First preliminary stage: economic war against China?

by Prof. Dr. Eberhard Hamer*, Germany

(2 May 2023) (Edit.) With his frank analyses, Professor Eberhard Hamer, founder of the “Mittelstandsinstitut Niedersachsen” (Lower Saxony Institute for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses), doesn’t beat about the bush. Particularly in these times, in which the political guidance of Germany, takes orders from big brother almost like a subordinate bailiff. Will Germany refuse to comply with the disastrous China policy of the U.S. administration?

For decades, Eberhard Hamer has been committed to the backbone of the German economy – the small firm sector. Very many self-employed entrepreneurs, often family entrepreneurs, are struggling for the survival of their businesses in these times, a consequence of out-of-touch politics. Small and medium-sized businesses have hardly any time or opportunity for intrigues and lobbying in Berlin or Brussels, as the big players can afford to do. This is reflected in anti-business policies that favour global corporations and disadvantage national companies.

Despite being over 90 years old, Eberhard Hamer always looks at the big picture and, thanks to his independence, relentlessly points out undesirable developments. A role model from Germany which the “Swiss Standpoint” greatly values.

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President Biden obviously prepared Scholz with a short command in Washington [on March 3] that the USA had planned sanctions against China and that Germany as China’s second largest trading partner (after the USA) had to participate in this.

Since then, the Anglo-Saxon press (also in our country), the Greens, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) have been invoking the danger of our economy becoming dependent on China.

Obviously, this is the same overture as with the Ukraine war: first the invocation of dependency on Russia, then sanctions by the U.S. and its NATO satellites, then more and more arms deliveries and financing of the war by Europe up to war participation with deliveries of ammunition, tanks, and howitzers training of Ukrainian soldiers, spying on the Russian front and target setting by NATO and British special forces, etc.

If you don’t meet American targets fast enough, Biden will blow up your supply lines.

I wonder if Scholz has pledged allegiance to the coming U.S. sanctions against China.

VW produces 40% of its sales in China, also BMW and Mercedes almost a quarter. The German economy has become so accustomed and so vitally attuned to the division of labour with China that a sudden breakdown in this relationship would be even more disastrous than the sudden breakdown of trade with Russia following the Ukraine sanctions.

And if the Americans again resort to confiscating Chinese property in the U.S. as they did against Russia, and China carries out the same against U.S. properties and properties of its satellites, suddenly we will have two German automobile companies of equal value on both sides, one German and one Chinese, each with the same technology, the same quality, but at cheaper Chinese prices. This also applies to Airbus, which has built up a complete production plant in China and would have an equivalent competitor in its own subsidiary in the event of sanctions and war.

Scholz will therefore have to decide between U.S. allegiance and war measures against China, as propagated by EU Commissioner von der Leyen, Röttgen, Baerbock and Co. or, on the other hand, upon German interests, the refusal of allegiance to the U.S., as announced by Macron with his warning that Europe be not instrumentalised for the sake of sanctions and war against China.

According to the Anglo-Saxon press, the majority of the Scholz cabinet is against German interests for NATO allegiance; the German economy, on the other hand, is alarmed and would see a sanctions and war participation of Germany and Europe against China as a global economic crash for our economy, the end of our export surpluses and the end of our prosperity system.

If we go along participating with sanctions and war against China, we would no longer be able to finance Ukraine, to supply it with weapons, to finance and therefore be able to take in hundreds of thousands of additional refugees. We would no longer be able to finance two-thirds of our population with transfer payments – one-third even unemployed – to fulfil the nonsensical and expensive environmental demands, to make the payments and guarantees to the EU, and to maintain our own lavishly growing unproductive state and social administration.

As yet, the green experiment has not succeeded to survive as a national economy and as a nation by the ordered (sanctions) termination of cheap Russian oil and gas supply with simultaneous green bans of nuclear energy and fossil raw materials. The guarantee of this by a lay economics minister and children’s book author no one will take seriously, seems cynical. Now to repeat the same mistakes of taking orders also with sanctions and war participation against China, can, except from atlanticists, come only from economic self-destructors.

So, a crucial situation hovers above us, which must decide between allegiance to the colonial power or independence in our own interest, between participation in a third world war or world peace for Europe, between prosperity or poverty, between political or economic self-responsibility and between blind obedience to big business or acting in our own interest.

The USA has fought more than forty wars since the last world war and has won none. They had to flee from Vietnam and Afghanistan, their satellites as well. And the Ukraine war, according to US will, is to be “increasingly borne and financed by Europe”. Ukraine will probably be abandoned by the USA, although they are the originator and main winner of this war against Russia. Therefore, those who too recklessly followed American calls for sanctions and war participation have so far been bigger losers than the U.S. itself. Do we want to repeat this all over against China on a major scale?

Scholz is not to be envied for his ministerial amateurism for the decisions to be made in the coming weeks. If he exercises vassal loyalty, we will crash economically. If, like Macron, he has the courage to contradict the colonial power on behalf of German interests, he would possibly be personally punished like Gerhard Schröder, but he would save our country from war. Here, foreign policy obligations stand against domestic political and economic survival.

Does Scholz have sufficient backing and strength to make the right decision?

Our economic importance and prosperity will depend on it.

* Eberhard Hamer (born 1932) is a German economist. After studying economics, theology and law, Hamer earned his doctorate. He then worked as a lawyer in a company. He received a call to the University of Applied Sciences in Bielefeld, where he taught as a professor of economic and financial policy until his retirement in 1994. In the 1970s, he founded the privately run Mittelstandsinstitut Niedersachsen in Hanover and published numerous essays and over 20 books about small and medium-sized enterprises.

Source: https://www.goldseiten.de/artikel/576382--Erste-Vorstufe~-wirtschaftskrieg-gegen-China.html, 16 April 2023 © Prof. Dr. Eberhard Hamer, Mittelstandsinstitut Niedersachsen e.V.

(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)