A new survey of European public opinion has a finding that would have been unthinkable a decade ago: Germans are now Europe’s most China-skeptical people. In a European Council on Foreign Relations poll of 15 countries, a combined 49 percent of Germans described China mainly as a rival, even an adversary, the highest share anywhere. France, the next most skeptical public, stood at 43 percent. Only 38 percent of Germans regard Beijing in a positive light, as a partner or ally. Spaniards and Bulgarians, at 65 and 62 percent, still hold that friendly view.
The country whose postwar prosperity was built in symbiosis with the Chinese market now regards Beijing the way it used to regard Moscow. The shift did not come from the foreign-policy establishment. It came from the economy, and it came from the bottom up.
The report’s authors put the economic fact on the table. German manufacturing shed about 420,000 jobs from 2019 to 2025, and the sector keeps losing roughly 10,000 a month. The auto industry has paid the heaviest price, pushed out of a marketplace where Chinese makers increasingly dominate, at home and abroad. What was once a complement, German engineering meeting Chinese scale, has become a rivalry: China makes the cars now, and the German version of globalization has no answer to that. The economists call it the China shock, and the shock is what has changed the voters’ minds.
The politics are catching up slowly. Berlin was the brake on European China policy for years. When Paris, Rome, Vilnius, The Hague and Madrid pushed the European Commission for tougher trade defense against Beijing, Germany declined to join, and at times it called for stronger industrial ties instead. At the European Council meeting in June 2026, that changed. EU leaders agreed on a tougher trade-defense toolbox, including the Buy European clauses of the Industrial Accelerator Act and curbs on high-risk Chinese technology. By ECFR’s reading, Germany has stopped standing in the way of firmer EU action and now cautiously supports the new direction. The shift matters beyond Berlin: the bloc’s ability to use its trade-defense tools has always depended on German consent, and with the brake released, Brussels has room to move against Chinese subsidies and overcapacity.
The detail that matters most is inside the numbers. Sixty percent of supporters of the two governing parties, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, regard China as an adversary or rival. Whatever coalition governs Germany after the next election will inherit a public that has already made up its mind. The old excuse, that the voters would not accept a tough line on China, is dead. The government that hesitates from now on will be hesitating against its own electorate.
The survey is a political fact before it is an economic one. German hawkishness is not the product of a grand strategic debate; it is the mood of a country watching its industrial base shrink and looking for the cause. Beijing is a convenient answer, and a partly accurate one. The danger is that the mood becomes policy without a strategy. Decoupling from China without an industrial program is just deindustrialization wearing a foreign-policy label. The ECFR authors argue that Berlin should pair economic de-risking with its electrification drive, building European wind, battery and clean-tech industries as the domestic half of the China policy. That is the only version of hawkishness that does not end in a smaller German economy. Whether the government is capable of it, after years of drift, is the real question the survey cannot answer.
The symbiosis is over, and the poll is its obituary. Germans have decided what China is. Now they have to decide what Germany is without it, and that decision is harder, and the numbers are less comfortable, than any survey question.