Overview

As Europe finds itself once again caught between two superpowers – the USA and a rising China – little has been written about a relationship that will have a profound influence on the international order: the relationship between the People’s Republic of China and Germany. In Germany and China, leading international relations expert Andreas Fulda looks critically at the increasingly interdependent relationship between the two countries. Drawing on examples from politics, industry, development aid and technology sectors and academia, the book explores how successive governments from Helmut Kohl to Angela Merkel have pursued ever-closer ties to China in the interests of short term economic gain. Fulda explores the danger of this increasing entanglement not just for Germany, but for Europe and the international world order.

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9781350357020

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Reviews

China matters to Germany, Europe and the world. Getting our policy towards a resurgent China right is important to Germany, Europe and other democracies. Andreas Fulda has raised serious questions about the German establishment’s engagement with China in this book. It should be required reading for policy makers and others interested in how we should engage China. * Steve Tsang, Director of the SOAS China Institute * Andreas Fulda masterfully dissects a series of Germany's pathological self-deceptions which hamper effective foreign policy, trade, and security. Exercising an impressive degree of self-reflection and impartiality, Fulda shows how a moralized, dysfunctional style of debate helped sustain obsolete policy images. The book thus offers the rare feat of not only a meticulously researched problem analysis, but also an applied example of how a robust implementation of transparency in political debates may be implemented. * Pascal Jürgens, Trier University, Germany * Germany and China: How Entanglement Undermines Freedom, Prosperity and Security is a tour de force. Grounded in 25 years of research and on-the-ground experience, Andreas Fulda’s third book provides an ominous critique of Germany’s economic and psychological dependence on China, and the subsequent threat posed to Germany’s national security. Fulda contextualises his epic account in a rich socio-political history of Germany and China relations, offering both a philosophical and pragmatic critique. * Jane Richards, University of Leeds, UK * In this highly readable monograph, Andreas Fulda scrutinises, and debunks, some of the most consequential flaws in German academic and policy thinking about the People’s Republic. Xi Jinping’s unmistakably clear intent to make China the next superpower requires no less than a strategic view on this country, underpinned by serious China expertise. Fulda's account, thus, betrays the power-related frictions that conventional German approaches will need to undergo. The author's research achieves this ambitious goal rather superbly. * Maximilian Terhalle London School of Economics, UK * This book carries important lessons for democracies in general. It shows the risks of developing deep economic interdependencies with autocratic regimes – how they may lead to highly destructive material and psychological dependencies, opening-up for malign foreign influence. As such, Fulda’s new book provides a critical contribution and a must read for European policymakers and business managers at large now struggling with ‘de-risking’ their China relations and developing greater autocracy competence in the wake of Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. * Mikael Wigell, Finnish Institute of International Affairs * Fulda discusses the ideas and policy decisions that led to the current level of dependency and vulnerability. It is required reading for anybody who wants to know how we got there, how politicians, scientists, diplomats and lobbyists created the German ideology of 'rapprochement through interweaving'. Fulda also offers a way out of the policy of voluntary entanglement. His book is a landmark on the way to a new strategic culture vis-à-vis China. * Jörg Lau, Foreign Affairs Editor at DIE ZEIT * Fulda provides ample evidence that deficits and failures at the political level have an impact on numerous other domains and can thus, in their entirety, turn into a substantial threat to a country’s economic sustainability and social cohesion. But Fulda does not stop at simply pointing the finger at failures in his home country. He also makes a number of helpful and constructive suggestions that I hope will receive the attention they deserve. * Alicia Hennig, International Institute Zittau, TU Dresden, Germany * Combing his expertise as a consultant in Germany's development agency, a political scientist and China scholar, Andreas Fulda analyses China studies' formation and underlying trends. Analyzing his positionality in these debates and contextualizing the discourses, Fulda makes a significant step for our area to foster our self-reflexivity and need to explore our positionalities for future research and discussions. At a time when the whole academic cooperation with China is adjusted, Fulda's work is required reading for all China scholars. * Sascha Klotzbücher, Comenius University, Slovakia * Armed with a vast expertise in the history of ideas and International Relations, Andreas Fulda has debunked the myth of the impartiality behind the claim of objectivity in academia by calling out some of his peers and putting them in front of their responsibilities as scientists. No, he argues, Human Rights are not negotiable and yes, it is the role of experts to display clear coordinates. It does not make them lesser scientists. Fulda argues that bowing to Chinese coercion is only displaying provocative weakness which in turn invites more aggressive demands by the Chinese Communist Party. * Nathalie Vogel, Institute of World Politics, USA * Foreign relations with China are one of Germany's sore spots. Germany is officially committed to democracy and human rights. Yet successive governments have been mostly motivated by economic interests, resulting in increasing entanglement with the Chinese authoritarian regime. Efforts to develop a more principled approach to autocratic China have been unsuccessful. This has resulted in a problematic continuity of German China policy, as Andreas Fulda meticulously shows in his analysis. Hopefully, his book will help break this continuity. * Heiner Roetz, University of Bochum, Germany * Andreas Fulda lays bare the flawed logic that has guided the policies of successive German governments towards China over decades. In the case of Russia, the same approach built around ‘change through trade’ proved disastrous. It blinded the political and business elites to the real nature of change taking place in Russia and the increasingly aggressive intent of its leadership. A similarly naïve and over-optimistic approach to dealing with China has created a set of serious vulnerabilities for Germany. This book is a wake-up call for German politicians and business leaders who instinctively want to avoid confrontation with China. * John Lough, Chatham House, UK * Fulda’s book will be particularly useful to those who, like me, have praised Germany’s economic prowess without truly grasping the geopolitical compromises that facilitated it. Though it might be an uncomfortable read for those who preside in the corridors of power in Berlin, it contains within it much that could inform policy as Germany assesses the geopolitical landscape. If, as Fulda asserts, Germany’s mercantilist China policy prioritised economic gains at the cost of industrial competitiveness and democratic resilience, this book represents a long-overdue reckoning. * Martin Thorley, Asia Pacific Senior Analyst for the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) * Andreas Fulda’s new work is brilliantly timed, as Germany – and the wider democratic world - casts around, since the Ukraine invasion, for lessons from their 'rude awakening' from 20 years’ mostly unconditional, economically-driven engagement with the totalitarian powers of Russia and China. Based on more than 20 years’ interdisciplinary research, Fulda’s book seeks to provide not a new theory of international relations but more usefully, analytical tools combining theory and practice. It succinctly proposes replacing Germany’s mercantilist China policy – also common worldwide – and its associated, ineffectual, Faustian bargain, with a realistic policy of 'constrainment'. * Rowan Callick, Griffith University, Australia * Andreas Fulda's new book explores the legacy of failed assumptions in German China policy and hones in on recent public debates challenging these narratives. Based on the political cybernetics of Karl Deutsch, he frames his research in terms of learning capabilities of the German foreign policy system and process. The failures and timidity of German China policy and the recent progress of the debate are well documented, thoroughly researched, dialogically discussed, and presented in a nuanced way. * Horst Fabian, Civil Society Ambassador Europe—China *

Author Information

Andreas Fulda is Associate Professor at the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, UK. His recent books include The Struggle for Democracy in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong (2020) and he is a frequent commentator on China for international media such as the BBC, Washington Post and Al Jazeera.

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