Brussels and Berlin keep tightening the rules on what European companies and consumers may buy from China. They call it de-risking. But there is a cost nobody prices in: Europe is walling itself off from the one country whose infrastructure delivery it most urgently needs to study. Germany is about to demonstrate why that matters — with borrowed money.
The scale of the borrowing is historic. To fund defence, infrastructure and welfare, the 2026 federal budget authorises core spending of €524.5bn against €98bn in net new debt — revenue of roughly €427bn covers the rest. The European Commission expects the deficit to hit 3.7 per cent of GDP this year and 4.1 per cent in 2027, through the EU’s 3 per cent ceiling; the Bundesbank sees 4.8 per cent by 2028. Fitch affirmed the triple-A in May — and in the same breath warned that fiscal expansion and rising debt are “increasing pressure on the rating”. When the eurozone’s benchmark asset comes under pressure, so does everything priced off it.
Where does the money go? Much of it flows around the core budget rather than through it, via special vehicles — above all the Special Fund for Infrastructure and Climate Neutrality. Within that torrent, some €33.7bn is earmarked for transport in 2026. And what is it buying? Deutsche Bahn has just marked down its own ambitions: long-distance punctuality of merely 69 to 72 per cent by 2030, with the 80 per cent target shunted back to 2035 — the year the network renovation is finally meant to be finished (see also Berliner Zeitung). Record money in, lower targets out. Set Stuttgart 21 beside Chongqing East railway station and the verdict writes itself: Germany’s institutions have been protecting their own bureaucratic incompetence rather than attacking the root causes of the infrastructure deficit. Refuse to borrow from China’s playbook, and Germany will not catch up in the digital economy or rebuild a competitive economy.
Stuttgart 21 is Deutsche Bahn’s project to sink the Baden-Württemberg capital’s terminus station underground and turn it into a through-station. This summer, a scathing internal audit killed the planned 2026 opening: the main station is now due in December 2031, and projected costs have jumped another €3bn to €14.5bn. The auditors found “serious deficiencies in planning, control and risk management” — chief executive Evelyn Palla called the findings shocking. Senior project managers are out; in their place, a five-stage commissioning plan stretching from December 2027 to December 2033.
The cost history is a study in drift. The 1995 framework agreement pencilled in roughly DM4.9bn — about €2.5bn. In April 2009, six parties — the federal government, Baden-Württemberg, the City of Stuttgart, the regional association, Stuttgart Airport and DB — signed a financing agreement fixing costs at €3.076bn, plus a €1.45bn risk buffer: a hard ceiling of €4.526bn, with trains promised for 2019. Within months, DB-internal calculations of €4.9bn had surfaced. Construction began in 2010. By December 2023, the supervisory board had lifted the financing framework to €11.45bn. Now the projection stands at €14.5bn — nearly five times the sum agreed in 2009, for a station that will have been a building site for more than two decades. Among the audit’s exhibits: defective cable ducts, a technical building designed in 2013 that no longer meets requirements, and a power supply that has to be redesigned.
Now look to China. Chongqing East opened to passengers on 27 June 2025 as the world’s largest railway station building by floor area: 1.22mn square metres, which was erected in just 38 months once the engineering blueprints were finalised, at a reported total investment of $7.8bn. Half Stuttgart 21’s projected bill for a vastly bigger building. Per official Chongqing municipal media: 15 platforms and 29 lines across three station yards, moving up to 16,000 passengers an hour at peak — among the top stations in the country. Eight storeys stacked across an 80-metre drop in elevation, fusing four networks in one building: high-speed rail, intercity, commuter and urban transit. A multi-level metro interchange feeds the rail decks above by lift and escalator; the design brief demands that any transfer, between any two modes, take less than five minutes. Passengers enter from all four quadrants; the exit level folds in bus stops and an urban air terminal.
Nor is Chongqing East a one-off. Chinese station projects of comparable complexity routinely land in four to six years. Hangzhou East — multi-level transfer concourse, multiple high-speed tracks, supporting tunnels — went from construction to full operation in roughly five years, opening in 2013 without large-scale stoppages. Chongqing’s Shapingba hub buried an entire working station underground and stitched it into the metro, despite hostile geology and dense housing on all sides, after 4 years & 8 months opening in 2018 with transport access, noise mitigation and heritage protection settled in a single planning phase.
What do these projects share? A closed-loop coordination system. Regulatory requirements, geological conditions and public concerns are absorbed up front, and approval happens once. One general contractor commands every subcontractor. Budgets are controlled dynamically, not discovered retrospectively. Contingency plans for public objections are prepared in advance, cutting the risk of litigation-induced shutdowns. None of this requires China’s political system. It requires front-loading conflict resolution instead of litigating and redesigning mid-project — precisely the discipline the Stuttgart 21 audit shows Germany lacked.
Here is the irony. Germany still holds the most conservative balance sheet in the G7: debt of 63.5 per cent of GDP at end-2025, a stock of €2.84tn, per the Bundesbank — against roughly 120 per cent for the US and over 200 per cent for Japan. That restraint, the legacy of the debt brake, bought the real economy the cheapest funding in the club. But fiscal strength stored is worth nothing. It must now be exchanged — for infrastructure that actually gets built, to close the public-service gap with China.