Preliminary
In 2018, GermanyCity of DuisburgWe have signed a smart city cooperation agreement with Huawei.
This is a dynamic city in Central Europe. The German Chinese City. Identity is welcomed. The golden age of cooperation.。
But nobody knew that only four years later. This agreement was put on hold, and even the related news was deleted.
This is not unique, but in recent years. Germany, which originally linked more than a hundred cities with China as "friendly cities", has been quietly isolated.
Why are more and more German cities abandoning friendly relations with China?
Sino-German Golden Age
Before 2005, the relationship between China and Germany had been tepid, neither good nor too bad. After all, East and West Germany had just merged in 1990.
Therefore, although there were also some two-country cities linked for "friendship", it was just a headline, with almost no interaction.
Until Merkel took office in 2005, things changed.
The first female chancellor of Germany, with an outstanding political vision, saw the great potential of China at a glance.
During her 16 years in power, she travelled 12 times to China, and the highest frequency can be said to be in Europe and America, and even the destination is not only Beijing, but also Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou and other places.
In those years, the cooperation between China and Germany, driven by Merkel, naturally advanced by leaps and bounds.
During that time, hundreds of German cities and Chinese cities formed friendly partners, achieved win-win cooperation, and the economy flourished.
Among them, Duisburg Port is the most prominent, the city that was selected as an important hub in Central Europe for the Belt and Road, and directly became China's "gateway" to Europe.
The benefits brought by this to the local area are real. Three or forty trains run back and forth every week, and a large number of enterprises invest, which directly increases the number of jobs by 15%. Needless to say, economic development.
Under such circumstances, the trade volume between China and Germany has soared, reaching an astonishing 245.5 billion euros, and China has become Germany's largest trading partner.
China's huge market has also become the reliance for Germany to make a fortune, and German auto giants such as BMW and Mercedes-Benz have all made a lot of money.
It can be said that this "golden period" of China and Germany allowed the two sides to truly realize win-win cooperation.
The relationship broke.
But with Merkel’s departure in 2021, everything changed.
As his successor, Olaf Scholz clearly didn't trust China so much, and in July 2023, he also released a "China Strategy", which described China as a "partner, competitor, system rival."
The meaning revealed here is obvious, to continue to cooperate with China, but to "control risks".
The reason for this, Germany clearly given, is that Germany is too dependent on China, like rare earth basically 95% are dependent on China, graphene, uranium and so on.
In addition, the German economy itself is also in great need of the Chinese market, and even when the outbreak of the epidemic in 2020, the basic medical supplies such as masks, protective clothes and other basic medical supplies in Germany will also need to be imported from China.
All this, coupled with the “Chinese threat theory” that Europe and the United States are constantly promoting, has led the Germans to begin to generally believe that they should get rid of China.
More importantly, of course, is the outbreak of the conflict in Russia, which has made the relationship between Europe and Russia very tense.
While China remains neutral, in Europe, not following up with sanctions on Russia is equivalent to helping Russia, so it is equally hostile to China and considers China to be Russia’s helper.
This view also naturally affected Germany, although the Olaf Scholz government, for economic reasons, did not directly contradict China, but in private, there were many small moves.
For instance, those friendly cities, one by one, start to cut off connections.
The most classic are China's Qingdao and Germany's Kiel, which are both important naval cities and should have been well-suited, but the two cities' "sister city plan" was canceled by Germany in May 2023 for "security risks".
It was even revealed that the Kiel municipal government didn't even consult the intelligence agencies and the navy before it was cancelled.
Even so, Germany could not be separated from China at this time, for example, in July 2023, Germany exported 6.4 billion euros to China, down 7.3 percent from last month, but imports from China remained at 14.3 billion euros.
Obviously, even if the German government wants to “change the way”, German still know who can make money.
Now Scholz was helpless. As a result, when the EU planned to impose tariffs on Chinese trams, Germany became one of the few countries that opposed it, resulting in a very complicated relationship between China and Germany.
This also affects many German cities, so that many cities are unavoidable to China at the same time, but there are also many German cities rushing to deepen ties with China, and even quietly "returning the forefront" after the breakdown.
For example, at the first Sino-German Cities Summit in June 2025, Jinhua and Dylan City were directly upgraded to a national sister city.
In fact, this also illustrates a problem: Germany itself knows that cooperating with China is beneficial to itself, but due to political factors, it has caused extreme internal chaos and doesn't know what to do.
This phenomenon even appeared not only in Central Germany, but also in Ode, where German and Russian energy cooperation was very good, but with the "North Stream pipeline" being bombarded, it was only Germany that began to cut off with Russia.
From the present point of view, this is obviously a means for the United States and the West to force Germany, and they blew up the pipeline.
The German government knows this, but still chooses to lose its own interests, relying on the West, to know that this "North Stream" pipeline is not less important to Germany than our country's Three Strait Dam, so that Germany can endure, really don't know what to say.
However, at least for now, the cooperation between China and Germany is still ongoing, and the assessment of the Merrick think tank's 2024 report also shows that cutting off cooperation with China is at the expense of Germany's own economy.
In other words, the cooperation between China and Germany is closer, and once it leaves, Germany's losses will be even greater.
Therefore, we believe that in the future, China and Germany will inevitably be able to find the balance of stable cooperation within the framework of "risk-taking".
So, what do you think of this?
Reference source:
Observer Network German automobile industry experts: It is stupid not to cooperate with China, they hold all the trump cards
Germany releases its first "China strategy", China's embassy shows its position!
Xinhua News Agency is close to each other | German port city prosperous due to China-Europe freight trains
The mayor of Duisburg, Germany: fight against the epidemic in cooperation with friends of the city of Wuhan