Bauer AG, a big producer of construction equipment, is better placed than many German companies that invested heavily in China over the past few decades.
The Bavaria-based firm, which traces its roots back to 1790, does not have to worry about keeping a Chinese joint venture partner happy because it is the sole owner of its two plants in Shanghai and Tianjin.
The specialist engineering machines Bauer produces there are sold in countries across Asia, shielding the group from swings in the volatile Chinese building market.
Illustration: Tania Chou
Even so, chief executive officer Thomas Bauer, the seventh generation in his family to run the firm, is worried about his company’s place in China and a broader economic relationship that until recently was seen by German corporations and politicians as a lucrative one-way bet.
“Germany has put too many eggs into one basket, and that basket is China,” Thomas Bauer, a jovial 62-year-old with a thick Bavarian accent, told reporters at the company’s headquarters in Schrobenhausen, an hour’s drive north of Munich, Germany.
Thomas Bauer’s concern points to a growing fear in Germany. For more than a decade, the country has been the growth locomotive of Europe, its economy weathering global financial turmoil, the eurozone debt crisis and a record influx of refugees.
That resilience was based on two key drivers: Germany had innovative firms that produced high-end manufactured goods that fast-growing economies needed; and the country was better than others at profiting from an open, rules-based global trading system that rewarded competitiveness.
China has been crucial on both fronts. Over the past decade it bought up German cars and machinery at an astonishing pace, as it gradually opened up to foreign firms. Last year alone, German manufacturers sold about 5 million cars in China, more than three times as many as in the US.
However, even as the good times roll on, a radical shift is taking place in how Deutschland AG views the vast Chinese market.
Not only has the opening of China shifted into reverse under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), but Chinese firms have moved up the value chain far faster than many in Germany expected.
Germany’s China conundrum is part of a broader challenge facing Europe: Years of inward-focused crisis fighting have left the bloc politically divided and ill-prepared to respond to looming geopolitical and economic challenges. Now the continent risks being squeezed between a more assertive Beijing and the “America First” policies of US President Donald Trump.
In private, some executives liken the situation of German industry in China to the proverbial frog in a pot of slowly heating water which ends up boiling to death because it will not or cannot jump out.
German Ambassador to China Michael Clauss at a meeting with industry chiefs in Berlin last month warned of “tectonic changes” in the relationship, participants said.
“We need to prepare people here for a new era in our partnership with China,” said an official at Germany’s powerful Federation of German Industries. “These are still golden times, but there is a huge amount of concern about what lies ahead.”
ROLE OF THE STATE
German companies were among the first in the West to set up shop in China, giving Germany an advantage as the Chinese economy took off.
Bilateral trade between the two countries hit a record 187 billion euros (US$231 billion) last year, dwarfing China’s trade with France and the UK, both about 70 billion euros. Last year, Germany ran a trade deficit with China of 14 billion euros, tiny compared with the US deficit of about 346 billion euros.
Bauer, which employs 11,000 workers in 70 countries, built its first production facilities in China in the mid-1990s. At the time, not a single Chinese firm could make the sophisticated drilling machines it produces — towering yellow structures used to build the foundations for skyscrapers, power stations and airports.
By 2013 Bauer counted 36 Chinese competitors able to make such machines, a shift Thomas Bauer said was accelerated by European suppliers selling codesigned parts to the Chinese.
A decade ago, the company’s Chinese plants generated revenues of 109 million euros. Sales slumped to less than half that amount in five of the nine years that followed.
Today, what Bauer and other German firms say they are most worried about is the role of the Chinese state in the economy.
Last year, China introduced a cybersecurity law which tightened state control over Internet services, including secure VPN connections that are used by foreign firms to communicate confidentially with headquarters. More recently, some German companies have complained of pressure to accept Chinese Communist Party officials on the boards of their joint ventures.
Thomas Bauer fears that Xi’s “Made in China 2025” strategy, which identifies 10 key sectors — including robotics, aerospace and clean-energy cars — where China wants to be a leader, represents a direct challenge to German manufacturing dominance.
To keep its edge, Thomas Bauer said his firm is focusing intensively on digitization.
“It will not be a contest against copiers. It will be one against innovative engineers who are intent on overtaking us,” he said. “If we don’t start finding answers soon, this can end very badly.”
