China–Germany relations (1912–1949)

The German Empire established diplomatic relations with the Republic of China in October 1913. After World War I and the creation of the Weimar Republic, Germany followed a policy of friendship towards China. Nazi Germany and the Nationalist government of the Republic of China maintained bilateral relations between 1933 and 1941. The Chinese Nationalists sought German military and economic support to help them consolidate control over factional warlords and resist Japanese imperialism. Germany sought raw materials such as tungsten and antimony from China. During the mid-1930s, thousands of Chinese soldiers were trained by German officers and German economic investment made its way into China. However, Joachim von Ribbentrop strongly favored an alliance with Japan over one with China, and starting with the 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact, Germany began to realign its East Asia policy. After Japan invaded China in 1937 and Ribbentrop became Foreign Minister the following year, German aid to China was cut off. In July 1941, Nazi Germany severed relations with Nationalist China and transferred their recognition to the Japanese-controlled Wang Jingwei regime. Nonetheless, China did not officially declare war on the Axis Powers until after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

German Empire and China
The German Empire was, like the other major European powers, initially reluctant to grant recognition to the newly established Republic of China. It eventually did extend recognition in October 1913, after the inauguration of Yuan Shikai as the Republic's first president. During the First World War, China fought on the side of the Allies in an attempt to reconquer Qingdao, which had been colonized by Germany in 1898. China's entry into the war was a result of agreements between President Yuan Shikai and the United Kingdom.

Weimar Republic and China


Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the German Army had been restricted to 100,000 men, and its military-industrial production was greatly reduced. To circumvent the treaty's restrictions, German industrial firms formed partnerships with nations such as the Soviet Union and Argentina to produce weapons and sell them legally. After the death of Yuan Shikai, the Republic of China had descended into a civil war between various warlords. German arms producers began looking to re-establish commercial links with China to tap into its vast market for weapons and military assistance.

The Weimar Republic's Foreign Office favoured a policy of friendship with the Republic of China. In 1924, the Kuomintang (Nationalists or KMT) party was founded by Sun Yat-sen in Guangzhou. With the support of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists, the KMT planned to launch a Northern Expedition to defeat the warlords and unify the Republic. The Nationalists also sought German assistance, and turned to the German-educated Zhu Jiahua. Zhu would go on to arrange almost all of the Sino-German contacts from 1926 to 1944. In 1926, he invited Max Bauer to survey investment possibilities in China, and the next year, Bauer arrived in Guangzhou and was offered a post as Chiang Kai-shek's advisor. Soon, he managed to recruit 46 other German officers to advise and train the National Revolutionary Army while he helped devise a strategy for the Northern Expedition. In 1928, Bauer returned to Germany to recruit a permanent advisory mission for China's industrialization efforts. However, Bauer was not entirely successful, as many firms hesitated because of China's political instability and because Bauer was a persona non grata for his participation in the 1920 Kapp Putsch. In addition, Germany was still constrained by the Treaty of Versailles, which made direct military investment impossible. The Weimar Foreign Ministry urged neutrality and discouraged the Reichswehr from becoming directly involved with the Chinese government. The same feeling was shared by the German import-export houses for fear that direct government ties would exclude them from profiting as the middleman. After he returned to China, Bauer contracted smallpox, died, and was buried in Shanghai. Sino-German trade slowed between 1930 and 1932 because of the Great Depression.

Economic and military cooperation
In 1933, the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. The Nazis sought to increase cooperation with the Nationalists in order to gain access to Chinese raw materials. Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath very much believed in maintaining Germany's good relations with China and mistrusted the Empire of Japan. The 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria had shown the Chinese leadership the need for military and industrial modernization and they wanted German investment. Moreover, the rapid rise of Nazi Germany's military strength led some Chinese elites to explore fascist ideas. In May 1933, Hans von Seeckt arrived in Shanghai to oversee German economic and military involvement in China. He submitted the Denkschrift für Marschall Chiang Kai-shek memorandum outlining his programme for industrialising and militarising China. He called for a small, mobile, and well-equipped force to replace the massive but under-trained army. In addition, he advocated for the army to be the "foundation of ruling power" and for military power to rest in qualitative superiority derived from qualified officers. Von Seeckt suggested that the first step toward achieving this framework was the uniform training and consolidation of the Chinese military under Chiang's command and that the entire military system must be subordinated into a centralised hierarchy. Toward that goal, von Seeckt proposed the formation of a "training brigade" to replace the German eliteheer, which would train other units, with its officer corps selected from strict military placements.

