China refuses US interference in Hamburg Cosco deal

The 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.

And on Thursday, China also responded to the US statement: They do not want the US to interfere. The United States has no right to do so, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a press conference in Beijing on Thursday, a day before Chancellor Olaf Scholz's visit to China. "The pragmatic cooperation between China and Germany is a matter for the two sovereign countries." The US interference is symptomatic of the forced diplomacy it practices.

Shortly before Scholz's trip to China, the boss of the Hamburg port operator HHLA, Angela Titzrath, defended the planned investment in "Zeit": "In order to survive in international competition, we have to bind shipping companies like Cosco to us permanently."

She has neither a "naive nor an undifferentiated, uncritical attitude towards China," says Titzrath, but "the formation of blocs and isolation does not help us." Public criticism of Chinese companies puts a strain on German-Chinese relations, says Titzrath: "The current China -Bashing is of no use to anyone and snubs many entrepreneurs with whom we have done reliable business for decades.”

This was also argued in the Hamburg state government, while there were also many critical voices at the federal level – especially among the Greens. In Hamburg, the Greens in turn support the compromise.