Italy’s Salvini Gets Healthy Culture Shock in China
July 18—Italian Lega head and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini paid a visit to Japan and China last week, in a mission to explore infrastructure innovation and cooperation. Salvini’s visit to Beijing and Shanghai July 11-12, however, was tainted by Salvini’s turnaround on China in the last couple of years, including even recent hostile acts.
After endorsing the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the MOU signed with China by the government he was part of in 2019, Salvini went along with the current Meloni government, where he is deputy prime minister, in its decision to exit the MoU. Eventually he made hostile statements on Hong Kong and, more recently, on the 1989 Tiananmen protests.
Apparently, Salvini now comes to the belated conclusion that cooperation with China can bring benefits to his plan to modernize Italian infrastructure, such as ports. In Shanghai, he visited the port and could admire the high rate of mechanization, as well as the dimensions and the volume of trade.
The port of Shanghai Yangshan, world leader in container traffic with 49.16 million units handled, as well as the largest maritime port in terms of size, covering almost 4,000 sq. km, including both river port and deep-water port. The terminal visited by Salvini is located within an archipelago on an island 30 km off the coast of Shanghai, in Hangzhou Bay, and is connected to the mainland by the Donghai Bridge. The bridge has a total length of 32.5 km.
Commenting on Salvini’s visit, his former collaborator and architect of the BRI MOU, former Finance Minister Michele Geraci had some withering comments: "Salvini’s trip to China was a terrible choice for a deputy prime minister who:
“1) First wants to impose tariffs on Chinese cars and then goes to beg BYD managers to invest in Italy. They offered him tea, smiled, and greeted him politely.
“2) A descendant of the Romans and Marco Polo, and responsible for our country’s infrastructure, including ports and railways, decides to leave the Silk Road (the world’s largest project for the development of port and railway infrastructure, which would have given our ports a central role in the new multipolar world), and then meets with managers from the port of Shanghai, the largest in the world, to beg for cooperation with our ports. They offered him tea, smiled, and said goodbye. Containers from China will continue to arrive by sea in Rotterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg, and by train in Duisburg, Germany. We get the crumbs.
“3) In case there were any residual hopes for some minimal trade agreement, Salvini, ill-advised by incompetents in his team, decided to tweet against the Chinese government a few days before leaving for China, and some time ago, organized a flash mob in front of the Chinese embassy to demand respect for Hong Kong’s rights and freedoms. All historical events, not common knowledge.
“4) To collect some chocolates from the Americans, who are retaliating with 30% tariffs, he approved a military mission by our warships in the Mediterranean Sea to provoke the Chinese and try to interfere in China’s internal affairs, such as the Taiwan issue.
“And, of course, it was received as follows:
“1) Almost absent from Chinese newspapers
“2) A sparse official statement from the Minister of Infrastructure, the only member of the [Chinese] government who received Salvini, without any substance and full of empty words
“3) He was not received by his counterpart, the Deputy Prime Minister
“In short, it would have been difficult to do worse.
“I would add that I made a few phone calls to the circle of Italian Chinese experts, and so far, everyone has told me that they have never been contacted by Salvini to ask for information, clarification, or suggestions. Zero.
“He embarked on a journey toward becoming the world’s leading power in the infrastructure sector with dossiers prepared for him by who knows who, four inexperienced people in [Lega headquarters] Via Bellerio (with a couple of exceptions of capable people, but I don’t know if even they were consulted).”