In January 1934, the Handelsgesellschaft für industrielle Produkte, or Hapro, was created to unify all German industrial interests in China. The most important industrial project from the Sino-German cooperation was the 1936 Three-Year Plan, which was administered by the Chinese government's National Resources Commission and the Hapro corporation. It had several basic components, such as the monopolisation of all operations of tungsten and antimony, the construction of the central steel and machine works in Hubei, Hunan, and Sichuan, and the development of power plants and chemical factories. Cost overruns for the projects were partly assuaged by the fact that the price of tungsten had more than doubled between 1932 and 1936. Germany also extended a 100-million Reichsmark line of credit to the Kuomintang. The Three-Year Plan introduced a class of technocrats to run the state-owned projects.

The Chinese military was an important customer for German arms manufacturers and heavy industry. Chinese exports to Germany, including deliveries of tin and tungsten, were also seen as vital. At its height, Germany accounted for 17% of China's foreign trade and China was the largest trade partner for German businesses in Asia.

Germany sent military advisers such as Alexander von Falkenhausen to China to help the KMT government reform its armed forces. Von Seeckt's original plans called for a drastic reduction of the military to 60 elite divisions, which would be modeled on the Wehrmacht, but the factions that would be axed remained an open question. As a whole, the officer corps trained by the Whampoa Academy until 1927 had been only marginally better in quality than the warlord armies, but remained loyal to Chiang. Von Falkenhausen believed that it was too optimistic to expect the National Revolutionary Army (NRA) to be supported by armor and heavy artillery because the industry lacked the necessary capacity. Thus, he emphasized the creation of a mobile force that relied on small arms and would be adept with infiltration tactics, like those of the German stormtroopers around the end of World War I. Some divisions began training to German standards and were to form a relatively small but-well trained Chinese Central Army. By the mid-1930s, about 80,000 soldiers had received German-style training. A few pilots of the Nationalist air force did aerial-combat training with the Luftwaffe. The Nazis also provided military hardware. According to von Seeckt, around 80% of China's output of weapons were below par or unsuitable for modern warfare. Therefore, projects were undertaken to modernise existing arsenals. For example, the Hanyang Arsenal was reconstructed in 1935 and 1936 to produce Maxim machine guns, various 82 mm trench mortars, and the Chiang Kai-shek rifle (based on the German Mauser Standardmodell and Karabiner 98k rifles). The Chiang Kai-shek and Hanyang 88 rifles remained as the predominant firearms used by Chinese armies throughout the war.

Debate over China policy in the Nazi Foreign Office
As the 1930s progressed, "the Nazi government began leaning noticeably closer to Japan" while "the advisors (and many members of the German army) continued to push for a stronger Sino-German relationship". Although Neurath and the German Foreign Office continued to favor a pro-China foreign policy, "Ambassador-Plenipotentiary at Large" Joachim von Ribbentrop—who was in charge of an unofficial, alternative foreign ministry sponsored by Hitler—strongly preferred an alliance with Japan. For their part, the Japanese political and military establishments were, by 1934, less than certain about the usefulness of the new Hitler government in Germany, which Tokyo assumed would attempt to maintain a peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union and avoid any open alignment with Moscow's enemies. The distrust that Japan felt was partially caused by the close relationship between Germany and China, which, in turn, was perceived as an ally of the Soviet Union against Japan. So Japanese Ambassador Kintomo Mushanokōji and military attaché Hiroshi Ōshima often worked closely with Ribbentrop to undermine German-Chinese economic and diplomatic relations.

One of the major questions was whether Germany would recognize the Japanese puppet state in Manchukuo, installed after the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria. A recognition of Manchukuo, as suggested by German ambassador in Tokyo Herbert von Dirksen beginning in early 1934, would have clearly signaled support for Japanese expansionism. But fearing that the Chinese and Soviets would perceive such a move as an attempted encirclement, recognition of Manchukuo was initially opposed by Neurath and the Foreign Office. In response to his initial request to recognize Manchukuo, Ambassador Dirksen was instructed to avoid "any close relations with Japan which might lay [Germany] open to being suspected of wishing to render assistance against Russia". This level of caution was also attributable to the Germans' impression that war between Japan and the USSR could be on the horizon. They assumed that the Soviet Union would receive the aid of the western democracies if it were to break out, and the German Foreign Office sought, at all costs, to avoid entanglement in such a conflict.

