U.S. media cited two U.S. intelligence officials as revealing that two years ago a senior German official suppressed intelligence reports of increasing Chinese Communist Party infiltration in order to avoid damaging commercial relations with China. EU politicians have described it as a major scandal in German politics, which has hurt German national security and Western democratic and human rights values. Commentators say that Germany has been using its “trade supremacy” to diminish its focus on human rights issues in China, while China has been using its commercial interests to threaten Western countries with red lines, calling on the EU, led by Germany, to work with the United States to counter Chinese infiltration.
According to an exclusive report by U.S. news site Axios, a senior German official suppressed an intelligence report in 2018 on China’s growing influence in Germany on the grounds that it could damage business relations with China.
Ma Jian, a British writer who has been critical of the Communist Party’s global infiltration, criticized in an interview with the station that business interests have made some governments reluctant to implement policies that would affect economic ties with China, allowing Huawei, One Belt, One Road and others to drive in from overseas. Ma hopes that the European Union, led by Germany, will abandon its appeasement policy and work with the United States to block the CCP’s expansion.
It is useless if only the U.S. does it. If other countries don’t follow up and oppose the Communist Party, the Communist Party will use money to buy their way out again.
Göran Lindblad, a Swedish politician and former vice president of the Swedish Council in Europe, said in an interview with us that for him, Communist infiltration and espionage were not surprising, but that Germany, as a democratic government official, was betraying the democratic values of its own country by covering up the report and the facts, which was a major scandal.
Lindblad also said that he met a KGB major who had fled the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and that the major had written a book, KGB Today, which revealed the spying and infiltration methods of the Communist regime, which were being carried out around the world, including buying up businesses, infiltrating organizations and elite institutions, including anti-communist groups, and corrupt civil servants and politicians in the West.
Now is the time for all democracies to wake up and take precautions, even to counteract them,” says Lindblad.
When we criticize the Chinese Communist Party’s outreach and infiltration, we should be aware that for Germany, which is highly dependent on exports, companies talk to the government and exert influence, while the Chinese Communist Party uses its business interests to break the political world,” said Zhou May, a Chinese writer living in Germany.
In the case of Germany, which is highly dependent on exports, companies will talk to the government and exert influence, and the CCP is using its business interests to break the political scene,” Zhou said. It not only corrupts Western values, but also undermines its model of power segregation.
Noah Barkin, an expert on China-EU relations at the Rhodium Group, says Germany has done a lot of self-censorship on China, and Merkel has always criticized China behind closed doors rather than in public. But now Merkel’s “trade first” approach to China is meeting resistance.
Traditionally, Germany has viewed China from an economic perspective rather than a security perspective,” Barkin said. This year, that is really starting to change, as Germans are realizing that they need to establish red lines, they need to push China more strongly, and they need to emphasize human rights.
There have been voices outside criticizing German Federal Minister of Economics and Energy (BMWi) Peter Altmaier for his tendency to downplay China’s growing human rights violations and the challenges to German national security posed by the likes of Huawei.
In April 2019, Volkswagen’s CEO Herbert Diess was heavily criticized for claiming he was unaware of the concentration camps in Xinjiang, where Chinese authorities have detained over a million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities.
Germany, the EU leader, also often sets the tone for the EU. As Berlin begins to become more assertive with China, the EU is believed to adjust its policy toward China. Earlier, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi embarked on his first PR tour of five European countries since the outbreak of the epidemic, with several countries directly raising sharp criticism and questions about the Xinjiang concentration camps, Hong Kong’s National Security Law, and Huawei’s spying.
The highly sensitive German report, which was completed in 2018, covers the Chinese government’s attempts to influence Germany at all levels of government, society, and business, according to two U.S. intelligence officials who disclosed the report to Axios. It was planned that the report would be circulated within the German government, but a high-level official intervened beforehand.
The report was completed in 2018 at a critical juncture in Sino-German relations, and the identity of the official who suppressed the report was not directly revealed in the report. According to one intelligence official, German Chancellor Angela Merkel saw the report, but few others did.
A spokesperson for the German federal government told Axios that, as a matter of principle, the German government does not comment on intelligence findings or the activities of intelligence services. The German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) also did not respond to a request for comment. We contacted the German Constitutional Defense Agency (BfV) but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
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