中文
By Hannan Hussain
On December 20, Chinese President Xi Jinping held a telephone conversation with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Their exchange underlined peace building potential to address global challenges, reinforcing a partnership of "dialogue, development and cooperation," and illustrated how ties could contribute to China-EU stability without depending on "any third party."
Xi's call to expand bilateral consensus through dialogue has strong economic and geopolitical upsides. On the former, close strategic dialogue can support a more transparent and non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese enterprises in Germany. Such market transparency stands to benefit through coordinated expectations on trade and investment, given China's status as Germany's third largest investor and the value that dialogue affords to two "all-round strategic partners."
Moreover, Tuesday's exchange also sheds new light on the need for collective approaches to pressing global challenges. These include an evolving energy crisis, sluggish economic recovery and limited safeguards to protect delicate industrial supply chains. If anything, such global pursuits require healthy perceptions about one another's diplomatic intent. This helps enrich long-term trust, and better equips them to tackle what Berlin described as "common challenges."
The support for practical cooperation and fair market rules can also direct bilateral dialogue toward strengthening China-EU relations. The latter relationship finds resilience in strategic autonomy, and Berlin has shown signs that a healthy China-Europe development trajectory is in its diplomatic interests. Now the expectation that China-EU relations should not "target, depend on or be subject to any third party" comes across as a noble pursuit for Germany. Just consider its mature, accommodating view of China's rise, and its desire to exercise autonomy when it comes to preserving Sino-German engagement.
Looking ahead, Berlin remains well positioned to work toward increasingly cooperative China-EU ties. It counts China as its largest trade partner, serves as the EU's largest market, and enjoys important diplomatic and economic pull to inform mutual tolerance and complementarity with Beijing. Actually, support for such priorities has been chief to some incredible feats, including a trade volume increase by 870 times in the past five decades. Beijing's hope that EU will adhere to the basic positioning of China and itself as "strategic partners" thus finds optimism in extensive, in-depth cooperation between Germany and China.
It is true that the pragmatism and openness of Sino-German ties stands among the defining characteristics of relations at 50. "President Xi and I paid tribute to five decades of bilateral relations and engaged in a thorough and constructive discussion of current challenges," said Steinmeier. By maintaining close consultation with China, Berlin is looking at the prospect of greater cooperation synergies in market, capital and technology spheres. Those synergies also extend to fields with more untapped engagement potential, including digitalization and intelligent manufacturing. Berlin's established support for trade liberalization and opposition to decoupling would align with some of China's own pursuits in a changing world. All this makes relations a model that is conducive to deepening China-EU ties in the long-term.
On the geopolitical merits of Tuesday's exchange, greater coordination on key global challenges is a top pick. Neither side agrees that a protracted Ukraine crisis is endorsing global interests, and Berlin is aware of the economic fallout from sustained unrest. Similarly, the exchange underscores the value Beijing places on a sustainable European security architecture, one with the potential to deliver long-term stability on the continent.
Thus understood, meaningful diplomacy works best as a two-way endeavor. It is here that Berlin's desire to step-up regional hotspot consultations with Beijing is a move towards bridging differences and promoting a more balanced view of common challenges.
That in turn underscores the multipronged utility of Sino-German ties, reminding us why this relationship is a good fit to direct China-EU relations toward healthy development.
Hannan Hussain is a foreign affairs commentator and author. He is a Fulbright recipient at the University of Maryland, the U.S., and a former assistant researcher at Islamabad Policy Research Institute.