Anti-Comintern Pact
In mid-1935, in an effort to square the circle between seeking a rapprochement with Japan and Germany's traditional alliance with China, Ribbentrop and Ōshima devised the idea of an anticommunist alliance as a way to bind China, Japan, and Germany together. Wang Jingwei was in favor of joining the pact, but Chiang Kai-shek was careful not to offend the Soviet Union, which was China's only potential partner in case of a Japanese attack. Chiang knew that the Japanese regarded Chinese adhesion to the proposed pact as a way of subordinating China to Japan. As the Chinese hesitated, Foreign Minister Neurath and War Minister Werner von Blomberg persuaded Hitler to shelve the proposed treaty to avoid damaging Germany's good relations with China. But Ribbentrop disagreed and argued that Germany and Japan should sign the pact regardless. A revival of interest in both Tokyo and Berlin led to the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact on 25 November 1936, without Chinese participation, although China did receive an invitation to join. After serious consideration, the Chiang administration refused. They were unwilling to align with Japan without a retreat of Japanese forces from China. Such a retreat was rejected by Japan, which meant that China was unwilling to offend the Soviet Union, the only major power that would be able to effectively aid them in the case of a war against Japan. The Anti-Comintern Pact marked the beginning of Germany's shift away from China and towards Japan.



Chinese Finance Minister H.H. Kung and two other KMT officials visited Germany in June 1937 in an attempt to persuade the Germans to reverse their realignment towards Japan. During a meeting with Hans Georg von Mackensen, Kung argued that Japan was not a reliable ally for Germany, citing as an example the Japanese invasion of Qingdao and the former German colonies in the Pacific Islands during World War I. He claimed that China was a true anti-Communist state but that Japan was only "flaunting." Von Mackensen promised that there would be no problems in Sino-German relations as long as he and Konstantin von Neurath were in charge of the Foreign Ministry. Kung also met Hjalmar Schacht, who explained to him that the Anti-Comintern Pact was not a German-Japanese alliance against China. Germany was glad to lend China 100 million Reichsmark (equivalent to € million) and would not do so with the Japanese. Kung visited Hermann Göring on June 11, who told him he thought that Japan was a "Far East Italy," in reference to the fact that during World War I, Italy had broken its alliance and declared war against Germany, and Germany would never trust Japan. Kung met Hitler on June 13, who assured him that Germany had no political or territorial demands in the Far East, and that Germany's only interest in China was business. Hitler also expressed the hope that China and Japan could co-operate and offered to mediate any disputes, as he had done between Italy and Yugoslavia. Hitler also mentioned that he admired Chiang Kai-shek for building a powerful central government.

End of diplomatic relations


Despite German reassurances, the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War the following month caused a major rupture in relations. After the KMT lost Nanjing and retreated to Wuhan, Hitler's government decided to withdraw its support of China and turn decisively towards Japan. Joachim von Ribbentrop succeeded Neurath as Foreign Minister on 4 February 1938, and one of his first acts was to finalize the volte-face in Germany's Far Eastern policies. Ribbentrop was instrumental, in February 1938, in persuading Hitler to recognize the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and to renounce German claims upon its former colonies in the Pacific, which were now held by Japan. By April 1938, Ribbentrop had ended all German arms shipments to China and had all of the German Army officers serving with the Nationalist government recalled, with the threat that the families of the officers in China would be sent to concentration camps if the officers did not return to Germany immediately. At the same time, the end of the informal Sino-German alliance led Chiang to terminate all concessions and contracts held by German companies in Kuomintang China.

Germany continued to side with Japan, and in 1940 signed the Tripartite Pact with Japan and Italy. In July 1941, Germany officially recognised Wang Jingwei's puppet government in Nanjing after negotiations by its Foreign Minister Chu Minyi. Nationalist China did not declare war on Germany, Italy, or even Japan until after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. In retaliation, the Gestapo launched mass arrests and full-scale persecution of Chinese Germans.