Merkel inspects PLA troops outside the Great Hall of
the People in Beijing August 27, 2007. (REUTERS/Jason Lee)
The current cover story of Germany's weekly magazine Der Spiegel, titled "The Yellow Spies: How China Spies Out German Technology," has triggered a big political debate in Berlin about how to manage the country's political and economic relations with Beijing. According to undisclosed sources cited by Der Spiegel, German domestic security agencies believe that Chinese hackers linked to the People's Liberation Army (PLA) installed Trojan spy programs camouflaged as Word and PowerPoint documents on several computers at the Federal Chancellery, the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Economics and Technology, as well as the Federal Ministry for Education and Research.
In its first reaction, the Chinese Embassy in Berlin issued a statement rejecting the allegations, calling the Spiegel report "irresponsible speculation based on no factual evidence." The German Interior Ministry, for its part, pointed out that cyber attacks against government computers are a constant problem, but that no damage had been caused by them so far. Politicians from across Germany's political spectrum strongly condemned the Chinese hacker attacks and urged the Merkel government to make sure that such attacks would not happen again. The opposition pro-market FDP party also wants to raise the issue in the Bundestag to determine whether the IT security standards of the German government are really up to date.
The timing of the story's publication was certainly designed to ensure maximum impact, as it came on the eve of Chancellor Angela Merkel's on-going week-long Asia tour, which would lead her first to China and then to Japan. While Merkel declined to discuss the Chinese hacker allegations in public, she vowed to raise the issue of intellectual property protection during her talks with Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. A spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry declared that Beijing "has always been against and strictly opposes the criminal action of hacking and harming computer systems," adding that China and other countries have established good cooperation mechanisms to strike against hacking and that Beijing "is willing to strengthen cooperation with Germany on the issue." Other top agenda items include efforts to fight global climate change, recent Chinese product safety issues, and, last but not least, human rights concerns, particularly in connection with Darfur and China's close energy ties to the Sudanese government in Khartoum.
It remains to be seen what impact the recent cyber attacks revelations will have on German perceptions of China. For a long time, European countries, especially strong trading powers such as Germany, have viewed China above all as an economic opportunity, and not as a military or geostrategic competitor. The reverse has generally been true for the United States, where China is viewed both as an economic threat (by protectionist-minded Democrats) and as a strategic military threat (primarily by Republican security hawks in the current administration and on Capitol Hill). China, of course, is not the only problem. The head of the domestic intelligence agency of North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany's biggest state, just warned that Iran and Russia are trying hard to steal sensitive commercial/dual use technologies from German companies.
