Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz on November 2, 2022 in Berlin. MICHELE TANTUSSI / AFP
Despite its brevity, the trip will not be a formality. Olaf Scholz will stay in Beijing for just 11 hours on Friday, November 4, but the German Chancellor’s first visit to China promises to be more dangerous than all 12 by Angela Merkel. in that country during his sixteen-year tenure (2005-2021).
On the other side of the Rhine there are many critics against this fast journey, which is often regarded as premature. According to the leader of the German right, Friedrich Merz (CDU), Olaf Scholz “couldn’t have chosen a worse time” to go to Beijing, less than two weeks after 20 threats were made against Taiwan and where the predecessor of President Xi Jinping , Hu Jintao, was dragged out of the hall before the eyes of the whole world”. Even within the German government, the date of this official visit, the first by a European head of state to China since the start of the Covid 19 pandemic, caused great concern. “It was the Chancellor who decided to make this trip at the time,” said Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) on Tuesday, November 1, from Tashkent.
Twelve days after Mr Xi’s reappointment for a third term as head of the Communist Party, Mr Scholz’s round trip to Beijing also takes place a week after the Chancellor gave the green light for a stake in the Chinese stock corporation Cosco in a container terminal in the port of Hamburg . While it was noted that Cosco was only able to acquire 25% of the shares and not the 35% it wanted, this decision met with fierce opposition within the federal government, with no fewer than six ministers opposing an operation that could pave the way there for the takeover of a strategic infrastructure by a foreign group.
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The fact that Mr. Scholz managed Hamburg from 2011 to 2018 did not help matters. “A Hamburg mayor can conduct foreign policy like a businessman. But to act like that when you are chancellor amounts to a violation of the interests of Germany and Europe,” wrote Thorsten Benner, director of the Berlin think tank Global Public Policy Institute, in an article published in the American magazine Foreign on Monday, October 31 Policy was released.
“No clear strategy”
A week before Mr Scholz’s visit to Beijing, the green light for Cosco is taken as a very worrying signal by those who believe Germany needs to be much more determined on China than it was under Mrs Merkel. “Scholz is chasing after a China that no longer exists. While China has undergone profound changes, Scholz is doing ‘Merkel as usual’,” laments German MEP Reinhard Bütikofer (Greens), head of the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with China. The accusation is serious on the part of the former federal chairman of the Greens (2002-2008), a member party of the coalition of social democrats Olaf Scholz. “The coalition agreement that we signed at the end of 2021 makes it clear that Germany has to make much more demands on China. We have to assume that the Chancellor does not feel bound by this promise,” regrets Bütikofer.
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