Published: 29 August 2023 Author: Stefan Talmon
On 13 July 2023, about one month after the unveiling of Germany’s first ever National Security Strategy (NSS), the Federal Government adopted its long-awaited comprehensive Strategy on China. The 64-page document aimed ‘to present the Federal Government’s views on the status of and prospects for relations with China’. In both, the Strategy on China and the NSS, China was identified as a ‘partner, competitor and systemic rival’. In a keynote speech at the annual China Forecast event of the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin in January 2022, the Minister of State at the Federal Foreign Office, Tobias Lindner, had stated with regard to FUTURE Sino-German relations that ‘[w]e want to cooperate with China, wherever this is possible based on international law and within the framework of the rules based international order.’ International law and the rules-based international order thus featured prominently in the new China Strategy. (more…)