“China has done a lot to respect and protect the cultural heritage of Tibetan people.”
Such glowing praise for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) reign over Tibet would not be misplaced in a speech by General Secretary Xi Jinping. Yet in fact China’s state-run news agency Xinhua was quoting Alexander Birle, an office manager of the German Hanns Seidel Stiftung (HSS) in China. He had visited Lhasa on a paid tour of Tibet. During an interview with Chinese state media, Birle used the propaganda term “Xizang” for Tibet.
His reported comments stood in stark contrast to the foundation’s claim to support China’s transition towards an open society based on the rule of law, good government and participation. They were also at odds with the foundation’s original mission at home. Established after World War II, Germany’s political foundations are supposed to foster citizen engagement through social and democratic political education, thus contributing to a free and democratic political order.
In a subsequent press release the HSS claimed that Birle’s reported quote was “highly truncated and therefore misleading summary of a longer interview conducted in English” Klotzbücher, a German Sinologist at Comenius University in Bratislava was not convinced. He tweeted: “the moment you’ve said something into a microphone or camera, there is no going back. You are used as needed by propaganda. You have surrendered. If your employee #hss doesn’t know that, they are ignorant about CCP propaganda.”
The controversy about Birle’s comments reveals that German political foundations in China face a dilemma: if their representatives promote democratic values publicly, they risk confrontation with the ruling CCP. But when they start paying tribute to speech codes of the Chinese leadership instead, they risk turning German political foundations into propaganda tools of the party-state. That said, is there a third middle-way possible which makes most of a difficult situation and avoids falling into the trap of self-censorship?
This is a question I have often wondered about observing the challenging work of German political foundations in China over the past twenty years. By now, the CCP enjoys too much destructive leverage for the foundations to refocus their strategic approaches. In consequence, to restore their organisational autonomy and contribute to greater autocracy competence in Germany, they should exit China. This will allow them to warn about the dangers posed by an increasingly neo-totalitarian China.
From conditional tolerance to political neutering
But let us rewind a bit. During China’s so-called ‘reform and opening up’ era (1978-2012) we witnessed an uneasy coexistence between isolation and openness. The crackdown on China’s nationwide anti-corruption and pro-democracy movement in 1989 resulted in a political winter throughout the early 1990s. The Friedrich Naumann Stiftung (FNS) of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) — comparable to the UK’s Liberals — had to close its representative office following a Tibet conference in Bonn in 1996.
Following China’s WTO accession in 2001, German political foundations could capitalise on a brief political thaw. The Heinrich Boell Stiftung foundation (HBS) of the Alliance 90/The Greens for example started partnering with the China Association for NGO Cooperation (CANGO), a government-organised non-governmental organisation. Throughout the early 2000s, HBS engaged with environmental NGOs which enjoyed at least some autonomy.
Yet since 2012 and under Xi’s hard-authoritarian turn, representative offices of German political foundations have morphed from assets into liabilities. Since the anti-liberal Overseas NGO Law came into effect in 2017, German political foundations Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS) of the Conservative CDU, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) associated with the Social Democrats (SPD) and HBS were forced to partner with the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC).
CPAFFC is part of China’s united front bureaucratic bureaucracy, which aims to enhance the rule of the CCP to increase the country’s influence abroad. Coercive partnerships, however, make open-ended dialogue and cooperation impossible: As early as 2016, the German journalist Petra Kolonko reported that German political foundations had started refraining from addressing politically sensitive issues which they had previously addressed.
By now foundation representatives will have gained considerable first-hand experience with the closing doors for dialogue and cooperation with China. They would be well-positioned to inform the German public about the consequences of Xi’s neo-totalitarian rule. Yet instead, they have kept a low profile in Germany’s public discourse on China, probably to safeguard their projects and their representative offices there. Their silence should be viewed as a sign of capitulation.
Recent controversial studies on China from German political foundations raise doubts about their willingness and ability to defend democracy against the CCP’s increasingly aggressive form of authoritarianism. A February 2024 FES study is a case in point. Its authors argued that an operative German China policy was taking place at the local level. Surprisingly, their study did not include existing research on the danger of German municipal actors coopted by the CCP’s united front. Past instances of self-censorship at local Confucius Institutes (CI) in Hamburg (2014) and Duisburg (2021) were not mentioned, either.
Another example is a controversial study published in 2021 by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung foundation (RLS) of the Left Party. The study’s editor pretended that China remains a closed book despite intensive Western engagement with China and that the German media were now framing China as an enemy. Such an assessment was hardly convincing. As Western journalists and experts gain on-the-ground experience with China’s autocracy, media coverage evolves to reflect their growing understanding.
As early as in 2010, the HBS had published a similar study which insinuated that German media reporting was marked by “systemic ‘competing of oneself’ with China” which supposedly would “lead to self-centred and partly ideological reporting”. The study advocated “more holistic reporting” and implied it was deplorable that German media and the public had focused too much on the unrest in Tibet in 2008 ahead of the Beijing Olympics. Coincidentally, during that period, the HBS had established an office in Beijing, and cut ties with the exile Tibetan community which it had supported since the days of Petra Kelly.
The German Sinologist Thomas Heberer, one of the study’s authors, repeatedly complained about ‘one-sided’ and ‘distorted reporting’. In an op-ed in 2008, when western relations with China were much better than now, he had already lamented a supposedly ‘negative distorted image‘ of China in western media and argued that ‘over the past three decades, China’s political leadership has certainly proven that it is capable of learning.’ Following the publication of the HBS study in 2010, Heberer also admonished German journalists in China to engage in ‘self-criticism and self-reflection‘ about their supposedly ‘European instruction culture [that is European know-it-alls]‘.
Heberer’s advice gained a whole new meaning in light of a highly controversial op-ed which he published with fellow Sinologist Schmidt-Glintzer in Neue Zürcher Zeitung in autumn 2023. In this widely critiqued article, the two authors whitewashed human rights abuses in Xinjiang. It should be noted that Heberer was a mentor for many young German sinologists throughout the early 2000s. He has also been repeatedly published by the center-left political foundations HBS (2010, 2011) and FES (2017, 2020).
It is the responsibility of German political foundations to promote democratic values and not normalise authoritarian regimes. During China’s so-called ‘reform and opening up’ era (1978-2012) they could still make good use of existing grey areas to promote democratic values. Yet since the enactment of the draconian Overseas NGO Law in 2017 their representative offices in China have become major liabilities. The political compromises they have accepted to maintain their presence in China contradict their mission. To be able to pursue critical engagement, German political foundations should close their offices in China.
This way, German foundations can remove themselves from the immediate pressures of the party state — pressures that now clearly outweigh the benefits associated with a permanent on-the-ground presence. As Katherine Wilhelm, Executive Director of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, has rightly pointed out “no organization should compromise its mission in order to keep a China program active.” It needs to be understood that the decoupling in the non-profit sector is entirely of Beijing’s making. Re-coupling will require political liberalisation, which appears unlikely in the foreseeable future.
This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the China Foresight Forum, LSE IDEAS, nor The London School of Economics and Political Science.
The cover image of the German village in Changde, Hunan Province (湖南常德德国小镇) is available from the website of Changde Economic Construction Investment Group Co., Ltd. (常德市经济建设投资集团有限公司).
