“China: Dangerous Rival or Cooperation Partner?”
June 4, 2025
A book worth-while reading for academics and practitioners
Professor Gerhard Stahl* is a colleague with a lot of experience from the EU and academia in China – certainly meaning a perfect professional background for writing a book on such a complicated topic as “China: Dangerous Rival or Cooperation Partner”. The same conclusion can be drawn from the subtitle of the book: “How can EU-China relations develop in a changing world with geopolitical conflicts?”
Worth reading in many respects
In my view, the book deals with an issue that each and every European (Western) CEO, strategic or marketing manager with commercial interest in China should have dealt with already five or ten years ago – or should do so at least by now. Also financial and corporate analysts could look deeper into the descriptions and conclusions of Stahl’s book.
China’s position as the world’s largest or second largest economy – depending on the calculation method – not only includes GDP but also the global lead for exports (before Trump) and economic sectors such as car production, internet and mobile use, etc. Unfortunately, China is also known as a global leader in CO2 pollution – despite quite some progress in recent years. In other words: China has a lot of areas that should be interesting also to readers who are not daily influenced by Chinese decisions – or may be so only indirectly.
Stahl looks in his book both into past, current and future Sino developments and relations to the Western hemisphere. This kind of multi-temporal approach is definitely necessary for the understanding of China as a political superpower – but also as a market or strategic corporate partner. In this respect, one still can recognize considerable shortcomings in Western analysis. The analysis in Stahl’s book fills this gap.
History is well explained but the real value-added of Stahl’s book for Western readers can be found in the description of today’s China – politically, socially, culturally and economically. In my view, this multilateral approach is really needed for understanding China sufficiently. For this reason, single short-term indicators such as, for instance, the PMI or industrial production cannot tell us enough about the real state or trend of the Chinese economy – indicators that global financial markets, however, usually focus too much upon.
Furthermore, it should be emphasized as laudable that Stahl clearly explains the importance of China’s intransparent local decision makers and processes. This institutional condition is frequently neglected by foreign analysts – but at the same time, for example, very relevant for the understanding of China’s critical debt situation and the still limited central impact on the execution of fiscal policy.
Everyday experience
One of the major benefits of Stahl’s book are the exemplifications of Chinese everyday life. Such kinds of narratives make the cultural understanding of countries and their inhabitants much easier which, of course, is ineluctable for the understanding of a foreign country more generally and, consequently, also of corporate relations. The ongoing emancipation process of China’s female labor force appears as particularly interesting – a process that still seems to be confronted with completely different conditions for Chinese women in the metropolitan areas and the countryside.
Actually, I would have appreciated reading more about this specific gender issue – and also about ordinary people’s concern about the still dangerous CO2 pollution. The usual Chinese way of defending its enormous, world-leading pollution of CO2 – predominantly by pointing at much lower per-capita pollution than in the U.S. – does not make things better on, for example, the neighboring Japanese island of Okinawa which, for example, in winter may be affected very negatively by CO2 emissions from mainland China.
Watching China’s economic development – a difficult act of balance between admiration and criticism
Stahl tries to be fair in his judgment on China’s economic development in the past decades. Everyone who during the past 10-20 years has visited the “Middle Kingdom” at least a few times should have recognized the enormous modernization of the country that has taken place – despite still existing regional disparities. However, the rapid improvements of economic conditions on a relatively broad scale could not happen without sacrifices, harm and damage.
Stahl’s discusses all these issues in his book – issues that certainly are not an easy call. The interpretation of China’s economic development should – in my opinion – be regarded as a difficult act of balance between admiration and criticism. Stahl manages this challenge indeed nicely.
Stahl’s conclusion that China’ policy planners always interlink politics and economics is certainly one of the most important ones of the whole book – and I would like to mention additionally the organic ties between politics and the Communist party and ultimately with its leader Xi Jinping.
Exactly for this political reason, I would interpret the described New Silk Road Initiative – a major Chinese infrastructural project – as less benign for non-Chinese interests than expressed in the book. In my view, China’s increasing economic expansion all over the globe should be considered as more challenging for the involved emerging and advanced countries than described by Stahl.
China and the EU
The EU will have a challenging future with China, not only the U.S. China is a country with very different rules and institutions, different from the ones we appreciate and are used to in our part of the world. Since Stahl is an expert on both the EU and China, his conclusions on future EU-China relations should be particularly interesting.
In this specific context, Stahl explains convincingly that the EU nowadays is acting in a completely different world with all these new political and economic conditions – and that the EU benefits more from open markets than others. Stahl writes that the EU needs a clear strategy towards China and the United States “which has not yet been achieved”.
But is such a new European China strategy achievable and how could it look like? Stahl favors co-operation to confrontation. This is understandable and probably right when it comes to general mutual governmental relations and the obvious interdependence of the EU and China. Furthermore, President Xi Jinping seems to be the only leader being able to tackle President Putin which could be positive for Europe. However, if Stahl elaborated more on the issue how business contacts between corporate China and corporate EU could be developed more fairly and promisingly one of the few
What do we really know about China?
Finally, I would like to quote in this review of Stahl’s interesting book an appreciated colleague from a university in Hong Kong who – about 25 years ago – repeatedly admonished me to be humble when presenting and pretending my own knowledge or ideas about China. He often adjusted me by hinting at the following deeply rooted question: “What do we really know about China?” These words could still be applied as a ”Leitmotiv” by China analysts.
Sure, today we certainly know much more about China than a quarter of a century ago. However, China still shows up quite frequently as a kind of conundrum. But it is no exaggeration to conclude that Gerhard Stahl’s book about China makes the “China conumdrum” less mysterious. This is why I wholeheartedly recommend to read Gerhard Stahl’s illuminating book on the “Middle Kingdom”.
Hubert Fromlet
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*Gerhard Stahl had different occupations at the EU – among them as the Secretary General of the European Committee of Regions. He works currently as a visiting professor at Peking University HSBC Business School in Shenzhen, China.
