What the AfD really wants from China
For decades, German foreign policy rested on a simple assumption: Germany belonged politically to the West, and its relations with the rest of the world would be conducted largely within that framework. The AfD is challenging that assumption.
Its approach to China is one of the clearest tells. Beijing is not treated as an ideological enemy, but neither is it embraced uncritically. Instead, China is seen as a sovereign great power, an indispensable economic partner, and one pole of an emerging multipolar world.
Germany, in the AfD’s view, should cooperate with Beijing where German interests demand it, defend itself where necessary, and refuse to turn China policy into an extension of either American strategy or European ideological politics.
For Germany, and therefore for Europe, that could become a genuinely transformative foreign-policy doctrine.
From cautious engagement to strategic realism
The AfD’s 2021 foreign-policy program already described China’s Belt and Road Initiative as a “century project” and called for Germany to participate actively, including by developing complementary connections from West to East. The idea was that if China was building the infrastructure connecting Eurasia, Germany should take advantage of it and represent its interests, not stand on the sidelines and complain about it.
By 2023, the position had become more explicitly geopolitical. When the German government published its China Strategy, AfD senior member Petr Bystron attacked it as an attempt to import American geopolitical confrontation into German foreign policy.
Then came the AfD’s first parliamentary delegation to China. In June 2023, Alice Weidel, Peter Felser and Bystron travelled to Shanghai and Beijing. The delegation’s conclusion was unequivocal: China had become too important for Germany to keep pretending that confrontation was a viable strategy. Felser rejected the idea of both “de-risking” and decoupling, promoted by other EU officials, and argued that German trade with China was simply too important to sacrifice to geopolitical fashion.
The 2025 federal election program adopted at Riesa consolidated this direction. China is treated as a major economic partner, while Germany is urged to protect its own technological and security interests. The party continues to support exploiting opportunities associated with the Belt and Road Initiative while rejecting the idea that Germany should subsidize a country that is already a major economic power.
No more moral foreign policy
Perhaps the deepest difference between the AfD and Germany’s political establishment is not actually about China. It is about what foreign policy is for.
The AfD’s approach is realpolitik in the German interest, rather than moralpolitik. It explicitly endorses non-interference in the internal affairs of other states and rejects what it calls presumptuous lecturing and destabilizing intervention.
The AfD rejects making human-rights criticism the organizing principle of German-China relations. This does not require pretending that every Chinese policy is admirable. It does, however, mean refusing to make Germany’s relationship with a major sovereign power conditional on Berlin’s approval of its domestic political system.
The AfD has argued that Western governments should stop behaving as if they were entitled to act as the world’s political schoolmasters. For Beijing, this is obviously a more comfortable basis for relations than the moralized language of mainstream Western European China policy.
The AfD does not consider all Chinese policies beyond criticism. It has criticized Chinese economic practices, strategic dependencies, technology transfers and the potential consequences of excessive state control over digital infrastructure and society.
The party’s position is not ‘China is always right.’ It is ‘China is sovereign. Germany is sovereign. Let us deal with one another as sovereign powers.’
Partnership without dependence
The party wants more economic engagement with China while simultaneously warning Germany against excessive dependence on China.
Felser, now chairman of the German-Chinese Parliamentary Group in the Bundestag, has repeatedly emphasized both sides of the equation. In February 2026, he described China as “by no means our enemy” but an “important partner,” while insisting that Germany must protect its “Mittelstand” and establish fair conditions for competition.
In March, he criticized the enormous dependence on China in strategic technologies and raw materials, contrasting German weakness with China’s systematic drive toward technological self-sufficiency.
And in July, Felser warned against a trade war with China. Importantly, he did not deny the existence of Chinese dumping, “overcapacity” or competitive distortions. His argument was that tariffs are not an adequate substitute for negotiation.
By September, Felser went further: strategic dependence on China should be reduced not through decoupling, but by making Germany stronger – with lower taxes, less bureaucracy, and cheaper energy. China is not the problem; German weakness is. Germany should not become dependent on China. But neither should it destroy valuable relationships merely to demonstrate would-be ideological purity or geopolitical loyalty to another power.
The Weidel factor
Perhaps no one embodies this approach more naturally than Alice Weidel. The AfD co-leader’s knowledge of China doesn’t come exclusively from briefing papers. She studied in China, speaks Mandarin and has professional experience there. Her familiarity with the Chinese economy is unusual among senior European politicians.
That background provides the AfD with a senior political figure who approaches China neither as an exotic threat nor as a distant ideological abstraction, but as a country she has actually experienced – a rare trait in modern Western European politicians.
For a future German government, that kind of familiarity could be an asset, because China is not going away, and neither is Germany’s industrial dependence on the Chinese market. Pretending otherwise will not make the problem disappear.
Why Beijing can live with the AfD
There is a reason this approach is likely to be more acceptable in Beijing than the policies currently dominant in Berlin and Brussels. The AfD does not demand that China convert to Western ideological values. It does not make German-China relations conditional upon such a conversion. And it explicitly rejects interference in the domestic affairs of other states.
At the same time, the AfD wants something Beijing can understand very clearly: reciprocity and protection of national interests.
German companies should have access to Chinese markets. German intellectual property should be protected. German strategic industries should remain German. Chinese companies should compete fairly. German dependence on critical Chinese inputs should be reduced. This is the kind of national-interest politics Beijing can understand and work with.
Countries do not need to agree about everything to have a productive relationship. They need to understand each other’s interests and boundaries. The AfD’s approach is built around exactly that premise.
The bigger picture
But China is only one piece of the puzzle. The AfD’s real foreign-policy innovation is its genuine commitment to multipolarity.
China demonstrates, from the AfD’s perspective, that a major sovereign state can pursue an independent industrial strategy, defend its own interests, reject Western political conditionality and revive its civilizational spirit.
Russia represents another pole. The United States remains indispensable, but the AfD’s relationship with Donald Trump and the American conservatives shows that friendship with Washington does not have to mean automatic obedience to every American strategic preference.
That is the key distinction. The AfD can be close to Trump’s Republicans while rejecting the idea that Germany should confront China simply because someone in Washington wants it. It can advocate better relations with Russia while insisting on German interests. It can cooperate with China without wanting Germany to become dependent on Beijing.
The principle is the same everywhere: Germany should have friends, partners and alliances. But Germany should also have a foreign policy of its own.
Germany’s choice is Europe’s choice
The stakes are larger than the AfD itself. Germany is the economic center of the European Union. If Berlin changes its understanding of China, the consequences will not stop at the German border.
A Germany that pursued pragmatic relations with Beijing, Moscow and Washington simultaneously would challenge the strategic assumptions that have governed Europe for decades.
A Germany that rejected automatic economic decoupling from China could force Europe to reconsider whether confrontation is really in its economic interest.
A Germany that put national sovereignty and multipolarity at the center of its foreign policy could fundamentally alter the balance between Berlin, Brussels and Washington.
The AfD’s policy is not about choosing China over America. It is about rejecting the idea that Germany must choose at all. It’s not a timid or ambiguous stance – on the contrary, it is unapologetically national, realist and multipolar.
And if the AfD eventually governs Germany, it may prove to be one of the most consequential political changes Europe has experienced in generations. A sovereign Germany engaging China on its own terms could be the beginning of a Europe that finally understands the world as it is – not as the liberal utopians once wished it to remain.
