For now, neither the COVID-19 crisis nor China’s increasingly assertive behaviour abroad has fundamentally shaken the German government’s commitment to close relations with China. Chancellor Merkel’s push for an EU–China investment agreement in the final weeks of 2020 attest to this. Germany’s deep economic relationship with China, and its view of Beijing as a partner on issues such as climate, will continue to influence the approach of policymakers in Berlin. But pressure is building, both within the German political establishment and indirectly, through the hardening positions of the country’s closest allies, for a stronger rethink. Recent setbacks for Merkel on the 5G issue and on the CAI underscore how tenuous her position on China has become. Germany may find it increasingly difficult to maintain a policy of open engagement with Beijing when countries like Australia, Canada, India, Japan and the UK are all pushing back more forcefully. Over time, a country that has had to come to terms with its own painful history in the 20th century may find it unacceptable to turn a blind eye to China’s far-reaching surveillance state and its mass detention of Uighurs in Xinjiang’s re-education camps in the 21st. Beijing’s security crackdown in Hong Kong and its sabre-rattling over Taiwan have further raised the pressure on Germany to recalibrate its approach.
After years of strategic ambiguity under Merkel, important political shifts in 2021 could bring more clarity. In the US, President Joe Biden has signalled that he will be pushing Europe to engage in a more structured dialogue on the strategic challenges presented by China, a discussion that was impossible while Trump was in the White House. Speaking after Biden at an event organized by the Munich Security Conference in February 2021, Merkel acknowledged the need to develop a transatlantic agenda in relation to Beijing, even as she described this as ‘complicated’. France – Germany’s close ally in Europe – is pushing a strategic autonomy agenda that sees the EU emerging as a separate pole of power, distinct from both the US and China. How Germany chooses to position itself between its weakened post-war ally and security guarantor on the one hand, and a rising, more assertive power with which it has forged deep economic ties on the other, will shape Europe’s broader response to US–China competition. It will, therefore, also play an important role in determining the success of US efforts under the Biden administration to build a coalition of like-minded democracies to counter Beijing.
In September 2021 Germany will elect a new federal government. Although not all of the leading candidates to succeed Merkel, who is stepping down after 16 years in office, are promising a different approach to China, the next German chancellor will have a vastly different – and more demanding – set of foreign policy choices than those facing Merkel when she came into office in 2005. Under her leadership, the German government has resisted pressure to choose between Beijing and Washington. For her successor, sitting on the fence is likely to prove a far tougher challenge.