From Maoist to Europe’s top China hawk: outspoken lawmaker Reinhard Buetikofer steps down

Hundreds of millions of Europeans began voting on Thursday in elections that will deliver a new EU parliament and commission, charting the bloc’s political course for the next half-decade. Few citizens will be casting their vote with China front of mind: talk of the Asian giant has been largely absent from election debates and the stump. When the votes are tallied and the dust settles next week, however, Europe’s discussion of China will have lost its biggest voice. Reinhard Buetikofer, Europe’s most prominent China hawk, retires from the European Parliament this month at 71. He returns to Germany having dominated Brussels’ political discourse on China since being elected in 2009. Not many tears will be shed in Beijing. During his tenure helming the parliament’s China delegation, bilateral relations have run aground. The German has been panned in Chinese state media as an “ideological fanatic” and was even blamed as a “black hand” behind Hong Kong’s anti-government protests of 2019. But in Brussels, many will miss Buetikofer’s straight-shooting ways and a perspective on China that evolved over half a century. “Seen by many as a polariser, he was actually a consensus builder for a realistic China policy and, as such, appreciated by many in the EU institutions,” said Gunnar Wiegand, until last year the EU’s top diplomat on Asia. Buetikofer leaves under sanction from Beijing, capping an unusual journey from card-carrying communist in the 1970s when he was captivated by a rebellious and romantic image of Mao Zedong “swimming in the Yangtze, writing poems for his first wife”. Raised in the sleepy German city of Speyer, on the left bank of the Rhine River, Buetikofer’s family was scarred by the horrors of the Second World War. His father, a military veteran, came home with “half a foot left”, the departing lawmaker told the Post in a series of wide-ranging interviews. While other kids played cops and robbers with toy pistols, the boy was told: “‘This family has seen enough of that’ … that was a political echo of their experience in the war.” His earliest political memory, at 15, was encountering a man handing out leaflets about the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. “That was the first event that had a major impact for my thinking. And that basically settled the issues around the Soviet Union for me.” With China, however, his lifelong relationship would be more complicated. Buetikofer studied sinology along with philosophy and history at nearby Heidelberg University. “I was a good student, but I was even better at political activity,” he said sitting in his parliamentary office strewn with books about Asia. He dropped out from his degree to explore his communist political leanings. “The first thing I ever heard about Mao Zedong was a quote … printed on the cover of a book at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1969,” he said, recalling the Cultural Revolution slogan: “To rebel is justified”. “That was the kind of sentiment that hit home with my generation: rebellion is justified.” In Heidelberg, his Communist League of West Germany won a seat on the city council, “the only Maoist that was ever elected to any public office in all of Germany”, he said. After co-founding the German Chinese Friendship Association in 1973, Buetikofer visited the country as part of one of the earliest German delegations after the resumption of diplomatic ties a year later. “I would say I was half-Maoist and half-Marxist, which is not exactly the same. But at some point, the wheels started to come off this car,” he said. The young German reds gradually grew uncomfortable with how things were unfolding in Beijing. “I would say there was a lot that we did not want to see or that we wanted to play down,” Buetikofer recalled. “We felt we were Maoists, but Beijing was not fond of what we did because we didn’t bow to their leadership claim,” Buetikofer said, noting that several of his peer groups were received by Mao in Beijing or later his successor Hua Guofeng. “But the leader of our group was never received in Beijing. We were proud of that. We were our own independent kind of radical communist movement that tried to build its own perspective and not just wait for orders.” “I don’t think I would have fallen for Xi [Jinping] and I would not have fallen for Liu Shaoqi [once considered as Mao’s successor]. I read [Liu’s] book How to Be a Good Communist, and I did not want to be told how to be a good communist. The party telling you what to do, that was not my world.” As the 1970s drew on, he became increasingly disillusioned with communism and Beijing. His notion of romantic rebellion faded. “In the admiration of the great rebel Mao Zedong, that was a serious political mistake because we basically ignored the totalitarian reality that he created with all the suffering of millions of people,” Buetikofer said. His disenchantment was complete when paramount leader Deng Xiaoping “advocated the modernisation of industry, agriculture, the military and