China, having discovered that the United States has finally tired of playing the gullible mark in its long-running confidence game, has simply done what every seasoned trickster does when a door slams shut: it goes knocking elsewhere. And in this case, the “elsewhere” is Germany — that vast emporium of engineering pride and regulatory earnestness, suddenly reduced to the role of Europe’s unwitting bargain bin.
The numbers tell the story with a kind of brutal elegance. Chinese imports to Germany up eleven percent; prices down four. Exports to the U.S. collapsing by sixteen percent. And across more than fifteen hundred product categories, the pattern repeats: what Washington rejects, Berlin absorbs. Not out of enthusiasm — but out of sheer exposure, the way a coastline cannot help but absorb the tide.
Particularly comedic — in the tragic sense — is the spectacle in the automotive sector. As American tariffs send Chinese electric vehicles into a state of near paralysis (a ninety-nine percent drop, no less), Germany receives a sudden biblical doubling of plug-in hybrid imports. One imagines long lines of gleaming, subsidy-fattened vehicles arriving in German ports like a modern-day version of the horsemen of the apocalypse, albeit with better mileage.
And the chemical sector — that old pillar of German industrial pride — fares no better. Polyamide imports double in Germany while falling eleven percent in the United States. It’s the commercial equivalent of water finding the lowest point: in this case, the point of least resistance.
But let us not pretend the explanation is mysterious. China has raised its tariffs to the U.S., finds its goods no longer welcome at clearance-sale prices, and thus turns to Europe, whose trade policymakers still cling to the touching belief that engagement alone will cure Beijing of its mercantilist vices.
Experts point out that Germany has become an “alternative market.” That is a polite way of saying “dumping ground”; that German key industries are being squeezed like a lemon in a gin fizz. Beijing subsidises, manipulates its currency, and unleashes a tidal wave of goods priced so low that one wonders whether the Chinese export sector is run by accountants or nihilists.
And yet one cannot simply sneer at the Germans for noticing. Klingbeil, in Beijing, reminds his hosts that competition is welcome but must be fair. A banal line in lesser mouths, but at least an assertion that Europe is not quite ready to surrender its industrial soul for the pleasure of cheap goods and temporary calm.
The trouble is that Europe speaks the language of partnership while China speaks the language of leverage. One side talks about cooperation; the other calculates dominance. And Europe, that ageing Venusian power, responds with its customary mixture of indignation and indecision.
Klingbeil is there to change that, or at least to slow the continental drift toward strategic servility. He wants market access, reciprocity, something resembling a level playing field — in other words, the bare minimum one should expect when dealing with a superpower that deploys state capitalism like a bludgeon.
Whether he succeeds is almost secondary. The fact that Europe is belatedly recognising the game — and daring to question the rules — is itself a modest victory. But unless Brussels discovers a spine and a tariff, and unless German industry realises that dependency is not a business model, China will continue to treat Europe not as a partner, nor even as a rival, but as a convenient pressure valve for its own overproduction.
