Olaf Scholz leads a blue-chip business delegation to China

years has a routine inaugural trip of a head of government been watched with such keen interest at home and abroad. When Germany’s Social Democrat chancellor, Olaf Scholz, travels to Beijing for a one-day visit on November 3rd, he will be the first Western leader to do so since the start of the covid-19 pandemic. Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, was keen to travel together with Mr Scholz, though preferably not right after China’s leader, Xi Jinping, got himself anointed as Communist Party chief for a norm-busting third term. Mr Scholz said . He is instead taking along 12 s of German blue-chip firms, including the bosses of Merck, a drug company, Siemens, an engineering behemoth, and Volkswagen, Europe’s biggest carmaker.Over the past two decades the interests of German business have shaped Germany’s China policy to the exclusion of other concerns. Mr Scholz’s corporate retinue suggests that this is still the case, despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which starkly illustrated the dangers of economic dependence (in Germany’s case for Russian fossil fuels) on an autocracy driven by an aggressive ideology. A new consensus in European capitals is that Europe must rethink its business ties to China. Many Germans accept this, too. “The Chinese political system has changed massively in recent years and thus our China policy must also change,” declared Annalena Baerbock, Mr Scholz’s foreign minister from the Greens party, on November 1st, during a trip to central Asia. Deutschland , though, is reluctant to open its eyes to the new reality.