Dialogue Program - KAS Fellows´ Meeting 2013 - Foundation Office China
Event Reports
The KAS-fellows represent an important pillar of the KAS country programs in China. Their broad expertise ranges from literature on international relations, economics, law, chemistry up to policy, and their period of study in Germany was both a unifying and rewarding experience.
The formerly sponsored fellows are closely connected with the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung even after their successfully completed studies. All year round, the KAS-fellows are included in the dialogue programs of the foundation offices in Beijing and Shanghai. As in previous years, the old fellows´ meeting of the KAS, regularly organized by the Beijing office of the foundation headed by Thomas Awe, represents the highlight of the exchange program. There are more than 10,000 former scholarship holders and fellows worldwide and the 9 employees of the representative offices of the KAS in China serve about 100 Chinese local fellows.
This years Scholarship holder meeting took place in the Chinese border city Dandong - separated only by a narrow stream from North Korea – and stimulated the intensive discussion on the highly current theme of development and prospect of Chinese-North Korean relationship, as well as the geopolitical implication for the region. The conflict over North Korea's nuclear program remains unresolved and threatened to escalate already several times in the past. Together with German experts the KAS scholarship holders discussed the expected adjustments in China’s North Korea policy.
In this discourse Europe (especially Germany) plays an important role. A further question which the participants of the meeting took on was whether the EU/Germany as neutral player should engage more thorough in the security issues in Northeast Asia.
Current trends of Sino-European/German partnership (in the fields of society, politics and economics) were also analyzed in the context of the German election results in
2013.
The Consul General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Shenyang Jens-Peter Voss, who has worked from 2006 to 2008 at the German Embassy in Pyongyang, opened the meeting with his presentation about the recent developments of North Korea behind the scenes. The debate continued after the contribution of Prof. Hans-Alexander Kneider, who works as professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS) and the Graduate School for Interpretation and Translation (GSIT) in Seoul. In a multimedia presentation Prof. Kneider showed the activities of Germany in East Asia, specifically in Korea in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The current development of the Sino-German relationship was the second focus of the meeting. Thomas Awe, Director of the KAS office in Beijing, as well as Dr. Peter Hefele, head of the KAS office in Shanghai, commented on the numerous questions from the old fellows about the implications of the election and the intensive coalition negotiations in Germany that were ongoing at the time.