society” but not “the fifth modernisation [that] would have been democracy … that was put down.” He joined Germany’s Green Party in the early 1980s and has been a dominant force ever since. Over the years, he maintained contacts in China, chairing political dialogues spanning decades, even as he campaigned loudly on human-rights issues. He continued to visit China and hosted senior party officials in Brussels, although that quickly stopped when Xi came to power in 2013. “When Xi took over, the CCP Central Committee sent a delegation saying: ‘By the way, we have new rules. It’s either our way or the highway’,” he recalled of a political dialogue he coordinated annually until then. On his last visit in 2019, he said he was greeted by one long-term interlocutor as “old friend”. But things were already souring. In 2021, Buetikofer was banned from entering China when he was sanctioned along with four other lawmakers in retaliation for EU sanctions on Chinese officials for alleged abuses in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, which Beijing has firmly and repeatedly denied. “Buetikofer has turned into an anti-China vanguard. China should have sanctioned him [a] long time ago,” Wang Yiwei of Renmin University told Global Times, a Communist Party tabloid, that day. The sanctions turned the parliament against a painstakingly negotiated EU-China investment pact, effectively killing it. The deal became emblematic of the broader bilateral dynamic: a sinking ship in which the parliament has played an outsize role. Buetikofer is retiring at a delicate moment. Hostility towards China is rising in Europe, owing partly to its close ties to Moscow, while economic spats keep spiralling. The election is predicted to tilt the parliament further to the right, with some speculating that a victory by former US leader Donald Trump in America’s presidential election in November could usher in a loose transatlantic anti-China coalition. While Beijing may be glad to see the back of Buetikofer, some fear that removing his decades of experience will render the chamber more hawkish but less informed. Few politicians in Europe resemble the ex-Green leader. Over the course of three interviews, he expounded on Taiwan’s domestic politics (“more complicated than it looks”) and Beijing-Berlin economic ties (“we’re now suffering from the downside of the big success of the German-Chinese relationship”). He also spoke at length about whether Europe should work with Trump on China (“as closely as we can without offering ourselves to be his prey”). Like him or loathe him – and he appears to trigger both emotions in equal measure – Buetikofer will leave a huge gap in a parliament not known for China literacy. In June 2022, for instance, the German killed language in a resolution that would have accused China of committing genocide in Xinjiang. The measure materialised from a small group of lawmakers and could have had drastic consequences for EU-China ties. “I thought we should not go down that rabbit hole … that would deflect the conversation from discussing the facts on the ground to a legal dispute that the general public doesn’t really understand,” Buetikofer said. The language they settled on – “crimes against humanity” – was no trivial matter, he added. Amid Buetikofer’s departure, there is no clear replacement for the German as the point person on China issues. He “leaves big shoes to fill, with no clear successor combining his expertise on China, convening ability and conviction balanced with pragmatism”, said Grzegorz Stec, head of the Brussels office for MERICS, a German think tank also sanctioned in 2021. Rather than having one “Mr China … you may need an army of people that have very different specialisations”, said Janka Oertel of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “The fact that one person could dominate the China topic was maybe a sign of the times that he was active in,” Oertel added. Iuliu Winkler, a centre-right lawmaker on the same China committee, noted he often disagreed with Buetikofer, but said he would miss his “ability to sit down and have a candid conversation”. “I’ve always found him a difficult but reasonable partner to negotiate with,” said Winkler. “He is a real China-watcher, and the EP will miss his expertise, energy and, clearly, his humour.” Buetikofer plans to keep some skin in the political game and has already been tapped to lead a Taiwan-Germany government-exchange platform. Asked about the parliament’s future China expertise, he was philosophical. “This is what happens. Old people step aside and young people fill the space and oftentimes in a way that surprises you positively. I’m betting on that.”

From Maoist to Europe’s top China hawk: outspoken lawmaker Reinhard Buetikofer steps down

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;}No love lost in Beijing while many in Brussels to miss the straight-shooting if polarising German who became point person on Sino-EU policy

No love lost in Beijing while many in Brussels to miss the straight-shooting if polarising German who became point person on Sino-EU policy