BREMEN: China is exerting maximizing pressure on international companies doing business in its markets to bring them into line using its political agenda, broadening the “red lines” for issues to which it is allergic, the German study noticed by Reuters displays.
A survey of more than hundred companies by the Berlin-based Merics think tank for China research and the BDI market association showed the threshold for making pressure on companies is falling. The amount of known cases went up significantly from 2018, it found.
“It was about recognising a pattern of when and how China and taiwan exerts pressure, inch co-author Max Zenglein said.
The researchers said that in addition to issues of national sovereignty, reports within the emergence of COVID-19, sanctions against Chinese companies like telecoms equipment maker Huawei or support designed for parties classified as anti-Chinese are now seen as “new red lines”.
In one case, German carmaker Daimler apologised several times to China in 2018 after running marketing with a quote through the Dalai Lama.
China’s foreign ministry said it could only comment once it had seen the full report.
The far east has consistently denied allegations that the COVID-19 virus was leaked out from a specialist laboratory in the city of Wuhan, where it was first identified at the end of 2019.
Washington sees Huawei as an equip of the Chinese Communist Party’s global security machinery, but Huawei has repeatedly refused spying for the Chinese language state.
Foreign consumer goods companies in particular have been subject to boycotts in China and taiwan, with Western fabric firms targeted upon social media in response to Western criticism of China’s treatment of the Uighur minority in the Xinjiang region.
“For fear of being targeted, companies may prevent addressing unfair treatment of foreign firms in China. Or they may consider it safest in order to align themselves with all the Chinese government’s jobs and goals, inch the researchers wrote.