News and Public Outreach
New Publication
01/16/2026
Europa im Spiegel Pekings,
in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 January 2026.
[Gastbeitrag gemeinsam mit Arthur Tarnowski]
Wie China Europas „strategische Autonomie“ für sich reklamiert. Und was daraus folgt.
New Publication
01/09/2026
Ein Krieg in den Köpfen,
in: DIE ZEIT, 9 January 2026.
Die Entführung Maduros zeigt, wie sensibel Deutungshoheiten sind. In Taiwan spüren sie: Gewalt lässt sich politisch als Vollzug erzählen. China weiß das zu nutzen.
New Publication
01/08/2026
Review of: David Shambaugh: Breaking the Engagement: How China Won & Lost America
in: International Affairs 102/1 (2026), pp. 313-315.
"[...] the book represents a significant scholarly contribution, offering an analytically rigorous account of the rise, internal contradictions and eventual collapse of America's long-standing engagement policy toward China."
New Publication
12/19/2025
The EU’s China Fault Line Runs Through Spain,
in: The Diplomat, 19 December 2025.
Madrid’s stance on EV duties, pork retaliation, and 5G debates shows how one member state can steady the relationship with Beijing while straining EU cohesion.
New Publication
12/17/2025
Review of Lili Zhu: Deutsch-chinesischer Waffenhandel: Eine Verflechtungsgeschichte (1922-1941),
in: Journal of Asian History 59 (2025) 1/2, pp. 306-309.
New Publication
12/11/2025
"Der Ferne Osten": Begriffs- und ideengeschichtliche Annäherungen an eine eurozentrische Raumkonstruktion,
in: INDES: Zeitschrift für Politik und Gesellschaft,
Heft 2-3 (2025), pp. 9-19.
Wer heute vom „Fernen Osten“ spricht, beschwört unweigerlich ein Kaleidoskop von Bildern herauf: prachtvolle Pagoden, filigrane Kalligrafie und konfuzianische Ethik oder auch pulsierende Großstädte. Solche Vorstellungen wurzeln tief in der europäischen Imagination, ihre Ursprünge reichen von den Reiseberichten Marco Polos über Voltaires Chinabegeisterung im Essai sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations (1756) bis hin zu Pearl S. Bucks Schilderungen des bäuerlichen Alltags in China in ihrem Roman The Good Earth (1931). Schon auf den ersten Blick offenbart sich hier eine bemerkenswerte Ambivalenz: Die Rede vom „Fernen Osten“ wirkt gleichermaßen vertraut wie antiquiert, wie ein nostalgisches Echo einer vergangenen Epoche.
Doch was genau steckt eigentlich hinter dieser Bezeichnung? Welche impliziten Vorstellungen und Wertungen werden durch die vermeintlich neutrale Kategorie „Fernost“ immer wieder reproduziert? Der vorliegende Beitrag nimmt den Begriff kritisch in den Blick und fragt nach den historischen Wurzeln und kulturellen Dynamiken, die ihn einst hervorbrachten und bis heute prägen. In diesem Zusammenhang werden auch übergeordnete Problemstellungen adressiert: Was bedeutet es eigentlich, eine Region als „fern“ zu kategorisieren, und welche diskursiven Machtverhältnisse treten durch solche Distanzzuschreibungen zutage? Wie konstruiert Sprache geopolitische Realitäten, und wie wirken dabei Hierarchien fort?
Antworten eröffnen sich dort, wo die Begriffsgeschichte des „Fernen Ostens“ ihren Anfang nimmt. Diese begriffs‑ und ideengeschichtliche Spurensuche folgt dem Terminus von seinen frühen europäischen Ursprüngen über seine Etablierung als kolonial geprägte Sammelbezeichnung des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zu seiner Exotisierung in popkulturellen Klischees der Gegenwart. Dabei zeigt sich, dass „Ferner Osten“ nie eine neutrale geografische Realität bezeichnete, sondern stets als machtvolles kulturelles und politisches Konstrukt westlicher Gesellschaften fungierte – ein Produkt kolonialer Denkmuster, politischer Interessen und geopolitischer Raumkonstruktion. So wird „Fernost“ als eurozentrische Projektionsfläche sichtbar, die im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert enorme Wirkmacht entfaltete und bis heute nachhallt.
New Publication
11/20/2025
Recognition Before Rules: Postcolonial Memory and the Reception of China and the West,
in: the global, 20 November 2025.
