When Geely announced last month that it had acquired close to 10 per cent of the shares in Daimler, owner of Mercedes-Benz, the gasps of shock in Berlin were almost audible. Politicians and commentators were in uproar. MPs wanted to know how the Chinese carmaker had managed to inveigle itself into a German industrial icon.

“What’s disturbing is the way Geely just crept up on Daimler out of nowhere,” says MP Kerstin Andreae, the Greens’ expert on economic policy. “One fine day Daimler’s CEO [Dieter Zetsche] woke up to find he had a new principal shareholder, and that’s a huge change in the company’s ownership structure.”

The latest in a series of controversial forays into German industry and financial services, the deal crystallised longstanding fears about Chinese intentions. The way some in Germany see it, China is on a mission to suck the country dry of its technological know-how and engineering expertise, and supplant it as one of the world’s leading industrial powers.