Four dishes and one soup, with no alcohol. This was the meal symbolically consumed by Xi Jinping, China’s president, on a visit to Hebei province in 2012 as part of his crackdown on corruption among party officials. There should be no lavish hospitality or edible bribery, he signalled.
Foreign companies that want to acquire businesses in China face a similarly strict diet. There are few dishes on the menu and they are hard to swallow. It is quite unlike what Jörg Wuttke, president of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, calls the “banquet” to which China is treated abroad.
Now, though, Germany may be calling a halt to its banquet or removing some of the dishes. It this week withdrew approval for a €670m takeover of chip-equipment maker Aixtron by Fujian Grand Chip, an investment fund. Together with regulatory delays to ChemChina’s proposed $44bn takeover of Syngenta of Switzerland, this suggests Europe is taking another look at the bill.