ANGRY ATHENS EMBRACES BEIJING
China considers Greece its ‘most reliable friend’ in Europe
ATHENS of the governing Syriza party.
Douzinas said China had never explicitly asked Greece for support on the human rights vote or on other sensitive issues, though he and other Greek officials acknowledge that explicit requests are not necessary.
“If you’re down and someone slaps you and someone else gives you alms,” Douzinas said, “when you can do something in return, who will you help, the one who helped you or the one who slapped you?”
The Trump administration, recognising it has a geopolitical and economic challenger, recently intervened to help lift a US deal over a Chinese competitor — and the Greeks seemed happy to play one power off the other.
EU officials are concerned that China is buying silence on human rights issues and undermining the bloc’s ability to speak with one voice. Analysts said China targeted smaller countries in need of cash, among them Spain, Portugal and others that suffered in the financial crisis. Hungary, where China is pledging to spend billions on a railway, also blocked the EU statement on the South China Sea.
Many analysts have noted that Greece’s human rights veto came as Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras returned from Beijing in May, where he signed billions of euros’ worth of new investment memoranda with Chinese companies.
Greek officials insisted that the country identified with, and was loyal to, the EU and did not do China’s bidding. Some European officials are not so sure.
“The Greek government needs to choose where its alliances lie and realise the EU is not only a market, but first and foremost a community of values,” said Marietje Schaake, a prominent member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands.
Over the summer, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany tightened rules to limit takeovers of German strategic assets, a move aimed at Chinese state-backed firms. As Merkel put it to a German newspaper after Greece’s vote blocking the condemnation of Chinese human rights violations, Europe “has to speak with China in one voice”.
She added that China’s economic might allow it to pressure weaker European nations.
In January 2015, Greek voters shook Europe by electing the radical leftist Syriza party and its leader, Tsipras. He had campaigned to end the austerity measures of the EU and halt privatisations like the port of Pireaus. Protesters spilled into the Greek capital, waving Syriza flags and denouncing Brussels and Berlin.
But it was Beijing that became quietly nervous. China’s years of laborious and expensive spadework in Greece suddenly seemed imperilled, especially its investments in Pireaus.
After Tsipras took office, the Chinese ambassador, Zou Xiaoli, was the first foreign official to pay him a visit. Zou pressed Tsipras to honour the previous Greek government’s commitments to privatise Piraeus.
Less than a week later, Chinese Premiere Li Keqiang telephoned Tsipras to make sure there were no more misunderstandings.
In response, Tsipras and his deputies announced an “upgrading of relations between Greece and China”. Within weeks, three Chinese frigates arrived in Piraeus port. At a ceremony, Tsipras affirmed Greece’s intent to “serve as China’s gateway into Europe”.
Costas Douzinas
Even as Berlin and Brussels grow wary of Chinese investment, Greece may not care, after suffering under German-enforced austerity attached to the international bailouts that have kept the country afloat since the 2010 debt crisis.
Along more than 32km of coastline outside Athens, a forest of cranes at the Piraeus port load and unload thousands of containers from China and around the world. An ultramodern floating dock is scheduled for arrival in November from China. A Chinese-financed passenger hub is also in the works.
China has transformed Piraeus into the Mediterranean’s busiest port, investing nearly half a billion euros through the statebacked shipping conglomerate Cosco. It hopes to make Piraeus the entry point to Europe under its One Belt, One Road project.
Chinese goods will travel along a network of railways and roads through central Europe to Germany, where China invested US$12 billion (RM51.3 billion) last year alone.
After World War 2, the benefactor showering millions on Greece was the US, courtesy of the Marshall Plan. The US’ role in Greece wasn’t always popular, especially its support for the country’s military dictatorship during the Cold War, but the US was regarded as the gold standard for economic opportunity. Not so much anymore.
When former President Barack Obama visited Greece on his final foreign trip, some Syriza officials, bitter that his administration had not intervened more forcefully during the financial crisis, mocked his speech as a funeral oration for his own legacy, worthy of Pericles. Privately, Obama’s advisers said the trip also demonstrated, belatedly, US engagement in Greece in the face of Russian meddling in the region. But, it was China that was most deeply entrenched.
Tsipras is trying to play both sides. Having travelled twice in a year to Beijing to meet the Chinese president and attend One Belt, One Road forums to draw investment, he recently welcomed US businessmen and promoted Greece’s recovery to US lawmakers.
In May, when Fosun and two other Chinese companies bid to take over a major Greek insurer, the US commerce secretary, Wilbur L. Ross, intervened to help push the deal into the hands of Calamos Investments, a GreekUS consortium whose chief executive is a backer of President Donald Trump. The Exin Group, a Dutch partnership with Calamos, eventually won the bid.
“He sent us a letter asking us to look at Calamos,” said Papadimitriou, the economy minister. Any deal, Ross implied in the letter, “could be the beginning of more investments in Greece,” Papadimitriou recalled.
Some Greek government officials cited Fosun’s defeat as evidence that Athens wasn’t under China’s sway.
“We are sensitive to being viewed as someone else’s colony,” said Panagiotis Kouroumblis, Greece’s maritime minister.
“Nothing can move forward without the agreement of the Greek state.” NYT