Why does the West’s emphasis on a “rules-based international order” resonate so weakly across much of the Global South compared to China’s rhetoric of recognition and equality? This blog post argues that global norms gain traction only when they first acknowledge postcolonial memory, equal status, and local agency. Drawing on examples from Kenya’s Madaraka Express to Argentina’s Cauchari solar park, it demonstrates that placing dignity before standards enables rules not merely to travel, but to take root.
New Publication
11/13/2025
Scale Is Not a System: Learning from China without Mimicry,
in: Made in China Journal, 13 November 2025, ahead of print available online.
Kaiser Kuo’s (2025) ‘The Great Reckoning: What the West Should Learn from China’ is a bracing provocation. He argues that China is no longer merely ‘catching up’ but increasingly sets the tempo of economic, technological, and institutional development. Legitimacy in the twenty-first century, he contends, rests increasingly—though not exclusively—on performance, with climate policy as the decisive test: China is simultaneously the largest carbon dioxide emitter and the indispensable builder of clean energy, installing more solar and wind capacity each year than the rest of the world. The United States is already edging towards instruments it once disdained, such as industrial policy and state–private sector coordination, even as public discourse clings to reassuring rationalisations. Drawing on Joseph Levenson’s (1965) meum/verum distinction, Kuo diagnoses a widening gap between what Western societies hold dear and what the world renders true. His call is not a policy manual but a perceptual shift: to acknowledge achievement clearly rather than coping by predicting collapse.
The question, then, is not whether a reckoning is due—it surely is—but how to reckon well. A persuasive response must integrate what Kuo sees and what his sweeping lens blurs: the historical depth of multiple modernities, the cyclical fragility of performance-based legitimacy, the difference between a toolbox and an order, the gap between capacity and system integration, and the terms by which learning travels between regimes.
In this piece, I advance five claims. First, modernity has long been plural, and China radicalises that plurality by pushing it to continental scale. Second, performance-based legitimacy is powerful yet cyclical and depends on truth-tracking inputs. Third, scale is not system: enduring gains hinge on integration, not capacity totals. Fourth, convergence of instruments such as subsidies and procurement does not equal convergence of orders defined by accountability and reversibility. Fifth, learning travels between regimes under constraints that determine what can be adopted and how fast.
The aim of this reply is to sharpen, not blunt, Kuo’s challenge: to recognise what is genuinely new about China’s ascent while resisting the temptation to infer a wholesale hierarchy of systems from a hierarchy of outcomes in particular domains.
New Publication
11/13/2025
Anchored Autonomy: Europe’s Strategy for a Post-Complacent Age,
in: E-International Relations, 13 November 2025.
Donald Trump’s transactional return and America’s accelerated pivot toward the Indo-Pacific have ended Europe’s post-Cold War strategic complacency.
New Publication
11/10/2025
Atomisierung statt Integration,
in: Soziopolis. Gesellschaft beobachten, 10 November 2025.
Review of „Beyond Coercion. The Politics of Inequality in China“ by Alexsia T. Chan
New Publication
11/06/2025
L’Europa schiacciata tra Trump e Xi: che cosa rischia su terre rare, materiali critici e semiconduttori,
in: Il Fatto Quotidiano, 6 November 2025.
Il compromesso tra Stati Uniti e Cina sblocca l'export, ma resta la vulnerabilità del Vecchio continente. Stefan Messingschlager, storico ed esperto di relazioni sino-europee: "La leadership cinese è profondamente consapevole della propria forza geoeconomica ed è abile nel tradurla in influenza politica, ponendo rischi sostanziali per la stessa unità europea."
New Publication
11/04/2025
Space – Flows – Rules: Securing the Commons in a Network Order - Revisiting Haushofer’s Ghost,
in: Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), 4 November 2025.
In 2025, maps (still) shape incentives, but they no longer dictate outcomes. Power travels not only through straits and passes, but along supply chains, data cables, payment rails, and technical standards – and is bounded by power‑backed rules that raise the cost of coercion. This essay keeps Karl Haushofer’s map, where geopolitics still matters, while discarding his original myth that geography is everything. Instead: geography frames, connectivity scripts and power‑backed rules decide.
New Publication
10/21/2025
Zwischen Kooperation und Konflikt,
in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 21 October 2025.
Von wegen „grenzenlose Freundschaft“. Sören Urbansky und Martin Wagner zeigen, wie sich über die Jahrhunderte das Verhältnis zwischen Peking und Moskau immer wieder wandelte. Die einzige Konstante bis heute: tief verwurzeltes Misstrauen.
