Between Weltoffenheit and securitisation: Germany’s partial securitisation of science policy towards the People’s Republic of China

Abstract

Within a decade, German-Chinese scientific cooperation has shifted from a promoted pillar of internationalisation, rooted in Germany’s self-perception as ‘open to the world’ (weltoffen), to a contested domain of risk assessment and institutional screening. While existing literature maps this transformation, it rarely reconstructs how threat claims are translated into organisational practice. Taking Germany as a European case, the article asks what outcome its science policy towards China had reached by 2026 in terms of intensity and scope, and which sequences of moves, audience responses and measures produced it. Using explaining-outcome process tracing on a corpus of federal, parliamentary and organisational documents and investigative journalism, it reconstructs four phases between 2014 and 2026. Securitising moves by political and media actors were filtered through the organisational audiences of the science system, producing responses from procedural absorption and categorical exclusion to counterclaims defending cooperation capacity. The outcome is theorised as partial securitisation, combining limited intensity with selective scope. The article contributes to securitisation theory by specifying audience response as the mechanism producing partial and selective outcomes in institutionally dense, self-governing systems. It contributes to German China policy research by showing that reconfiguration occurs through accumulated organisational measures rather than a single critical juncture.