How Donald Trump brought China and Germany closer together
US President Donald Trump is overturning all alliances. That is bringing Germany and China closer together. The Chinese and Russian ambassadors explain their strategies.
US President Donald Trump is overturning all alliances. That is bringing Germany and China closer together. Handelsblatt correspondent Stephan Scheuer describes the new strategies.
Background
This report was made in the first weeks after Donald Trump took office in January 2017. With his withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, his retreat from the Paris Climate Agreement and his announcement of new tariffs, the US president called into question the United States’ traditional role as guardian of the rules-based world order. For Beijing it was a strategic gift.
China’s President Xi Jinping seized the opportunity to present himself at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2017 as the new champion of free trade – a rhetorical reversal that would have been unthinkable until then. At the same time the New Silk Road, China’s global infrastructure programme, accelerated, and the People’s Republic actively courted European partners. German companies such as Volkswagen, BASF and Siemens deepened their presence in China during this phase.
In the years after this report, the picture shifted fundamentally. Trump imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese imports from 2018 – the start of an open trade war. The Biden administration systematically extended technology export controls: semiconductor equipment, AI chips and eventually also investment restrictions were used to slow China’s technological rise. In 2025 Trump returned to the White House – and announced further, significantly higher tariffs.
Germany has never been able to find a comfortable position in this configuration. The car industry earns a considerable share of its profits in China, the machine tool sector exports massively to the People’s Republic, the chemicals industry invests in Chinese plants. At the same time pressure from Washington grows to decouple from critical technology fields. The German government published its first China strategy in 2023 – an attempt to find its own path between the blocs without losing access to its most important export market.