Talking to officials across the German government and in the Bundestag these days, however, reveals a more hawkish tone on China than that coming from the chancellor’s office. In recent years, a cross-party coalition of lawmakers has emerged that wants Germany to reduce its economic dependence on China and push back harder in the face of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong, and, since the COVID-19 outbreak was first reported, its attempts to silence critics and spread disinformation about the origins of the pandemic and EU efforts to contain it. Even so, Merkel has resisted pressure to substantively adapt her policy to this new reality.
Divisions over how to define Germany’s relationship with China have been brought into stark relief by the debate over 5G. Norbert Röttgen, a former environment minister and the current chair of the foreign affairs committee in the Bundestag, led a revolt within the CDU against Merkel’s plans to include Huawei in the country’s 5G network. Together with allies from the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Greens and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), Röttgen argued that allowing Huawei a role in building this critical infrastructure posed unacceptable security risks. Altmaier countered this case, stating that excluding Huawei would delay 5G deployment, hurt German competitiveness, and bring retaliation from Beijing. During her visit to China in September 2019, Merkel was personally warned by the country’s leadership that a block on Huawei’s involvement would have economic consequences for Germany. China’s ambassador to Germany subsequently made this line public, suggesting that German carmakers operating in China would pay a high price if Huawei was not included.
As in other countries in Europe and elsewhere, the 5G debate in Germany was shaped by the Trump administration’s attempts to pressure partners into excluding Huawei from their networks.
As in other countries in Europe and elsewhere, the 5G debate in Germany was shaped by the Trump administration’s attempts to pressure partners into excluding Huawei from their networks. This allowed Huawei proponents to reframe the issue: excluding the company, they said, would mean allowing the deeply unpopular Trump to get his way. Germany held its 5G auctions in the spring of 2019, but the government struggled for years to forge a political consensus on the role of Chinese suppliers. In April 2021, the Bundestag finally approved a new IT security law, which sets a high national security bar for suppliers but leaves it to future governments to decide on the role that Huawei will play. In the meantime, the political vacuum has led telecommunications operators, including the partly state-owned Deutsche Telekom, to begin building out their 5G networks with equipment from Huawei. The saga has exposed the flaws – some would say the immaturity – in Germany’s evolving policy towards China: a struggle to view technology questions through a strategic prism; an inability to chart a clear way forward for the EU; an all-too-frequent record of bending to threats from Beijing; and a tendency to cloud debates over Germany’s strategic interests with Trump-fuelled animosity towards the US.
The backlash against Merkel’s approach has gone beyond the issue of 5G. Margarete Bause, a lawmaker for the Greens in the Bundestag, has led a push to elevate the issue of human rights in the German debate about China, putting a spotlight on the mass detention of Muslims in Xinjiang. Her party has been critical of Merkel’s push for the CAI, in part because of non-committal language from Beijing on questions of forced labour. Merkel’s coalition partner, the SPD, has also grown more outspoken in its criticism of her stance – notably what it sees as the weak response to China’s security crackdown in Hong Kong. ‘Merkel’s China policy is behind the times,’ said SPD foreign policy spokesperson Nils Schmid in July 2020.
Some aspects of Beijing’s behaviour during the COVID-19 crisis, including its efforts to silence voices seeking to draw attention to the virus in the early stages of the outbreak, its ‘mask diplomacy’ and the tactics of its ‘wolf warrior’ diplomats, have also led some German media outlets to adopt a more critical tone. The chief editor of top-selling German daily Bild has publicly clashed with the Chinese embassy in Berlin over the alleged virus cover-up. And Mathias Döpfner, chief executive of Bild’s parent company, Axel Springer, and one of the most influential figures in the German media, published an op-ed in May 2020 in which he urged the German government to wake up to the threat from China and follow the US down a path of economic ‘decoupling’.
Senior German officials in Brussels have also been outspoken. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, a former German defence minister, was the driving force behind a joint communication in December 2020 that spoke of a ‘once-in-a-generation opportunity’ for the EU and the US to work together following Biden’s victory, including on the ‘strategic challenge presented by China’s growing international assertiveness’. ‘Where China’s concerned, we as the European Union, we know exactly on which side of the table we are sitting, we are sitting on the side of the democracies, next to our American friends,’ she said when pressed, in January 2021, on where the EU’s loyalties lay following the conclusion of the EU–China investment agreement. Germany’s ambassador to the EU, Michael Clauss, earned a reputation for speaking out forcefully against China’s policies in his previous role as ambassador to China. Meanwhile, in Berlin, Minister of Defence Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer has pressed for Germany to play a bigger role in the Indo-Pacific, in part to counter the influence of China.
None of this has persuaded Merkel to take a more confrontational line on China. Senior members of her government have made clear that the Chinese government’s behaviour in the COVID-19 crisis has not changed their view of the country as a vital economic partner. Unlike Washington and Tokyo, Berlin has not encouraged businesses to rethink their supply chains in response to the pandemic. If anything, German firms have doubled down on the Chinese market over the past year, with carmakers investing billions of euros in electric vehicle ventures there. And while Merkel’s government has emphasized the need for China to be transparent about the COVID-19 outbreak, officials have also warned against attempts to turn Beijing into a scapegoat. A decision in early 2021 to send a German frigate to the South China Sea was hailed initially as a sign that Berlin was taking a firmer stand against Beijing’s territorial claims in regional waters. But adjustments to the mission to win over domestic sceptics and avoid antagonizing China have since raised questions about whether the deployment may instead be interpreted as sending a signal of weakness.
