The German chancellor’s awkward meeting with China’s boss

An official Chinese read-out said the summit meeting in Beijing that ended on April 16th reflected the strong ties that bind the world’s second- and third-largest economies. A morning of talks with Xi Jinping, China’s president, punctuated by a comradely stroll in the garden and ending in a cordial lunch, seemed to have marked a friendly climax to the three-day visit to China by Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor.

But not all is as rosy as spring. For a start, the German home audience was denied a live view of their chancellor’s frolic in Beijing because ZDF, a German public broadcaster, could not get Chinese press accreditation from the host country’s notoriously awkward bureaucrats. But behind that quibble lurked much bigger troubles. Just before the trip to China—his second since he became chancellor in 2021, and one for which he has attracted a fair amount of criticism from within Europe—Mr Scholz told an interviewer that although an American-style “decoupling” of the German economy from China is a bad idea, “de-risking” would be wise. “In Germany, the peacemaking effect of economic contacts was certainly overemphasised,” said the former mayor of Hamburg. “Nobody has that illusion today.”