Duncan Bartlett
Germany has a president, as well as a chancellor, and on the face of it, their attitudes toward China are distinctly different.
The chancellor is the more powerful one — Angela Merkel was the previous incumbent. “Decoupling is the wrong answer,” current German chancellor Olaf Scholz told a business conference before he headed to Beijing to meet Chinese leader Xí Jìnpíng 习近平. Many German industrialists agreed with him, and chose to accompany him on the trip.
However, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier — a former foreign minister — said that Germany must learn from Russia’s war in Ukraine. “The lesson is that we must reduce lopsided dependencies wherever we can,” he told the public broadcaster ARD last month. “This applies in particular to China.”
President Steinmeier reinforced this message with visits to Japan and South Korea that took place in parallel to the chancellor’s trip to Beijing. In fact, he had lunch with President Yoon Suk-yeol in Seoul at exactly the same time as Chancellor Scholz was in Beijing, although it was the Scholz-Xi meeting that received all the press attention.
President Steinmeier and Chancellor Scholz are both members of the same party, the Social Democratic Party (SPD). It governs in a coalition with other groups, including the Greens.
Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, is a Green. She has emphasized human rights and support for the autonomy of Taiwan, and some of her colleagues in the Foreign Ministry openly criticized Scholz’s trip to China. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Baerbock said that Scholz had a duty to be blunt with the Chinese leadership.
“As is well known, we clearly stated that China is our partner on global issues. We cannot decouple in a globalized world, but China is also a competitor and increasingly a systemic rival,” said Baerbock.
Ukraine looms above everything
Other influential figures in Germany called upon the chancellor to warn Xi Jinping that if China supports Russia militarily in the war against Ukraine, it will face severe sanctions, with profound consequences for its economy.
Chancellor Scholz appeared to make an effort to get these points across during his morning meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing on Friday, and Xi did indeed mention Ukraine in the official Chinese readout of the meeting, saying that “the international community should…oppose the threat or use of nuclear weapons, advocate that nuclear weapons cannot be used and that nuclear wars must not be fought.” Scholz says he told Xi that he wants discussions about the situation in Xinjiang and said that human rights are universal, especially the rights of minorities.
After lunch, Scholz then met with outgoing premier Lǐ Kèqiáng 李克强 in the afternoon, where he repeated the line that Germany is not intending to decouple from China.
During a news conference, Scholz said he had raised the issue of Taiwan with the Chinese leaders.
“Like the U.S. and other countries, we are pursuing a one-China policy. But I have made equally clear that any change in Taiwan’s status quo must be peaceful or by mutual consent,” he said.
As expected, the Chinese state media was selective in its reporting of these conversations. The human rights issue was ignored entirely and there was nothing to imply criticism of Vladimir Putin, although Scholz on Saturday said that his and Xi Jinping’s statements opposing the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine “had been reason enough for the visit.”
BASF invests $10 billion in new factory in China
The Chinese side likes to think that Germany still wishes to have a win-win relationship, based on its access to the flourishing Chinese market and investment opportunities. The German chemical giant BASF recently announced a $10 billion investment in a factory in Zhanjiang, Guangdong Province. Its CEO, Martin Brudermüller, accompanied Scholz on the trip to Beijing. He has hit out at the “China bashers” who have criticized investments in the country. “We should look at ourselves a bit more self-critically,” he said recently.
The line taken by China’s Ministry of Publicity (formerly Propaganda) is that decoupling is an American ruse, designed to hold back China’s rise. Powerful nations, such as Germany, should avoid being forced by the U.S. to act against their own self-interest.
“If they don’t invest in China, where do they go?” asked an adviser to the Chinese government, according to the Financial Times.
But there are many influential groups in Germany, including the Green Party, who want Germany to take a more “values-driven” approach toward foreign policy. Many of them are angry that Chancellor Scholz pushed through the sale of a stake — just under a quarter — in the port of Hamburg to state-controlled Chinese shipping giant COSCO, even though six of his ministers opposed the arrangement.
The Hamburg deal was signed as politicians debated the wording of an official review of Germany’s strategy toward China, which is due to be published next year. Finance Minister Christian Lindner is seeking to set the tone of the report. “It will designate China as an important trading partner but say that the Communist Party is a systemic rival,” Lindner said in an interview last week. Lindner is from the Free Democratic Party, a coalition partner that has issues with Scholz’s approach to foreign policy.
The Biden administration has been circumspect about Scholz’s meeting with Xi Jinping. The State Department recognizes that European leaders forge their own relationships with Beijing. Nevertheless, the Pentagon and the U.S. Department of Defense regularly update their European partners with detailed information about their security concerns.
During the debate in Germany about the sale of a stake in the Hamburg port to China, the discussion focused on whether Chinese companies should be barred from acquiring critical infrastructure on the grounds of national security.
Is France next?
In terms of relations with Europe, China’s next target is France. Foreign Minister Wáng Yì 王毅 recently telephoned his French counterpart, Catherine Colonna, and according to Xinhua, they agreed to work toward “high-level exchanges.” The Ministry of Publicity hopes that French President Emmanuel Macron will come to Beijing soon.
However, before deciding on such a trip, Macron may well wish to weigh its political implications. Unlike Scholz, the president of the French Republic may conclude it is better to keep China at arm’s length, rather than pose for photographs with Xi Jinping beneath a hammer and sickle in the Great Hall of the People.
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