The eagle and the dragon: a plea for German-Chinese friendship

The Chinese, who value the friendly relationship with Germany, do not like to think back to the year 2022. Because precisely in the year that marked the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations, our bilateral relationship had hit rock bottom. The hoped-for big anniversary celebrations did not materialize; personal encounters were a rarity. Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz decided on Japan as the destination of his first trip to Asia, and on the way back he avoided the Middle Kingdom. Angela Merkel once gave us diplomatic priority: China was the first country she had visited in Asia; she visited China twelve times during her tenure as chancellor.

In the middle of this political ice age, we heard how hotly the topic of turning away from China was being discussed in Germany. Therefore, Olaf Scholz’s one-day November visit to Germany was seen as a positive change in times, especially since he had spoken out against deglobalization shortly before his trip to China.

For us Chinese, the year 2023 began with optimism. On the one hand, the corona measures, which had weighed heavily on both the country’s own economy and foreign relations, were lifted shortly before the turn of the year. On the other hand, the fear that highly dangerous virus mutations could arise if more than a billion Chinese were infected with omicron proved to be unfounded.

A kind of thaw

Thirdly, last April there was suddenly so much movement in Sino-European relations that we now tend to interpret what happened as a kind of thaw. We not only had French President Macron, EU Commission President von der Leyen and German Foreign Minister Baerbock as guests; much more, in connection with these state visits, a polyphony could be heard in the European China debates.

Emmanuel Macron not only discouraged Europeans from being American “vassal” towards China, including on the Taiwan question, but he also tweeted in three languages ​​(French, English and Chinese): “Long live Franco-Chinese friendship! As a Germanist, I envy my Romance colleagues from the bottom of my heart for this sentence. Ursula von der Leyen gave a noteworthy speech on China on April 18th in the European Parliament.

On the one hand, she spoke in a respectful tone about China in view of its ancient culture and its unique achievements in fighting poverty and warned the Europeans against painting in black and white. On the other hand, she advised focusing more on risk mitigation rather than decoupling. Finally, one can also look back with satisfaction on Annalena Baerbock’s visit. She had been able to look around our country – seeing once is better than hearing a hundred times – and found not only critical but also appreciative words.

Remembering the Golden Bull

I particularly noticed that she had looked up at the four-language nameplate at the entrance to the Lama Monastery, the symbol of China’s multi-ethnic statehood. I think of them every time I see the sign golden bullthe basic law of the Holy Roman Empire, which states that the son of an elector must start learning four languages ​​at the age of seven: German, Italian, Czech and Latin.

In addition, on April 25, British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly gave a speech on China in London that made people sit up and take notice. He campaigned for cooperation with China, a country he respects because it has a history of 2,000 years and has lifted 800 million people out of absolute poverty. He impressed us with a history of China that is unusual for a Western diplomat.

What bothers and fascinates me about his speech is that while he persisted in directing a warning to Beijing about the Taiwan question, he also craved an explanation for the age-old and irrepressible desire of the Chinese called for reunification. He quoted from the novel “The Story of the Three Kingdoms” and explicitly referred to the year 221 BC. In that year the unification of China took place by Qin Shihuang, whose counterpart in German history would have been Hermann the Cherusci if he had managed to unify the Germanic tribes.

Lack of resonance in Germany

Unfortunately, one sometimes gets the impression that the Chinese find it even more difficult to communicate with the Germans than with other westerners. As a Germanist, it is not without surprise that I find that Chinese literature finds much less resonance in Germany than in other Western countries, including the USA: while the representative Chinese writers of the present day have almost all received some form of award in other Western countries, hardly any one of them was awarded a literary prize in Germany.

Chinese poetry, for example in the form of the Tang poems, had long since reached the level of the Weimar Classic when the oldest book appeared in German in 780.

Huang Liaoyu

It is well known that more literary prizes are awarded in Germany every year than in almost any other country in the world. In my opinion, what separates German culture from Chinese culture so clearly is less the age difference (in the form of the Tang poems, for example, Chinese poetry had long since reached the level of the Weimar Classics when the oldest book in German appeared in 780) than the difference in age mentality difference. The German mentality is so deeply shaped by the Christian religion on the one hand and by German idealism on the other that the Germans have a missionary sense of mission and tend to give the ideal priority over the material.