New Publication
10/14/2025
Cortejar a Berlín, desafiar a Bruselas: la doble vía china hacia la UE,
in: Politica Exterior, 14 October 2025.
Pekín ha seguido una táctica marcada por gestos de cercanía hacia Berlín y firmeza ante Bruselas. La maniobra busca dividir el enfoque europeo y mantener abierto el acceso económico alemán mientras la UE refuerza su control comercial y tecnológico.
New Publication
09/22/2025
How Europe’s Global Gateway Competes With China’s BRI,
in: E-International Relations, 22 September 2025.
For a decade, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has set the cadence of global infrastructure finance: fast, centralised, often opaque. Europe’s answer, the Global Gateway, will never match Beijing’s firepower – and it doesn’t need to. The European Union’s advantage is governance and delivery: de-risking that crowds in private capital, standards that protect people and balance sheets, and assets that work and are maintained. The test is whether communities can point to functioning grids, ports and data links and say: this improved our lives. For years, the EU was dismissed as a payer more than a player. That view faded as the BRI expanded from logistics hubs to critical raw materials and corridor finance. In 2021, Brussels launched the Global Gateway to mobilise up to €300 billion by 2027, delivered via a “Team Europe” architecture that combines EU institutions, member states and development finance arms. The intent is explicit: offer a trusted, high-standards alternative that aligns with partner priorities without opaque terms or unsustainable debt, while serving Europe’s own resilience in supply chains, energy and secure connectivity.
New Publication
09/22/2025
What Cosco’s Hamburg deal can tell us about Europe’s “rules-first” approach to China,
in: European Politics and Policy (EUROPP), 22 September 2025.
Germany’s decision to allow Chinese shipping firm Cosco to buy a stake in a Hamburg port terminal in 2022-23 raised concerns about Europe’s economic dependence on China. Stefan Messingschlager writes that two years on, the deal now looks like the first step in a shift toward a “rules-first” approach to Chinese investment in Europe.
New Publication
09/20/2025
China’s debt reckoning,
in: East Asia Forum, 20 September 2025.
China is managing its government debt burden through refinancing and swaps that buy time but fail to address structural flaws, risking a prolonged balance sheet recession. Sequenced reforms should look to stabilise essentials first, broaden revenues and pool social insurance, then resolve weak entities and cleanse bank balance sheets.
New Publication
09/16/2025
Calm Realism, Not Cold War: Europe’s China Reset,
in: The Diplomat, 16 September 2025.
The antidote to the flawed China policy of the past is not decoupling or moral grandstanding, but managed interdependence.
New Publication
09/09/2025
Courting Berlin, Countering Brussels: China’s Twin‑Track Approach to Germany and the EU,
in: China Observers in Central and Eastern Europe (CHOICE), 9 September 2025.
Since Germany’s 2023 China Strategy entrenched “de-risking, not decoupling,” Beijing has pursued a deliberate twin track: reassuring Berlin through high-level access and visa-free mobility, while pushing back at the EU level when trade defense and technology controls bite – exploiting the Union’s division of labor to separate German signaling from Commission enforcement. Drawing on stress tests from EV tariffs, Germany’s 5G phase-outs, and espionage cases, the article argues that “managed estrangement” is now the baseline. A “unity with nuance” playbook – targeted, WTO-consistent tools, diversification of critical inputs, and credible counter-coercion – offers the best chance to keep de-risking rules-based rather than tit-for-tat.
New Publication
09/09/2025
Lost in Translation: Why the West Keeps Misreading China,
in: The Loop: ECPR’s Political Science Blog, 9 September 2025.
Western governments have armies of Mandarin speakers and AI translators, yet they keep misreading Beijing. What’s missing, Stefan Messingschlager argues, is independent, context-rich expertise – people able to decode China’s history-laden signals and puncture bureaucratic groupthink. This kind of knowledge is the strategic insurance every democracy needs before the next crisis hits.
New Publication
08/21/2025
China Research, Politics and Expertise in Germany: Some Reflections on a Tension-Fraught Field,
in: ASIEN: The German Journal on Contemporary Asia 170/171 (2024), pp. 65-86.
China research has always been characterized by a pronounced dependency on politics, significantly shaping its institutional structures, thematic orientations, and methodological approaches. Using the Federal Republic of Germany since 1949 as a case study, this research note systematically explores four central dimensions: the evolution of China research from philological origins toward interdisciplinary, politically engaged scholarship; macro-political contexts shaping research opportunities and agendas; scholars’ strategies for balancing collaboration and integrity vis-à-vis the People’s Republic of China; and the evolving advisory role of China researchers within German policy-making. By historicizing these complex interactions and critically reflecting upon current ethical debates, the analysis highlights the urgent need for clearer ethical standards and methodological transparency amid escalating geopolitical tensions and authoritarian challenges, thus preserving rigorous and independent scholarship as indispensable for informed policy-making and credible public discourse.
