Germany urged to stop admiring Beijing and wake up to ‘China Shock 2.0’

Key points

• Germany must stop admiring China’s success in the EU or it will sleepwalk into the kind of deindustrialisation the US experienced 25 years ago, a leading Brussels thinktank has said.
• With China’s surplus with Germany having doubled between 2024 and 2025 from $12bn (£9bn) to $25bn, creating a $94bn trade imbalance, the Centre for European Reform (CER) said Europe’s largest economy risked a repeat of what happened in the US in 2001 when a sudden surge in imports permanently hollowed out towns in the American midwest.
• “China Shock 1.0” not only led to losses of up to 2.5m jobs but was also marked by a rise in suicides, divorce and drug use in US towns that lost industries to the Chinese, according to the CER report.
• That fraying of the US social fabric, it said, was “an eerie warning shot for Germany’s car and machine-building cities like Wolfsburg and Stuttgart”,...