Merz’s Beijing Trip Clinches 120-Jet Airbus Sale and Promises of Fairer Sino-German Trade

China has used large Airbus orders as diplomatic sweeteners since its first 150-jet purchase in 2005, much as the Soviet grain deals of 1972 softened Cold-War tensions; Merz’s haul therefore fits a pattern of Beijing leveraging market access for political breathing room. The visit sits at the junction of two structural currents: Europe’s century-long oscillation between dependence on distant hegemonic powers (the U.S. since 1945) and quests for strategic autonomy (echoing de Gaulle’s 1960s challenge to NATO), and China’s push to pre-empt Western decoupling by binding key industries—aircraft, EVs, A.I.—to its demand cycle. On a 100-year horizon the episode matters not for the headline jet sale but as another data-point in the gradual re-weaving of a multipolar trade order where regulatory leverage—not tariffs alone—is the principal weapon; if Europe manages to extract genuine reciprocity, the asymmetry that hollowed German manufacturing in the 2020s could narrow, but if history rhymes with the 1930s raw-materials dependencies, Berlin’s deeper entanglement may instead magnify vulnerability when the next geopolitical rupture arrives.