Pablo Hiriart
Piraeus, Greece. The simplicity of the administrative building of this port terminal on the Aegean Sea (in a broader sense, the Mediterranean), controlled by the giant shipping company China Ocean Shipping Company, COSCO, does not reflect its role as a major logistical hub for the Asian country’s expansion in Europe.
It is part of the Belt and Road Initiative launched by Beijing in 2013 to reconfigure global trade routes under its influence.
China’s advance has been relentless: when it joined the World Trade Organization in late 2001, 80 percent of countries had the United States as their leading trading partner. By 2018, the tables had turned: China became the number one trading partner for 65 percent of the world’s population.
Here at the entrance to Cosco, you can help yourself to coffee or water in paper cups and share tables with the people who work there or are there to carry out paperwork. Almost all of them are Greek, as there is not a single Chinese person in sight. Except for the one in a frame—nothing ostentatious—on the wall of the antechamber to the bosses’ offices: Xi Jinping, walking, accompanied by the prime minister of this country, Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
Photo: Pablo Hiriart on Cosco offices in Piraeus, Greece
All the workers are Greek, but Cosco does not employ any of them. “So what’s going on?” I ask my table companions. “People here don’t work for Cosco. The company hires companies that provide workers. And they rotate them,” says Natasha, from a Greek company that comes to receive goods. “What do you mean, the workers are subcontracted? So, where is the communist paradise in this Chinese company?” I ask provocatively.
Georgius puts his glass down on the table to make me understand that “the Chinese are not communists, they are capitalists. And we work very well with them. Perfect. The Greek state has a lot of bureaucracy. With the arrival of Cosco, our work has become much easier.“ ”Don’t say anything to him,” warns a gray-haired Greek man, older than my table companions, and several of them disperse when I ask to take a photograph.
In the courtyard leading to the restricted container area, I saw three people of Asian appearance. I approached them to ask about the significance of this Chinese terminal, one of the 24 European ports that they either totally or partially control. Only the woman didn’t disappear: “It’s our main port in the Mediterranean,” says Chen, a young Chinese woman who is in charge of the paperwork for receiving containers with solar panels (China produces almost all of the world’s solar panels).
“And Barcelona, isn’t that yours?” I ask. “Only part of it,” she says, adding with a hint of sadness, or perhaps modesty: “We share Barcelona with Hutchinson” (also Chinese, from Hong Kong).
Photo: Pablo Hiriart on elfinanciero.com.mx
The 5.8 million containers that arrive annually at this port are primarily shipped by train, connecting Piraeus with Budapest via the Balkans through Macedonia and Serbia.
In just a few years, Xi Jinping has built a network of rail corridors, under the operational command of China Railway Express, linking 224 cities in the Asian communist giant with 200 terminals in 25 European countries.
These are 800-meter-long trains that pass through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, and Poland, with others diverting through Azerbaijan and Turkey to avoid the war zone in Ukraine.
The leap has been made in less than a decade: in 2016, China sent 1,700 trains to Europe; in 2023, there were already 17,000 trains, and it is estimated that there are now around 20,000 trains loaded with household appliances, computers, cell phones, electric vehicles, digital communication components, semiconductors, chips, photovoltaic panels, clothing, toys, trinkets…
Of the 4.6 billion packages of low-cost products (under €22) that entered the European market last year, 91 percent were manufactured in China. Is 4.6 billion packages in 2024 a lot or a little? That’s double the number that arrived in 2023 and triple the number that entered in 2022.
China is the world’s leading producer of electric cars (31.3 million per year), and Trump’s decision to discourage their production and bet on gasoline-powered vehicles was a godsend. In this way, it will also dominate the future of the autonomous (driverless) car market. Tesla, the “American” electric vehicle giant owned by Elon Musk, produces 40 percent of its cars at a plant in Shanghai, which it developed with a soft loan of $1.4 billion from China. And trains from China keep coming. In Madrid, for example, 1,500 arrive each year from Yiwu, and from the Cobo Calleja industrial park, containers are distributed to the rest of Europe.
China’s largest railway hub on this continent is in Duisburg, Germany, which connects it to Chongqing, through whose corridor more than 2,000 trains pass each year. And the empire on rails is growing along the Xi’an route, which stretches through Hamburg, Warsaw, and Budapest. Therein lies, in part, the key to China’s trade surplus, which last year stood at $1 trillion and, as of May this year, had already reached $500 billion.
“And what do the ships carry on their return to Asia?” I ask my table companions at the Cosco terminal in Piraeus. “They take a long time to fill up,” replies Georgius. From here, they pass through several Asian countries. They carry luxury goods, wine, olive oil, Iberian ham… More important is what they bring. Every ship, every train, brings influence. It transports geopolitical power.
It is preferable, and indeed more pleasant, to admire Chinese ships loaded with valuable, low-cost goods than to study under-the-table subsidies, protectionism, tricks to win in unequal trade, and technology piracy. And to pretend that we do not know that the company where I am taking these notes must serve China’s strategic and military objectives, as stated by Xi Jinping in 2023. That it is obliged to have a Communist Party cell within its corporate structure.
The train is, after all, a physical, political, and economic insertion into the heart of the West. China is taking on the role of investor, financier, builder, operator, seller… The great Asian power not only wants to move goods, but also to shift the axis of global power back to where it was before Columbus opened up a new world for the West in 1492. We will discuss the shift in the center of power from the North Atlantic to Asia next Tuesday from Athens.
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