up as a Conservative backbencher, junior minister and then Cabinet minister. She was at a disadvantage in what was still very much a chaps’ party, dominated by men who had attended the same schools and belonged to the same clubs. But she ignored all that. In 1975, she was the only Tory with the guts to challenge Edward Heath for the party leadership, and in 1979 she led her party to victory in the first of three general elections.
To be sure, some women in politics have been less successful than others. France’s first female prime minister was Edith Cresson, who lasted less than a year, and the first Canadian was poor Kim Campbell, who held the job for less than six months before leading her party to catastrophic electoral defeat. But Helen Clark in New Zealand and Angela Merkel in Germany have fought the political fight on equal terms, neither expecting nor receiving any favors because of their gender. What a contrast Clinton presents! New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has written that without her marriage, Clinton might be a candidate for president of Vassar, but not of the United States. Yet the truly astonishing nature of her career still doesn’t seem to have impinged on Americans. Seven years ago she turned up in New York, expecting to be made senator by acclamation. Until that point, she had never even sought any elective office, nor had she held any executive-branch position. The only political task with which she had ever been entrusted was her husband’s health-care reforms, and she made a complete hash of that.
No doubt she has been a diligent senator, even if the cutting words of the New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier about “the most plodding and expedient politician in America” ring painfully true, and no doubt her main Democratic rivals have only quite modest experience themselves: Obama’s stint in the Illinois state legislature before entering the US Senate in 2005, John Edwards’ one term in the Senate. But both men are unquestionably self-made, and no one can say they are where they are because of any kin or spouse. Predictably enough, Clinton’s husband has tried to defend her. Dynasties mean the kings of France, Bill Clinton told Tim Russert on “Meet the Press,” whereas Hillary has had “a totally different career path” from his, “from a different political base” to a different “set of expertise areas.”

—Arab News



US-Iran stand-off: Never say never again!
Seumas Milne

IT SEEMS almost incredible after the catastrophe of the Iraq war, but the signs are growing that the Bush administration wants to do it all over again — this time to Iran. Just as in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Washington air is thick with unsubstantiated claims about weapons of mass destruction; demonisation of the country’s president has reached bizarre proportions; Intelligence leaks about links with Al Qaeda and attacks on US and British targets are now routine; demands for war from the administration’s neoconservative outriders are becoming increasingly strident; the pronouncements of George Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, are turning ever more belligerent — and administration sources claim that the British government is privately ready to play ball.
You might imagine after invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq at such huge human and strategic cost, an attack on another Muslim country would be the last thing on the US president’s mind. But the drumbeat of war has been unmistakable since the summer, when Bush declared he had “authorised our military commanders in Iraq to confront Teheran’s murderous activities”, and the administration let it be known that it was preparing to brand Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a “terrorist organisation”. Last month (SEP) Bernard Kouchner, the hawkish new French foreign minister, insisted that “we must expect the worst” and “the worst is war” — while Mohamed El Baradei, the UN’s chief weapons inspector in charge of overseeing Iran’s nuclear programme, warned against the “neo-crazies” pushing for an attack after 700,000 had died in Iraq on “suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons”. Meanwhile, Israel’s recent air raid on Iran’s ally Syria has been widely interpreted as, at least in part, a power play aimed at Teheran.
This week John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the UN, used the British Conservative party’s conference to call for an attack on Iran, as leaks to the US Press about war preparations continued. Newsweek reported that Cheney had been discussing the possibility of encouraging Israel to launch missile strikes at an Iranian nuclear site in order to provoke Iran into “lashing out”, and open the way to a wider US assault. And in the New Yorker magazine, the investigative writer Seymour Hersh reported that in a videoconference this summer Bush told the US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, that he was thinking of attacking targets in Iran, and the British “were on board”.
A Downing Street spokesman said recently that the “prime minister and president have never had a discussion about an attack on Iran in Iran” and that the government was pursuing a diplomatic solution. “Of course, it’s the job of a lot of people to see that contingency planning is done,” he added, but denied that any go-ahead had been given. The echoes of similar denials in the run-up to the Iraq war, however, cannot be missed. Nor should the reference to an attack on Iran “in Iran”. Both the US and British military now regard themselves as already involved in a proxy war with Iran in Iraq, as General Petraeus recently told the US congress. What is becoming clearer is that the likely pretext for aggression against Iran has shifted from the possibility that Teheran might develop nuclear weapons to its role in supporting and allegedly arming the resistance in neighbouring Iraq and Afghanistan.

—Khaleej Times