TAICANG, China — German and Chinese flags flutter along
tree-lined avenues. Workers are erecting a shopping and hotel project with the
half-timbered style of architecture more typically found in places like Bavaria
or the Black Forest. A nearby restaurant serves Thuringia grilled sausages,
fried pork sausages and lots of sauerkraut.
اضافة اعلان
And in Erwin Gerber’s bakery nearby in Taicang, an
industrial city a little more than an hour’s drive northwest of Shanghai,
hungry customers can buy a loaf of country sourdough bread or a pretzel baked
the way they are made in Baden-Württemberg.
“Everything you find in Germany,” Gerber said, “you will
find in my bakery.”
Taicang epitomizes the deep ties between the world’s second-
and fourth-largest economies. The Chinese city is so tightly knit with
Germany’s industrial machine that some people call it “Little Swabia,” after
the German region that the owners of many of its factories call home.
But the relationship has also raised concerns that Germany
has become overly dependent on China. That could be a particularly thorny
problem for President Joe Biden, who has made isolating Beijing on trade and
geopolitical issues a major part of his overall China strategy.
In December, Germany played a dominant role in hammering out
an initial European Union investment protection deal with China, despite
objections from the incoming Biden administration. German Chancellor Angela
Merkel has defended the agreement as necessary to help European companies make
further gains in China. She signaled in January that she does not want Germany
to take sides in a new cold war, telling the World Economic Forum, “I’m not in
favor of the formation of blocs.”
Her stance could have broad sway throughout Europe, given
Germany’s position as its largest economy.
“It’s a swing state in terms of influence,” said Theresa
Fallon, director of the Center for Russia Europe Asia Studies in Brussels.
Germany will be under growing pressure in the months ahead
to pick a side. The deal with China still requires approval from the European
Parliament, where many are hostile to it.
It could also face pressure during the early June summit of
the Group of 7 industrialized nations, which also includes France, Italy, the
United States, Canada, Britain and Japan. Biden wants to strengthen that
institution after former President Donald Trump gave it short shrift over the
past four years.
Some European politicians, voters and rights groups want
Germany to take a tougher stance on human rights abuses. They cite China’s
crackdown on the democracy movement in Hong Kong and its detention of as many
as 1 million members of predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, in
China’s far west.
“We are not happy about vague promises made in regard to the
brutal suppression of the minorities,” said Reinhard Bütikofer, a member of the
European Parliament who is the Green Party’s spokesperson on foreign policy
issues.
Even Germany’s leading business groups, while generally
backing Merkel’s stance, have called on China to answer to the criticism.
“The human rights situation in Xinjiang as well as the
political situation in Hong Kong strain our political and economic relations,”
said Joachim Lang, director-general of the powerful German Federation of
Industries. “It should be in China’s own best interest to provide greater
clarity to the international community regarding conditions on the ground and
respond to the allegations.”
China rejects the criticisms as interference in its internal
affairs. European companies in China have said they avoid the use of forced
labor in Xinjiang.
Germany has benefited from its ties with China, particularly
during the pandemic. China has overtaken the United States as Germany’s biggest
trading partner and become the major market for many of its companies.
Mercedes-Benz sold three times as many cars in China last year as it did in the
United States.
Yet some in Germany fear that the Chinese bonanza is coming
to an end. China has stepped up its efforts to compete with German companies in
precision machinery or acquire them outright. Executives at some German
companies in Taicang said local managers they trained had left to form
competitors.
German-owned factories make the precision machinery that
many Chinese manufacturers need to keep running. If Beijing succeeds in its bid
for industrial self-reliance, a recent study by the Bertelsmann Foundation
warned, China will no longer need them.
“It won’t be a win-win situation anymore,” said Ulrich
Ackermann, director of foreign markets for the Mechanical Engineering Industry
Association, known by its German initials, VDMA, which financed the study by
the foundation.
Most of the German companies in Taicang are small and
midsize manufacturers that make niche industrial products, or the “Mittelstand”
companies that underpin the German economy.
Germany’s first roots in Taicang were planted in 1985, when
Hans-Jochem Steim, managing director of a German manufacturer of wire springs,
went looking for a place to build a factory. Taicang, little more than a
collection of villages then, was a short drive north from Shanghai’s only
commercial airport at the time and had a small-town atmosphere that reminded
him of the company’s hometown, Schramberg in Swabia.
Kern-Liebers, Steim’s manufacturer, was the first of what
turned out to be more than 350 German companies that set up operations in
Taicang, drawn by cheap real estate, a nearby airport and cooperative local
officials. Steim encouraged his longtime suppliers to follow him.
“The first 20 German investors were more or less his
friends,” said Richard Zhang, CEO of Kern-Liebers’ China operations.
German investors helped transform Taicang into a city with
almost 1 million people. Workers who once rode bicycles now drive cars.
In 2004, when Klaus Gerlach was setting up operations for
Krones, a German maker of machinery for the food and beverage industry, “we had
one car in the parking lot, and it was mine,” he said. “Today, the parking lot
is full of cars.”
The downside of that growth is that Taicang, like factory
towns all over China, is suffering from a shortage of blue-collar labor.
Workers tend to job hop frequently unless they receive pay raises and other
benefits.
Kern-Liebers has set 5,000 yuan or $775, as the monthly pay
for entry-level workers, a more than sixteenfold increase from the 1990s.
“At that time,” Zhang said, “we paid 300, and everyone was
very happy. Now we pay 5,000, and they are not so happy.”
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