The visit of German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to Beijing 50 years ago was a visit that lifted German-Chinese relations to a completely new level. On 31 October 1975, Schmidt met the Chinese head of state Mao Zedong. In preparation he had read Mao’s poems. It was the first visit of a German chancellor to China.
Schmidt remained someone who, throughout his life, wanted to break with the colonial past of the West in China, and advocated relations on equal footing and with mutual respect. For example, in his discussion of the book The Governance of China by Chinese President Xi Jinping, he called on the West to replace arrogance with fair competition in its relationship with China. Good relations with China were among the priorities of German foreign policy.
Wadephul on a collision course
Almost exactly 50 years later, the German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul intended to make his way to China. Actually the visit was supposed to prepare Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s China trip later this year. But this seemed far off.
Shortly before departure, the German foreign minister pulled the travel plug and cancelled — for scheduling reasons. From the outset, Wadephul’s visit planning was under a bad star.
Wadephul is regarded as the man who implements German foreign policy exclusively according to Washington’s dictates. The website The Pioneer analysed this misère in relation to the relations with Beijing: “Especially toward China, the CDU man from Husum does not find the right tone”.
Indeed, Wadephul is regarded as an elephant in the china-shop of German-Chinese relations. His appearance gives the impression that he wants to continue the anti-Chinese turn in German foreign policy from 1937, and again pursue an alliance with Japan against China and Russia.
As part of his recent Asia trip to Japan and Indonesia in August, he attacked China and accused Beijing of an “increasingly aggressive stance” in the Taiwan Strait and in the East and South China Seas.
Even in Tokyo, Wadephul attacked Beijing directly. He named China as a source of threat to democracy and the rule of law in the region, and railed that China threatens “more or less openly to change the status quo unilaterally and to shift the borders in its favour”.
Wadephul walks in Baerbock’s footsteps
A diplomatic affront which with respect to Helmut Schmidt’s calls for fair treatment of China can only be described as a 180-degree turn in German foreign policy. Wadephul walks in the footsteps of the moralising foreign policy of Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. However his destructive potential is even far greater than that of his predecessor.
Thus it was no surprise that almost everything went wrong even ahead of his trip. The major business leaders preferred to stay home because Wadephul is now regarded as someone who has the potential to spoil any deal in China.
Correspondingly, the important state-politicians in Beijing had no time either. Wadephul would have met neither the prime minister, nor the head of state, nor his deputy.
Much suggests that Wadephul was working on a completely different mission – not to initiate a new start in German-Chinese relations, but to set the stop-over as the endpoint. But he apparently backed down at the last minute.
Perhaps Washington itself called him back, because the potential summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping on 30 October was first to be awaited.
This assumption of relationship destruction appears unrealistic at first glance. China has only recently again become the largest trading partner of Germany and the EU, because of Trump’s tariff policy.
Berlin and Brussels have, however, made themselves useful pawns of the White House’s economic war strategy against China. The dark clouds of the consequences of this policy are already gathering in the European sky.
Hubris, double-standards, and colonial patterns of thought
Neither German nor European foreign policy seems prepared to apply the principle of reciprocity in international relations. But that is precisely the colonial expectation of the West that is currently being continued in relations with China.
It is the expectation that one’s own measures against another country will not be answered, because that country dares not rebel against the rules established by the West. But that is precisely the stance someone like Helmut Schmidt always pointed out, and which the rapid development of China completely ignores.
Wadephul appears in Asia only as the squire of knight Trump, who attempts to fight the Chinese wind-mills. Concretely, one laments China’s restrictions on the export of rare earths for Western arms companies without recognising that the export bans to China came from the USA. One laments Chinese tariffs on US products without mentioning that the first shot in the trade war with Beijing was clearly fired by the USA. One allows via the Netherlands a Chinese chip-manufacturer to be placed under Western control and then complains that China no longer delivers chips to Europe and Volkswagen’s production lines stand still. And one wants to teach Beijing morals on human rights, yet supports – as the German government does – Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, with arms and trade privileges.
What concerns German foreign policy is that with Johann Wadephul’s figure, double-standards are joined by a historically grown, particularly unpleasant and in international politics almost deadly characteristic: hubris, a merciless overestimation of oneself. He seriously believes that one can execute the orders of the USA against the great power China without suffering severe damage oneself.
Wadephul’s unconditional will to challenge Beijing is certainly laughed at there, in the way one understands a dog’s bark as expression of its master. But at the same time – and here Mr Wadephul should not let himself be misled by his advisers – China is a country that is ready to accept a challenge.
German federal government destroys relations with China
Whoever believes that in China one must evoke memories of Kaiser Wilhelm and his notorious “Hun speech” at the disembarkation of the German expeditionary corps for the Western colonial mission to China might be surprised at the answers a country is capable of which counts today almost in all areas as a global technology leader.
What’s clear — and this might be Johann Wadephul’s biggest misunderstanding — is that the federal government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Vice-Chancellor Lars Klingbeil is in the process of destroying relations with the great power China and adopting the USA’s enemy declarations.
Thus 50 years of German-Chinese relations threaten to come to an end, and an unprecedented self-destruction of our country is set in motion, against which the consequences of the sanctions policy against Russia were only a light foretaste.
China is a centre of the multipolar world order. This insight is urgently needed. A German foreign policy that acts in the interest of the desperate maintenance of the USA’s doomed unipolar world order is destined to fail. In the interest of the German population however lies being in good relations with this centre.
This article first appeared in German in the Berliner Zeitung, and was published here in English with the author’s permission.
Sevim Dağdelen is a former member of parliament, publicist, and foreign-policy spokesperson of the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW). She was for many years deputy chair of the German-Chinese Parliamentary Group of the German Bundestag.
