By Keegan Elmer, Read the original article here.
- Greens party member Margarete Bause says the planned visit will not be allowed to go ahead if she remains part of the delegation
A trip to China later this month by a German parliamentary delegation on technology appears in doubt after Beijing rejected the inclusion of a frequent critic of its human rights record.
German Greens party member Margarete Bause was set to join the trip by a Bundestag committee on digitalisation to learn about China’s AI and start-ups. Fellow Green Dieter Janecek was originally meant to go but couldn’t and suggested Bause as a replacement.
Bause told German media on Saturday that the trip to Shanghai and Beijing planned for August 23 to September 1 would not go ahead as long as she was a member of the delegation.
“The Chinese stated that Mrs Bause had to refrain from being a member of the delegation, otherwise the whole committee would be denied access. So, de facto, she was declared persona non grata,” a spokesman for Bause’s office said.
In a statement on Sunday, the Chinese embassy in Berlin did not refer to Bause directly but said “China has the right to refuse those who have not been invited”.
The embassy said China and Germany agreed on the delegation in April, but “the German side unilaterally adjusted the make-up of the delegation just as the visit was approaching”.
“As for the parliamentarian, as far as we know, she is not a member of the digitalisation committee of the Bundestag, but is trying to visit China with the delegation. We don’t know what would be her purpose in doing this,” it said.
DPA also reported on Saturday that a Bundestag human rights committee had also been refused entry for a trip in September to Beijing and the autonomous regions of Tibet and Xinjiang.
China’s foreign ministry did not respond to faxed questions about the status of the human rights committee’s trip.
Kristin Shi-Kupfer, a researcher at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, said the Bundestag’s human rights committee applied to make the trip every year and Chinese authorities had denied the request “for years”.
“So in a way, this is business as usual,” Shi-Kupfer said.
Ties between China and Germany have been strained this summer over Xinjiang and ongoing protests in Hong Kong over a now-suspended extradition bill.
On a trip to Beijing and Shanghai last month, German Minister of State Niels Annen called China a “difficult partner”.
Annen’s talks focused on trade, but also covered the human rights situation in Xinjiang, according to Germany’s foreign ministry.
United Nations observers have said that more than 1 million ethnic Uygurs and other members of Muslim minorities have been held in camps in the autonomous region. Beijing says the camps are educational facilities set up to help stamp out religious extremism and to offer skills training.
Soon after Annen’s visit, Beijing cancelled a series of scheduled meetings in the Chinese capital with a delegation of parliamentarians from Germany’s Free Democratic Party (FDP) after the politicians met opposition lawmakers in Hong Kong.
But at least one meeting with FDP politicians went ahead in Beijing, with a top Communist Party official accusing Germany of “inciting” violence in Hong Kong, due to the country’s “public sympathy” for protests, and its decision to grant asylum to two Hong Kong dissidents last year, according to German media reports.