New Publication
08/19/2025
Informed sovereignty: Guard rails for research security in cooperation with China,
in: Table.Media Professional Briefings, 19 August 2025.
How open to cooperation, how strict on red lines? The Max Planck Society (MPG) and Germany’s scientific community are searching for a middle course in dealing with China. Political scientist Stefan Messingschlager argues that "informed sovereignty" should become the guiding principle.
New Publication
08/19/2025
Informierte Souveränität: Leitplanken für Forschungssicherheit in der China-Kooperation,
in: Research.Table Professional Briefing, No. 291, 19 August 2025.
Wie offen für Kooperation, wie strikt bei roten Linien? Die MPG und die deutsche Wissenschaft ringen um einen Mittelweg im Umgang mit China. Der Politikwissenschaftler Stefan Messingschlager wirbt dafür, dass informierte Souveränität zur Leitformel wird.
New Publication
08/13/2025
Zeitenwende in Europas Sicherheitspolitik: Auf dem Weg zur Europäischen Verteidigungsgemeinschaft 2.0?,
in: Zeitschrift für Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik 18 (2025), pp. 501-515.
Der russische Angriffskrieg gegen die Ukraine offenbart Europas anhaltende sicherheitspolitische Abhängigkeit von den USA. Vor dem Hintergrund zunehmend instabiler transatlantischer Beziehungen diskutiert der Essay mögliche Szenarien vertiefter europäischer Verteidigungsintegration – bis hin zu einer Europäischen Verteidigungsgemeinschaft 2.0 –, analysiert zentrale Herausforderungen und skizziert pragmatische Schritte zu einer stärkeren strategischen Autonomie Europas.
New Publication
07/25/2025
Letzte Chance für Europa,
in: wochentaz, 26 July 2025, p. 15.
Die neue Selbstsicherheit der EU gegenüber China ist positiv. Nötig sind nun konsequentere Entscheidungswege in der EU, um Blockaden zu verhindern.
New Publication
07/02/2025
Europe’s Dangerous Gap in China Expertise,
in: The Diplomat, 2 July 2025.
Most European capitals still treat China expertise as a background resource, not a strategic asset. That needs to change.
New Publication
07/01/2025
Decoding Xi’s China: The Return of Pekingology,
in: The Interpreter (Lowy Institute), 1 July 2025.
The art of deciphering Beijing’s carefully guarded politics
has been reawakened under Xi’s increasingly secretive rule.
New Publication
06/25/2025
Europe’s Fragmented China Expertise: Toward Strategic Integration – Lessons from Germany, the UK, and France,
in: SOAS China Institute Blog, 25 June 2025.
Stefan Messingschlager explores how fragmented knowledge networks across Germany, France, and the UK are weakening Europe’s ability to respond to China. He argues that without better coordination and integration, Europe risks strategic blind spots in an era of rising geopolitical competition.
New Publication
06/25/2025
Weltordnung am Wendepunkt: Trump und der sino-amerikanische Handelskrieg,
in: Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 7/2025, pp. 71-77.
Trump’s 2025 tariffs on China triggered more than just a short-term economic crisis — they marked a turning point in the global order. This essay examines how the U.S.-China trade war exposed the limits of transactional diplomacy, revealed China’s strategic resilience, and accelerated the erosion of multilateral institutions. A sobering look at the dawn of a more fragmented world.
New Publication
04/28/2025
Von Verflechtungen und Verwerfungen,
in: Internationale Politik. Das Magazin für globales Denken 80/3 (2025), pp. 120-123.
Steuern wir auf eine Konfrontation zwischen Washington und Peking zu, oder gibt es noch Spielraum für multilaterale Konfliktlösung? Neue Bücher zur amerikanisch-chinesischen Rivalität.
New Publication
04/22/2025
Europe’s China Challenge: Why Unity Is the Only Way Forward,
in: SOAS China Institute Blog, 22 April 2025.
As transatlantic uncertainty grows and geopolitical tensions rise, Europe’s “partner–competitor–rival” framework is reaching its limits. This piece argues that only a more coordinated and strategically integrated China policy—across trade, technology, and security—can equip the EU to respond effectively to both Washington’s volatility and Beijing’s assertiveness.