FCCC Talk: Germany: From partner to rival? by Stefan Aust and Adrian Geiges

Germany’s growing dependence on the Chinese economy by Stefan Aust and Adrian Geiges

Germany’s leading car manufacturer Volkswagen sells roughly half of its cars to Chinese customers.
And it’s not the only company that has put big bets on China. No other European economy is as
dependent on China as is Germany. At the same time the new German government, dominated by
the Social Democrats and the Greens, seems to embark on a new course towards China. What does
this mean for the future of German-China relations?

Stefan Aust and Adrian Geiges recently published their biography “Xi Jinping – The most powerful
man in the world”. Aust and Geiges will discuss the growing complexity of the relationship between
Europe’s biggest economy and China as well as their new book.

About our speakers: Stefan Aust is the former editor-in-chief of Germany’s leading news magazine
Der Spiegel and now the publisher of the daily newspaper Welt. He is the author of numerous
bestselling books including The Baader-Meinhof Complex. The movie based on this book got a
nomination as Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.
Adrian Geiges has been the long-standing Beijing correspondent of the weekly news magazine Stern
and a member of the Foreign Correspondents‘ Club of China in this time. Earlier as the Moscow
correspondent of Spiegel TV he covered the military coup against Gorbachev, the end of the Soviet
Union and the beginning of the new Russia. He also worked as a correspondent in New York and Rio
de Janeiro.