For us, China's action has gone through a progressive radicalization and the establishment of structures in China that we have been able to discover. It is really Xi Jinping who is developing this strategy and thinking. The shift, in terms of disinformation campaigns, manipulation of information and destabilization of social networks, occurred during the pandemic, a moment of radicalization whose goal was no longer so much to promote a narrative line, but to make ungovernable, especially on the health issue, the European countries in which we conducted the studies.
Targeting the economic side has been a strategy of the Chinese government from the beginning. Indeed, this government believes that globalization will eventually allow large European multinationals to become fundamentally Chinese companies, because their interests will be in China first, before they are in Germany.
When you take a company as large as Volkswagen and analyze their sales and production figures, you understand that, ultimately, Volkswagen has a much higher turnover in China than in Germany and that Volkswagen is dependent on the Chinese government. Moreover, even when there are scandals, such as the presence of Volkswagen factories in the Uyghur region, where the Chinese communist regime practises systematized slavery, the company is still present there. It would be in Volkswagen's economic interest to get out of this region. However, this car company is hostage to the Chinese government, because Volkswagen is hostage to the Chinese market and the Chinese production apparatus.
So the Chinese government can decide where Volkswagen will open or close a plant. It's no longer a choice made by a private actor, it's now a choice made by an economic hostage, if you will, a voluntary choice, obviously, because the goal is to make money. This is recurrent and this is what allows the penetration of the European debate.
There is also the issue of strategic infrastructure. This is really a strategy that involves Chinese investment first. In our opinion, the key date is 2008‑09, at the time of the debt crisis in the European Union and, in Greece, the sale of the port of Piraeus to Chinese investors.
Since then, we have seen how this is a strategy to gradually take control of strategic infrastructure.