TRUMP TARIFFS
The German angst over China mirrors that which has prompted Trump to threaten Beijing with tens of billions of dollars in trade tariffs.
However, because Germany’s top firms have become so dependent on the Chinese market, the government in Berlin has avoided confronting China head-on.
In February, carmaker Daimler AG showed just how skittish some companies are about upsetting Beijing.
After a backlash in China over a Mercedez-Benz advertisement on Instagram that quoted the Dalai Lama, Daimler deleted the post and its chief executive officer Dieter Zetsche wrote a letter expressing deep regret for the “hurt and grief” his company’s “negligent and insensitive mistake” had caused Chinese.
“There is a huge gap between what people in Germany are saying about China and what they are really thinking,” said Bernhard Bartsch of the Bertelsmann Foundation, a German research group.
Later this month, Bertelsmann and Berlin-based China think tank the Mercator Institute for China Studies are to host an Oxford Union-style debate on the motion: “In ten years’ time, China will have substantially undermined Europe’s political and economic system.”
The mood among German firms operating in China is also souring.
A survey late last year from the German Chamber of Commerce in China showed that for the first time in many years, more than half of its members were not planning investments in new locations in China.
About 13 percent of German firms operating in China said they could leave within the next two years.
For decades, Germany’s approach to China could be summed up with the motto wandel durch handel (change through trade).
Now that strategy is in tatters and government officials darkly joke that the “win-win” relationship has a new meaning: China wins twice.
“The hope was that closer economic ties would lead to an opening. Today it is clear this was a false hope,” a German government official said. “They tell us what we want to hear and then do the opposite.”
Berlin is starting to push back. Last year, after Chinese firm Midea Group’s takeover of robotics maker Kuka AG sparked an uproar, it tightened restrictions on foreign investments and launched a push for new Europe-wide rules for screening takeovers.
In December last year, a German domestic intelligence agency infuriated Beijing when it accused Chinese counterparts of using fake social media accounts to gather information on German politicians — a rare public rebuke that Berlin said was intended to send Chinese a message.
A summit between the German and Chinese governments later this year is likely to reveal a tougher line from Berlin, officials said.
However, they also concede that divisions within the EU and a wide gap between Europe and the go-it-alone Trump administration would make it more difficult to force change in Beijing.
“What the Chinese are really worried about is Europe and the United States working together against them,” the German official said. “In that sense, Trump really is a gift to China.”
Recently, China launched another diplomatic offensive against Taiwan, improperly linking its “one China principle” with UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 to constrain Taiwan’s diplomatic space. After Taiwan’s presidential election on Jan. 13, China persuaded Nauru to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Nauru cited Resolution 2758 in its declaration of the diplomatic break. Subsequently, during the WHO Executive Board meeting that month, Beijing rallied countries including Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Egypt, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Laos, Russia, Syria and Pakistan to reiterate the “one China principle” in their statements, and assert that “Resolution 2758 has settled the status of Taiwan” to hinder Taiwan’s
Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s (李顯龍) decision to step down after 19 years and hand power to his deputy, Lawrence Wong (黃循財), on May 15 was expected — though, perhaps, not so soon. Most political analysts had been eyeing an end-of-year handover, to ensure more time for Wong to study and shadow the role, ahead of general elections that must be called by November next year. Wong — who is currently both deputy prime minister and minister of finance — would need a combination of fresh ideas, wisdom and experience as he writes the nation’s next chapter. The world that
Can US dialogue and cooperation with the communist dictatorship in Beijing help avert a Taiwan Strait crisis? Or is US President Joe Biden playing into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) hands? With America preoccupied with the wars in Europe and the Middle East, Biden is seeking better relations with Xi’s regime. The goal is to responsibly manage US-China competition and prevent unintended conflict, thereby hoping to create greater space for the two countries to work together in areas where their interests align. The existing wars have already stretched US military resources thin, and the last thing Biden wants is yet another war.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, people have been asking if Taiwan is the next Ukraine. At a G7 meeting of national leaders in January, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warned that Taiwan “could be the next Ukraine” if Chinese aggression is not checked. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said that if Russia is not defeated, then “today, it’s Ukraine, tomorrow it can be Taiwan.” China does not like this rhetoric. Its diplomats ask people to stop saying “Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow.” However, the rhetoric and stated ambition of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Taiwan shows strong parallels with