The world may one day heal through the German character: this is what the poet Emanuel Geibel proclaimed in a poem in 1861. In the middle of the First World War, Thomas Mann wrote that he had “no life or death interest in German commercial dominance” and that Germany’s victory without interest would only please one in the country of Kantian aesthetics. The Chinese, on the other hand, whose traditional culture is characterized by intellectual down-to-earthness and polytheistic practices, know neither the monotheistic sense of mission nor the desire for philosophical soaring. The Chinese commandment “Do not do to others what you do not want to experience yourself” (Confucius) stands in interesting contrast to the German creed “I share with you what I find good”.

elimination of prejudices

What most clearly reveals the idealism in German China policy is the principle of “change through trade”. Germany’s largest trading partner is obviously far from becoming the intellectual image of the Europeans. In China, where such debates are virtually unknown, the creed of “change through trade” would either meet with complete incomprehension or – on the contrary – with great approval, which would mean something else. In China, people tend to think that a commercial transaction should be for mutual benefit and to break down the prejudices of the other party in order to make the business partner friendlier.

Originally, Germany wanted to establish diplomatic relations with China at the same time as France, i.e. in 1964, and accordingly traveled to Switzerland for negotiations with China, which were quickly broken off. One reason was that the US had not given the green light. This only came with Richard Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972. In the wake of this event, not only government representatives from Germany, but also from England, Japan and Australia flew towards Beijing.

And today? Is it time for Germany to act collectively again and heed the US call for decoupling? It goes without saying that the economic decoupling from China is not in Germany’s interest. The USA are not only victors, helpers and the big brother to Germany, but also the leader of NATO, which the Federal Republic of Germany joined immediately after its birth. Also, Germany is a late nation and is known to have come a long way west, and the US is in the far west.

France’s fault

A non-Westerner may be allowed to say a word about the western orientation, which has been made a state principle of the federation from the very beginning: in the West lies not only the land of the Declaration of Independence and the land of Magna Carta, but also the land of European ones Enlightenment and the ideas of 1789: In 1792 it made foreigners who sang about freedom (like Klopstock and Schiller) or fought for it (like George Washington or the military engineer Tadeusz Kosciuszko) its citizens, was already determined in 1794 to promote the idea of ​​freedom and equality ” without distinction of skin color” and accordingly abolished slavery in his colonies, which was to continue elsewhere for another 200 years. It is also worth noting that the statue of the goddess of liberty that still adorns New York Harbor to this day was a gift from France (1886).

50 years ago, the Chinese distanced themselves almost completely from all intellectual and cultural assets from Europe – apart from the writings of the Marxist classics and the “International”. Not even the music of Beethoven was exempt from this general boycott.

As a result, the famous conductor Li Delun dismissed the proposal to attend the Great Hall of the People to celebrate the signing of the Joint Communiqué Treaty on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between our two countries by Walter Scheel and Ji Pengfei on October 11 Conducting the 4th movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony in 1972. His orchestra hadn’t rehearsed for seven years!

50 years later, there was a radical change of course in US China policy. Anyone who has heard or read what Barack Obama said about China in a speech in Australia in 2010 will realize that it was not differences in values ​​that led to this change of course: “Our planet would not bear it if over a billion Chinese lived like this like Australians and Americans.”

It is therefore not surprising that the USA turned to the Indo-Pacific region under the Obama administration. The subsequent Trump administration spoke in a similar tone about China. Kiron Skinner, White House National Security Advisor, described on camera today’s China as the first “non-Caucasian” world power, which poses a worse challenge than the former Soviet Union, given that the Russians are, after all, part of the extended Western family… O friends , not these sounds!

Luckily we didn’t hear these sounds from Germany. I wish for a German-Chinese relationship that promotes trade in goods as well as the exchange of ideas. It would be nice if our bilateral relations developed again as between 2007 and 2010 under the banner of “Germany and China – moving together”.