Germany's President Begins His State Visit in Anhui, Test-Driving Volkswagen's Smart EVs

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier landed in Hefei before dawn on Monday, and by mid-morning he was standing in Volkswagen's largest research center outside Germany, watching a robotic arm test a dashboard screen on a car developed in China. The state visit — his first to China in nearly eight years — began, pointedly, not in Beijing but in Anhui province.

The itinerary makes the symbolism plain. Steinmeier visited Luogang Park, a Hefei showcase of urban sustainability, then went to Volkswagen's Hefei research hub, where German and Chinese teams jointly develop the new generation of "smart brain" for the company's cars. There he personally experienced the locally developed smart-driving electric vehicles, riding in one on Chinese roads. German standards and manufacturing, The Paper observed, are being fused in Hefei with Chinese innovation and speed.

Hefei is an unlikely stage for a visiting head of state, which is exactly the point: it is the city where Volkswagen has staked its biggest research operation beyond Germany, one of the concrete results of German carmakers' deep bet on China's electric-vehicle industry.

Steinmeier, who visited China repeatedly as foreign minister and is described by his hosts as an "old friend of the Chinese people," will spend several days in Anhui — Li Hongzhang's former residence, ancient villages, and the province's famous mountains — before continuing on to Beijing for the political leg of the trip, which runs through Friday.

For German industry, the subtext of the first morning was hard to miss: China is no longer only the world's largest car market but the place where German companies increasingly do their own technological rebuilding — a fact the German president spent his first hours in the country inspecting in person.