Preparations at the Grand Prince Hotel Hiroshima are in full swing. Since the beginning of the month, the hotel has been closed to ordinary guests. The waterfront was cordoned off with high fences, and the ferry service to the green forested islands in the Seta Inland Sea was suspended. The navy patrols the bay, in addition to the tens of thousands of police officers who have been seconded to the city in western Japan from across the country. The Plexiglas wedding altar, in front of which couples can usually say "I do" in the middle of the large water basin in the entrance hall of the Grand Prince Hotel, was also dismantled. There are likely to be some oaths of allegiance in the coming days.

Tim Kanning

Editor in business.

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Julia Löhr

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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This year's summit of the seven leading industrial nations (G7) will take place in Hiroshima from Friday to Sunday. This year's host is Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who has invited the other heads of state and government to his hometown. This also symbolically charges the summit. The peninsula with the Grand Prince Hotel is located far in front of the city, so it was spared the destructive force of the American atomic bomb during the Second World War. At that time, however, many wounded people took refuge on the offshore islands.

A few months ago, Kishida wanted to use the global lessons from the Corona pandemic as the headline for this summit. But in view of the global political situation, other issues are coming into focus. It is about China's quest for power and what a joint response from Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Canada and the United States should look like. For the first time in the history of the Group of Seven, the meeting in Hiroshima is to adopt a statement on the defense of economic security in addition to the traditional final declaration. Another topic of the working sessions will be how the West's sanctions against Russia can become more effective.

No anti-China alliance

The summit should not become an "anti-China alliance," it is emphasized in Berlin in advance. Nobody wants a decoupling from China, but a minimization of the risks, especially in the event that China should try to annex Taiwan by force. The positions of the G-7 countries towards China are closer to each other than they sometimes seem in public, according to government circles. The negotiators of the heads of state and government are discussing, for example, the question of whether the term "de-risking", which has been used so often in recent times, should appear in the final declaration of the summit or whether there should instead only be general talk of the desire for greater diversification of economic relations. For Germany, these negotiations are led by Jörg Kukies, the economic policy advisor to Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD).

But even if all sides are trying to radiate unity, it is an open secret that the Americans in particular are exerting pressure on their allies to contain China's desire for growth, both politically and economically. In recent months, the government in Washington has already imposed a number of export restrictions. Special microchips as well as machines for their production may no longer be delivered to China. At the request of the United States, the Dutch government has also imposed such export restrictions. The Netherlands is home to one of the most important manufacturers of equipment for chip production: ASML . Japan has also imposed export restrictions. All the country had to do was expand an existing law that already allowed the export of certain technologies that could be used for military purposes only under strict controls.