As the first visit by a German cabinet minister in 26 years, Bettina Stark-Watzinger’s trip to Taiwan in March last year, was a big deal. The German Minister for Education and Research oversaw the signing of a bilateral agreement on science and technology cooperation, which she said would enhance “cooperation on the basis of democratic values, transparency, openness, reciprocity and scientific freedom.”
She notably did not meet with former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) — a gesture designed to placate Beijing, which still branded her visit “vile” — but Stark-Watzinger’s two-day stay appeared to signal a new boldness in Germany’s approach to Taiwan and China under the coalition government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the Social Democratic Party (SPD).
‘ZEITENWENDE’
The new, ostensibly sturdier, posture was tied to “zeitenwende” — a catchphrase that Scholz used in a speech to the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, in October 2022. Literally translating as “times-turn,” the expression was perceived as a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which had dramatically brought home the naivety of German dependence on Russian gas.
Just three months later, the Scholz administration approved a new China Strategy — touted as heralding a tougher stance on engagement with Beijing. In the interim, Scholz had courted controversy by greenlighting a deal for Chinese shipping giant Cosco to take a 24.9 percent stake in a shipping terminal at Port of Hamburg — known as Germany’s “gateway to the world.”
A 35 percent share in the terminal had originally been proposed, before a backlash from German politicians and US officials had pressured Scholz into complying with a prior cabinet decision to limit investments in “critical infrastructure” to 25 percent.
Noticeable among the 64 pages of the document was a reference to Taiwan.
“Germany has close and good relations with Taiwan in many areas and wants to expand them,” the text emphasized.
While Andreas Fulda, perhaps somewhat unfairly, does not acknowledge this unprecedented comment on ties with Taiwan, he draws attention to “failure to mention Taiwan a geopolitical flashpoint” in its National Security Strategy paper, also unveiled last year, and the German Federal Foreign Office’s 2020 Policy Guidelines for the Indo-Pacific (which, in fairness to Scholz, preceded his chancellorship).
As this powerfully argued critique of Germany’s China policy across successive administrations makes clear, such oversights are emblematic of a confused and dangerous handling of relations with Taiwan and China.
Fulda offers five policy punctuation analyses (PPA) — case studies drawn from extensive media analysis, which highlight “competing policy images” and provided alternatives to the dogmatic paradigms that have influenced Germany’s China strategy for decades.
CHARTING A PERILOUS COURSE
Three of these paradigms for dealing with autocracies are effectively dismantled and exposed as examples of “destructive learning,” as opposed to “creative learning,” on the part of German policymakers, academic institutions and even nongovernmental organizations.
In simple terms, the former term describes a situation whereby, failing to recognize the folly of an adopted course of action, an actor continues down a route toward self-harm. As for “creative learning,” this denotes a change of tack, based on the realization that the captain’s charted course is steering the ship into perilous waters.
The first of the failed paradigms that Fulda critiques is “Rapprochement through Interweaving (Annaherung durch Verflechtung),” a doctrine propounded by Frank-Walter Steinmeier, chancellery chief of staff under former SPD chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. This philosophy can be seen as a descendant of the “Change through Rapprochement (Wandel durch Annaherung)” and Ostpolitik approach of Egon Bahr, secretary of state under former SPD chancellor Willy Brandt.
It is interesting to note that Germany’s dealings with authoritarian states, which are strongly associated with Schroeder, predate his time in office. Instead, his immediate predecessor Helmut Kohl of the Christian Democrat Union (CDU), was responsible for normalizing relations with Beijing post-Tiananmen by pushing for an end to the embargo on arms sales and, in 1995,“becoming the first Western leader to visit a Chinese military base.”
This, writes Fulda, “sent a clear signal that the atrocities of 1989 were no longer an obstacle to Western business engagement with China.”
‘BLACK ELEPHANT PHENOMENA’
Kohl’s own predecessor, Helmut Schmidt, of the SPD, who is described as Schroeder’s “political role model,” also comes under scrutiny for his opposition to “a value-based approach” to China. While this came to prominence way after his time in power, as a respected elder statesman, Schmidt’s “culturally essentialist” public statements that China was a country unsuited to democracy were influential.
An unabashed admirer of Xi Jinping (習近平), Schmidt habitually showed “a disregard for Taiwan’s security,” and dismissed the country’s democracy as “little to do with a Western democracy,” implying that it had been manufactured by the West.
“It is impossible to estimate the harm that Schmidt has done to German public discourse [on China],” Fulda writes.
He notes that between them, Schmidt, “his follower” Schroeder and Steinmeier — a triumvirate of authoritarian apologists — reined in the early “principled approach” of former CDU Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The final paradigm is “Change through Trade” (Wandel durch Handel) which became a cornerstone of Schroeder’s foreign policy and is still blindly championed by some, despite clear evidence of its fruitlessness.
Opportunities for disrupting this blinkered and pernicious mindset, Fulda suggests, can be found in instances of policy punctuation, where alternatives surface.
As the fourth of his PPAs, Fulda highlights Germany’s sidelining of Taiwan, as “a textbook example of the black elephant phenomenon.”
This memorable image combines the Nasim Nicholas Taleb’s black swan theory of unpredictable events that are rationalized in hindsight with the notion of the “elephant in the room.” The mixed metaphor refers to entirely forecastable occurrences that are ignored.
PRINCIPLE VS PRACTICE
Dividing the PPA into subsections that tackle Berlin’s One China policy vs Beijing’s One China principle; former US speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan visit; and the Czech Republic’s emergence as “a trailblazer in forging closer diplomatic ties with Taiwan,” Fulda ends by asking what Germany’s primary interests in Taiwan are and whether 2027 will be the fateful year that China invades.
On the first question, Fulda naturally emphasizes Taiwan’s indispensability to the semiconductor industry; he also notes Stark-Watzinger’s remark during her visit that “Germany has more to learn from Taiwan than the other way around.”
Reports of a hush-hush, visit by Stark-Watzinger to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) headquarters hours before the German minister flew out remain unconfirmed. Such a drop-in would have been “significant,” given speculation over plans for a TSMC fab in Dresden at the time. (Ground on the plant — the company’s first in Europe — was broken last month.)
As for the annexation threat, Fulda quotes the view of Taiwan’s Representative to Germany Hsieh Jhy-wei (謝志偉), who believes that Xi is likely to act sooner rather than later for fear of being “too mentally and physically weak to make it happen.” He also paraphrases German experts who assert that Xi seems “willing to pay a high economic price to realize his ambitions vis-a-vis Taiwan.”
In this book, Andreas Fulda lays bare Germany’s feeble stance on Taiwan, exposing the gap, thus far, between Scholz’s zeitenwende in principle and practice and calling for substantive action in place of superficial speech.
His recommendations for an effective “disentanglement” from China should be followed by policymakers in and outside Germany and heeded by any democratic state engaging with an authoritarian counterpart.
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