Chinese Ambassador to Berlin Slams China-Bashing in Frankfurter Allgemeine Interview

May 6, 2019 (EIRNS)—In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, the Sunday edition of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, China’s Ambassador Wu Ken, who took office in Berlin at the end of March, criticized the increasing discrimination against Chinese investors in Germany that is part of a widespread China-bashing campaign. Chinese investors are not rolling up the German economy, he stated. What is true instead, is that “the Germans have already invested €80 billion in China; we, however, only €11 billion in Germany.”

“As a former foreign policy advisor of the Governor of Guangdong, I know how many foreign firms have invested in this province alone and have taken over 100% (of shares) at Chinese firms,” Wu said. “On the other hand, Chinese investors unfortunately encounter increasing problems on the European and also the German market.”

Wu explained: The Belt and Road Initiative is not geopolitics, it is an economic cooperation design for a win-win for all who take part in it, and furthermore, it “is the biggest contemporary peace project,” Wu said; he called espionage charges against Chinese high-tech firms like Huawei “a mobbing campaign.” When FAZ suggested that Chinese companies could be “easily controlled by the government,” Wu countered by comparing Germany’s state share in Volkswagen to China’s in Huawei: Germany owns 20% of Volkswagen, whereas the Chinese state has not a single cent of shares in Huawei, he pointed out.

Wu also repudiated the “debt trap” argument, saying that as China has been active on the global scale only since 2013, it cannot be blamed for all the debt that has been there before, and that after all, “debt” is a rather neutral term, there are different kinds of debt—this he actually learned when studying economics in Frankfurt decades ago, Wu explained. The Chinese policy is helping countries to get out of their old debt, namely through development.

Global Times covered the interview today under the headline, “U.S. a Bully, Huawei Crackdown Politically Motivated: Chinese Envoy.”