2020 promised to be an especially consequential year for the EU-China relationship, but three highly anticipated summits have been thrown into uncertainty, and diplomacy between Europe and China is now completely consumed by the coronavirus crisis.
Dr. Li, a heart specialist at Wuhan No. 4 Hospital, spent the third week of March preparing for the reopening of the hospital’s general clinics, which closed on January 22, when No. 4 became a key facility for treating COVID-19 patients. After working for two months on the front lines of the coronavirus outbreak, Li is mentally and psychologically at a loss about what to do next. He can’t sleep or eat, he often feels dazed, and sometimes, seemingly out of nowhere, he weeps.
Jörg Wuttke is Vice President and Chief Representative of BASF China, based in Beijing. Since joining BASF in 1997, Wuttke has been responsible for helping guide the company’s investment strategy for China, negotiation of large projects, and government relations.
Before joining BASF, Wuttke worked with ABB for 11 years. His first professional encounter with China was in 1988 as the Finance and Administration Manager of ABB Beijing. In 1990, he returned to Germany as Sales Manager of ABB Power Plants Division, responsible for gas turbine sales to Africa and Russia. In 1993, he became Chief Representative of ABB China, in Shanghai, and in 1994 moved to the President’s Office of ABB China in Beijing, where he was responsible for the development and financing of large projects.
From 2001 to 2004, Wuttke was the Chairman of the German Chamber of Commerce in China. From 2007 to 2010 and from 2014 to 2017, he served as the President of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China. Since 2019, he has been serving in this role again. From 2011 to 2019, he was Chairman of the BIAC China Task Force of the Business and Industry Advisory Committee to the OECD (BIAC), a Paris-based body of major business associations that lobbies the OECD. From 2013 to 2016, and again since 2019, Wuttke has been Vice Chairman of the CPCIF International Cooperation Committee, a group representing Multinational Companies in China’s Chemical Association. Since its establishment in 2013, he has served as a member of the Advisory Board of Germany’s foremost think tank on China, Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS). In January 2019, he joined the International Board of the Stars Foundation, in Switzerland. He is the recipient of many honors, including the Order of Leopold II, presented by the Belgian King Albert II in 2011; the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, presented by French President Macron in April 2018; the Order of the Italian Star, from Italian President Mattarella in 2018; and the Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (Verdienstorden), awarded by German President Steinmeier in 2019.
Wuttke holds a B.A. in Business Administration and Economics from Mannheim and studied Chinese in Shanghai in 1982 and Taipei from 1984 to 1985.
Reinhard Bütikofer is a Member of the European Parliament (Greens/EFA) and the Co-Chair of the European Green Party (EGP). He sits on the Committee on Foreign Affairs (AFET), where he serves as Greens/EFA foreign affairs spokesperson, and on the Committee on International Trade (INTA) as a substitute member. He is the Chair of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations with the People’s Republic of China as well as a member of the Delegation to the United States and a substitute member of the ASEAN Delegation.
Before getting elected to the European Parliament in 2009, Bütikofer was the Co-Chair of the German Green Party BÜNDNIS 90/DIE GRÜNEN (from 2002 to 2008). He was the party’s Secretary General from 1998 until 2002. Prior to that, he served as the Chair of the Greens in the Federal State of Baden-Würtemberg. From 1988 until, 1996 he served as a Member of the Baden-Würtemberg State Parliament. His engagement with the German Greens began when he was elected as a member of the city council in Heidelberg in 1984.
Besides his positions in the party and parliament, Bütikofer is a member of the Europe/Transatlantic Advisory Board and the General Assembly of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the NABU Club, the German-Israeli Society, and the German-Chinese Dialogue Forum, as well as the DGAP and the IISS.
Ivana Karásková has been a China Research Fellow at the Association for International Affairs (AMO), a Prague-based foreign policy think tank, since 2007. She founded and has been coordinating ChinfluenCE, an international project mapping China’s influence in Central Europe (Czechia, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia). The internationally acclaimed project revealed how the China discourse in local media changed after acquisition of outlets by Chinese CEFC company, and publicized links between Czech politicians and the pro-China lobby. ChinfluenCE results were presented to the European Parliament, to Members of the U.S. Congress, and widely quoted in European, U.S., and Australian press. Karásková also founded and coordinates China Observers in Central and Eastern Europe (CHOICE), a platform gathering more than 40 China researchers from Central and Eastern Europe. CHOICE analyzes and critically dissects China-led 17+1 initiatives and observes Chinese activities in the region. Karásková holds a Ph.D. in International Relations and other university degrees in Journalism and Mass Communication, European Studies, and International Relations. She lectures on E.U.-China relations, China’s geopolitics, and security in Northeast Asia at Charles University, Czech Republic. She completed research and study stays in China, Taiwan, and the U.S. (as a Fulbright-Masaryk scholar at Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University). She is an alumna of the U.S. State Department’s International Visitors Program on Investment Screening Mechanism and a member of the China expert pool at the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (Hybrid CoE) in Helsinki.
Volker Stanzel is a retired German diplomat who served from 1979 to 2013. He currently teaches Politics of Memory at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin and heads a project on Diplomacy and Artificial Intelligence at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Berlin, of which he is a Senior Distinguished Fellow.
In the German Foreign Service, he held posts as Political Director (2007-2009), Ambassador to China (2004-2007) and to Japan (2009-2013), Director General for Political Affairs (2002-2004), Asia Director (2001-2002), and Director for Civilian Use of Nuclear Energy (1999-2001). From 1995 to 1998, he worked with the Social Democratic Party in the German Bundestag, and in 1998-1999 he was a Fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington, D.C.
After retiring, Stanzel taught at Claremont McKenna College and the University of California Santa Cruz in 2014, at Free University in Berlin in 2015, and at Dokkyo University in Japan in 2016. He is President of the Association of German-Japanese Societies, a Council Member to the European Council on Foreign Relations, Board Member of the Academic Confucius Institute at Goettingen University, and was Vice President of the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin in 2018-2019.
Born in 1948 in Frankfurt, Stanzel majored in Japanese Studies, Sinology, and Political Science, studied at the universities of Frankfurt, Kyoto, and Cologne, and obtained a Ph.D. from Cologne University in 1981. He writes frequently on political and Asian affairs. His last books, published in 2019, are New Realities in Foreign Affairs, which he edited, and Die ratlose Außenpolitik and warum sie den Rückhalt der Gesellschaft braucht (Clueless Foreign Policy and Why It Needs the Backing of Society).
