Pak Sahafat – Foreign Policy wrote that Berlin has published its strict strategy against China while there are doubts about its implementation and Berlin is not ready to turn its back on China.
According to Pak Sahafat News Agency, this media added: At the end of Angela Merkel’s term as Chancellor at the end of 2021 and the new government of this country took office, a general revision of Germany’s policy towards Beijing was promised, but it should be suspected for logical reasons.
Olaf Schultz, the new chancellor of Germany, in his election campaigns, promised to continue his foreign policy, and the Christian Democratic Party is the largest party in the governing coalition of Germany, which is made up of the Christian Democratic parties belonging to Schultz, the Green Party and the Free Democrats.
Schultz’s actions since coming to power have done little to alleviate these concerns about relations with Beijing. He even went to Beijing at the head of a business delegation and had a disagreement with some of his cabinet members in order to give the green light to an agreement with the Chinese shipping giant known as COSCO regarding the shares of the Hamburg port terminal.
This is while just last month, he rolled out the red carpet for Chinese Prime Minister Li Qiang and repeated his message that companies, not governments, should act on how to de-risk relations with China.
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In fact, Schultz, unlike other members of his party and government, has never considered China a part of the transformation of foreign and security policy that began after the Ukraine war. In the article he wrote in Foreign Affair, China was mentioned as an issue that should be thought about later, and its deep relations with Russia were barely mentioned.
Despite such a history, the German government published its first strategy towards China this month, which Schultz seemed to accept under pressure from hard-line members of the Green Party.
However, little is expected from this document. After the highly worded draft of this document was leaked to the German media by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs headed by Analena Baerbock last November, there is still no prospect of its implementation.
The author of Foreign Policy further states that he was informed that the German chancellor did not want this document to be published before Li Qiang’s visit to Berlin because he was afraid that it would limit his room for maneuver in negotiations with China. As a result, the publication of the strategy was postponed until the last date before the summer vacation, so that some members of the German parliament (Bundestag) had already left Berlin for vacation.
In the continuation of the Foreign Policy report, it is stated: As expected, the final version of this document is much easier in some matters than what was leaked in the draft version. However, what remains is still strict. Despite this issue, Germany is not ready to turn away from China for economic reasons.
To understand this issue, it is important to examine the implementation of this strategy with regard to Germany’s economic and political issues. Schultz and his team are deeply concerned about the state of the German economy, which entered a recession in the first three months of this year. The sudden cut-off of cheap Russian gas has hurt the country’s industries, and some of Germany’s biggest companies are considering shifting investments abroad because of special subsidies in the green technology sector included in the US Anti-Inflation Act. gives them
At the end of its report, Foreign Policy pointed out one of the interesting points in Germany’s new strategy: “We are fighting for a transatlantic trade agreement that eliminates industrial tariffs and recognizes transformative technologies.” This report noted that on the other hand, de-risking relations with China doubles trade and investment with allies. In this matter, the ball is in the court of US President Joe Biden.