Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will begin an official visit to China on Friday as a high-level participant in Beijing’s “Belt and Road” forum, where he’s set to hold separate meetings on the sidelines of the event with IMF chief Christine Lagarde, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and, of course, Chinese leadership, including with President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang.
The forum aims to promote Chinese leadership’s ambitious model of globalization, trade and transnational investment, what Beijing has called a contemporary “Silk Road” connecting Eurasia.
Chinese “strategic investments” has been prominent in bailout-dependent Greece over recent years, with Shanghai-based Cosco – a state-run shipping and port management conglomerate – taking over the port of Piraeus, the largest in Greece, and with the China State Grid Corp. emerging as the winning bidder for a controlling stake in the country’s power transmission operator (ADMIE).
Fosun Holdings is also one of three major partners in the massive Hellenikon real estate development project, another landmark privatization in Greece.
All three privatizations – the port of Piraeus, the grid operator and the real estate project – are memorandum-mandated prior actions.
