Dhe USA welcomes the German government’s restrictions on the entry of the Chinese shipping company Cosco into the operating company of a terminal at the Port of Hamburg. As a result, the state-owned Chinese company will not have any say in the matter, a senior official at the US State Department said on Wednesday. According to the agreements, Cosco could not acquire a majority stake. This is important for the standards that the USA wants to enforce.
The federal government has decided to allow Cosco a maximum stake of 24.9 percent in the terminal. This means that the Chinese group is prevented from influencing the management of the operating company. The green representatives in the federal government in particular fear China’s influence being too great. Cosco had actually agreed the purchase of 35 percent of the terminal operator with the logistics group HHLA.
Scholz leaves for China
The Biden administration has apparently also worked behind the scenes for this. A senior US official called it a success of this push that Berlin only approved the sale of a smaller stake in a Hamburg container terminal to a state-owned company from the People’s Republic.
Washington passed the recommendation through the embassy in Berlin that China should not be given a controlling stake in the port facility, according to the official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity on Wednesday.
The Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, is working with European governments to ensure investments in strategic areas are carefully scrutinized to prevent autocratic powers like China from taking control.
Scholz arrives in China on Friday with a delegation that also includes Volkswagen CEO Oliver Blume and other German captains of industry. Washington wants to prevent Berlin from tying itself too closely to China economically because the US fears a dependency similar to that of Russian natural gas. In a guest article for the FAZ, Scholz explained what he wanted to achieve with the trip to Beijing.
