This website uses cookies and other technologies to help us provide you with better content and customized services. If you want to continue to enjoy this website’s content, please agree to our use of cookies. For more information on cookies and their use, please see our latest Privacy Policy.

Accept

cwlogo

切換側邊選單 切換搜尋選單

Taiwan is an inspiration for a more assertive German China policy

Taiwan is an inspiration for a more assertive German China policy

Source:Shutterstock

The Taiwanese government led by the Democratic Progressive Party was deeply suspicious of the CCP's influence on the discredited UN agency, ignored the WHO's problematic public advice, and took decisive and highly successful preventive measures early on during the Covid-19 outbreak. There is much Germany can learn from democratic Taiwan's perseverance and resilience when facing the existential threat from General Secretary Xi Jinping's radical revisionist and expansionist foreign policy.

Views

1677
Share

Taiwan is an inspiration for a more assertive German China policy

By Andreas Fulda
web only

On Sunday, 7 June 2020 UK Labour's shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy offered a rare critical self-reflection. In an interview with The Observer she mused that "there’s been a naivety about Britain’s approach to China in the past decade". This can also be said about German China policy, which for too long has been based on naive assumptions. The problem is that a rather worn-out German grand coalition government between the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) appears to be less interested in critical retrospection. 

This is evident when listening to recent public statements about China by German Chancellor Merkel (CDU) and Foreign Minister Maas (SPD). Whilst one and a half million Uyghurs and Kazakhs are being held in internment or labour camps against their will, Hong Kong's autonomy is being undermined by the proposed National Security Law and Xi Jinping's threatens to annex Taiwan: their response is always the same. Germany and Europe shall continue dialogue and cooperation with China.  

This means that both Merkel and Maas are doubling down on Germany's unprincipled approach to China. They don't seem to have learned from the failures of their own China policy. For more than two decades German politicians and traders have argued that change in China would come through commercial engagement. But selling German cars to Chinese consumers has not led to liberalisation and democratisation in mainland China. Under General Secretary Xi Jinping we have seen the rise of an increasingly illiberal and autocratic Chinese security state, which now threatens peace, security and public health, not just in China, but around the world.   

It is a big mistake for Merkel and Maas to continue to stick to Germany's failed 'change through trade' China policy. The German approach to China is not just wrong when seen from a democracy, human rights or security perspective. It also does not make sense from the perspective of industrial policy. The German government needs to be mindful that for big companies like VW or BASF to put all their proverbial eggs in the mainland Chinese market creates vulnerabilities for Germany's industry overall. A Chinese diplomat recently threatened that the Chinese party-state could restrict market access for German car manufacturers to push through their own foreign policy objectives. Such pressure on the German government to accept Huawei to build Germany's 5G infrastructure is unacceptable. Both Chancellor Merkel and Foreign Minister Maas have failed to denounce the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) wolf warrior diplomacy. They should also explain to the German public that increased economic engagement in China in fact leads to more hidden liabilities which can then be exploited by the CCP.

To make matters worse, Merkel and Maas' advocacy of dialogue and cooperation is oblivious of the very real obstacles to open-ended exchange and collaboration between Europe and China. In the early 2000s I conducted research for my PhD on Sino-German development cooperation. I learned that rather than the Chinese Communist Party becoming socialised in a rule-based international order, various German state and non-state development agenies operating in China had lost much of their organisational autonomy in the process of unconditional engagement. It was sobering to see that some of them had become mere appendices of an intransparent and unaccountable Chinese party-state. 

And during the past three years a European research team under my leadership investigated the intended and unintended effects of the CCP's draconian Overseas NGO Law on European non-profit organisations and their Chinese partners. We learned that open-ended dialogue had been replaced by censorship and self-censorship. Trust networks between European and Chinese civil society organisations—which had been painstakingly built up over many years and even decades— where deliberately destroyed and replaced by top-down command and control imposed by the Chinese Ministry of Public Security. Furthermore it is an open secret in Berlin that while a majority of German political foundations still have offices in China, in reality they can no longer do any meaningful project work. Chancellor Merkel and Foreign Minister Maas have yet to explain to the public how this untenable situation is in the enlightened German interest.

Another problem with Merkel and Maas' call for dialogue and cooperation with CCP-led China is that it rests on outdated strategic thinking. As early as 1996 the widely acclaimed International Relations expert Gerald Segal pointed out that neither engagement nor containment—on its own—would be sufficient to integrate the PR China as a powerful, unstable non-status quo power. To overcome this self-limiting and overly binary choice in foreign and security policy he proposed what he called 'constrainment': a combination of economic interdependence combined with effective measures to constrain the CCP's undesired behaviour. In Segal's view, constrainment could work if only countries had the political will to do so. But is there any appetite among decision makers in Berlin to change the status quo? 

In an interview with ARD, Germany's first public service broadcasting station, Foreign Minister Maas claimed on 3 June 2020 that Germany was too small a country to stand up to China as a new superpower and could only try to do so by seeking a new pan-European China strategy. He should be reminded that Taiwan—whose population is about one third of Germany's—has successfully resisted the CCP's nefarious influence and interference for many decades. 

The way this de facto independent and democratic island-state has been dealing with Covid-19 has been exemplary. When news of the Covid-19 outbreak appeared in early January 2020 President Tsai Ing-wen issued a controversial but necessary travel ban for visitors from Wuhan. A concerted health education campaign and state-coordinated face mask dissemination subsequently has allowed Taiwan to not only minimise unnecessary deaths but also remain economically functional. 

In this sense Taiwan's exclusion from the WHO may have been a blessing in disguise. The Taiwanese government led by the Democratic Progressive Party was deeply suspicious of the CCP's influence on the discredited UN agency, ignored the WHO's problematic public advice, and took decisive and highly successful preventive measures early on during the Covid-19 outbreak. There is much Germany can learn from democratic Taiwan's perseverance and resilience when facing the existential threat from General Secretary Xi Jinping's radical revisionist and expansionist foreign policy. 

Chancellor Merkel and Foreign Minister Maas' unconvincing rhetoric on China stand in stark contrast to the decisive leadership of Taiwanese President Tsai. This sad state of affairs suggests that the current German CDU/SPD coalition government lacks the political will to constrain the CCP. At the same time increasing numbers of parliamentarians in Germany, Europe and around the world are growing increasingly impatient. 

An open letter highly critical of the CCP's undermining of Hong Kong autonomy written by Lord Patten and Sir Malcolm Rifkind was co-signed by more than eight hundred lawmakers from over forty countries. And on 5 June 2020 the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) was formed. The stated objective of this trans-national network of lawmakers from eight countries is to work "towards reform on how democratic countries approach China". Such efforts are also supported by global civil society. The change.org petition "Europe can no longer afford Germany's failed China policy of 'change through trade'" which I initiated at the end of May 2020 just surpassed the milestone of 10.000 signatories. An awakened global civil society—in partnership with parliaments around the world—are exercising collective leadership. But will it be enough to convince the German government to move from failed China engagement to more promising China constrainment? 



Andreas Fulda is a senior fellow at the University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute and the author of The Struggle for Democracy in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong: Sharp Power and Its Discontents.

Views

1677
Share

Keywords:

好友人數