A Roman Holiday From China’s Long March
Followers of the Chinese media may search in vain for any mention of Italy’s formal withdrawal from President Xi Jinping’s troubled flagship policy, the $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative. The move was officially confirmed in Rome early in December.
Every day is a good day to bury bad news in the “people’s democratic dictatorship”, and it is often simply ignored, presumably in the correct belief that most of the population will neither notice nor care. Nonetheless, the choice by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s center-right government is a big deal with policy lessons for medium-sized states.
First, it was not taken lightly. Meloni has proved to be a strong believer in Italy’s bedrock alliances with the United States, the EU, and NATO. Her foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, is an experienced international operator who was president of the European Parliament. He is on the monarchist wing of a Catholic, conservative tradition in Italian politics. They worked together to bring the diplomacy to a decisive point.
Second, the two-handled China thoughtfully. They prepared the ground through separate meetings with Chinese leaders to emphasize that Italy wanted to improve trade and investment on a par with the six G7 nations that were not in the Belt and Road. There was no grandstanding and barely any comment. Deeds, not words, count with Beijing.
Perhaps the starkest lesson lies in the contrast between the professional execution of this policy and the naivete of the Italian coalition that cozied up to China in the first place. It was possibly the most ill-prepared government in post-war Italy (the Italians have a nice word, preparato, which denotes skill, experience, and competence) dominated by the Five Star populist movement and led by Giuseppe Conte, an academic and lawyer who had never held high office.
Five Star was long on hip causes and short on Machiavelli; the Conte government may even have thought it was pioneering a new form of politics by brushing aside the security concerns of Italy’s historic allies and embracing the opportunities of what China likes to call “win-win” engagement by signing up to the Belt and Road in 2019.
It has turned out to be a lose-lose. Italian exports hardly budged while Chinese exports to Italy almost doubled. But it was an unexpected import from China — the Covid-19 virus — which exposed a kind of politics that many Italians may not have realized they were voting for.
A study by Martin Bull of the University of Salford described the Italian government’s initial response to Covid-19 as “confused, dilatory, and inadequate.” The left-wing health minister, Roberto Speranza, from the Democratic Party, wanted a hard lockdown, pointing with awed approval to strict measures in China, while Conte and others havered.
Ultimately Speranza imposed local lockdowns in Lombardy and part of the Veneto, but these merely had the effect, as Bull notes, of causing “veritable panic,” thousands of clandestine trips and an exodus from the region into the rest of Italy, precipitating a nationwide lockdown on 11 March 2020, the first such measure in a Western democracy.
Meanwhile, a panicked Conte cabinet did little to get a grip on the disparate health policies, and widely varying mortality rates, across Italy’s regions or to reconcile competing political and bureaucratic groups, tasks which would have tested the administrative efficiency of any Italian government, preferring instead to issue a flurry of diktats.
And yet for Speranza and others, there were lessons to be drawn from China beyond mere public health policy. Strong leadership and harsh methods, once delivered, boosted the power of the state and brought rewards. The polls showed Conte’s personal ratings soared as the public rallied round.
Not only did the Five Star government copy China, it even allowed units of Chinese “health workers”, clad in white protective gear, to roam Chinese communities in Italy, staging performative sprays of disinfectant and inspecting residents, presumably selected by their ethnicity alone. Insignia on their outfits identified the men as affiliated with the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department. This, too, in a Western democracy.
So confident was Speranza that over the summer of 2020, he penned a book entitled Perché guariremo (Because We Will Heal). It argued that the pandemic offered a chance to rebuild socialism and the role of the state by focusing on “fundamental” rights, precisely the argument of Chinese political thinkers in the Xi era.
Extracts from the book published in the Italian media quoted a key passage as saying: “I am convinced that we have a unique opportunity to entrench a new idea of the Left,” adding, “after many years of going against the wind, there is truly a possibility of reconstructing a cultural hegemony on a new basis.”
Speranza talked of China as “a great protagonist of our time,” mused about creating “a new political space” for Europe (presumably without the Americans), and, in an unfortunate echo of autocrats past, he said that in a national crisis, “there is no longer a majority or opposition.”
In the autumn of 2020, however, a second wave of Covid-19 swept across Italy and Speranza’s publisher, Feltrinelli, hastily withdrew the book from the shops.
Veteran foreign correspondent Michael Sheridan is working on a biography of Xi Jinping, ‘The Red Emperor’, to be published by Headline Books, part of the Hachette group, in 2024. He is the author of ‘The Gate to China: A New History of the People’s Republic and Hong Kong’ (2021).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
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