Europe’s Mr. China

Who is Luigi Gambardella? The answer to that question depends on whom you ask, so I start by asking the man himself. This much I know already: He is Italian, aged 52, pug-faced with light amber eyes, and is regarded by many in Brussels as the town’s most visible lobbyist. Once the powerful telecommunications industry’s man in Brussels, he is now “Mr. China” in the EU capital’s lobbying world.

Gambardella is the founder of the ChinaEU business lobby, a tireless — some would say relentless — advocate for deeper economic ties between Beijing and Brussels. We meet at the Park Side Brasserie in the European quarter for lunch, and he is, at first, a man of perfect composure. But when I ask him about rumors he has picked up a big client in the telecoms sector, he howls with laughter and his eyes go a little wild. “Everyone is asking,” he tells me, biting his tongue. “It’s a very fascinating adventure” — but still a secret.

Gambardella clearly enjoys a dash of controversy and intrigue, especially when he is at the center of it. His serious demeanor breaks down once again when I ask about his swashbuckling days as a telecoms lobbyist, playing the provocateur and grandstanding in the international press. “We made so many front pages at the FT, you cannot imagine,” he recalls. “Many, many, many!”

Again, the chuckling returns at the thought of the international outcry after his lobby sided with Russia, China and Middle Eastern states in an effort to give a United Nations body some control over the internet. “It was huge,” he remembers. “Google collected 3 million [signatures] — for the first time Google used its homepage to collect!” The meeting broke with no consensus, with the changes staunchly opposed by the United States and the European Union.

But when the subject turns to his controversy-stoking positions on China, from celebrating its Orwellian approach toward the internet to talking down trade tensions, Gambardella is decidedly more thin-skinned. The anti-China and bureaucratic establishment, he grumbles, is out to get him. “People are there to block,” he says, despairingly thumping the table with his hands. “I want to innovate, to try to think in a different way.”

Gambardella’s role as China’s most prominent booster in Brussels has given his critics plenty of ammunition. In one memorable interview with China Daily he celebrated Chinese President Xi Jinping’s vision for the internet as “inspiring.” He has derided European efforts to limit Chinese exports into Europe as protectionist — despite Chinese dumping having decimated such industries in Europe as steel and solar panels. He even shepherded China’s top internet censor around Brussels in 2015, shielding him from critics.

That last point is worth pausing on. Lu Wei, China’s internet czar, oversaw a crackdown on online dissent and asserted China’s right to block foreign websites. But when he came to Brussels, Gambardella hosted him at an event and helped arrange a meeting with Europe’s top digital commissioner, Andrus Ansip.

Ansip later tweeted saying the two had agreed to deepen cooperation on digital policy between the two regions.

Few other Brussels lobbyists — if any — can boast such connections in Brussels and Beijing, where Gambardella has shown himself adept at cozying up to the Chinese regime. If anyone wants an introduction to regulators in Beijing, or a back door into the country’s burgeoning tech sector, the dexterous Gambardella is probably the best bet in town.

It is a good time to be a bridge to China from Brussels. The world’s second-largest economy already boasts four of the world’s 10 largest internet companies. The Chinese government committed to investing €100 billion on upgrading its internet infrastructure in 2016, and again in 2017.

It is the biggest retail economy in the world and accounts for almost half of all online sales worldwide. Just as importantly: The election of Donald Trump on an avowedly protectionist agenda has led many in Europe to call for an easing of trade relations with the Middle Kingdom. This should be — why not say it! — the Gambardella Moment.

Think BIG

When the Italian started ChinaEU in 2015, he barely knew China. His career had been spent largely between Italy and Brussels, and his familiarity with his new sphere of business was confined, largely, to the occasional meal in Chinese restaurants.

Born near Naples, Gambardella retains the expressiveness of the Italian south despite being raised in Milan and having lived in Brussels for the last 20 years. A cupped hand fanning air towards his ear says: “Listen to me.” Or two hands held up front, opening and closing as if squeezing a lemon, means: “The argument has no substance.”

Gambardella studied economics and management at Milan’s prestigious Bocconi University. He started working at tech firm Olivetti, before hauling himself up the ranks at Telecom Italia to become a vice president and taking over the large telecoms association in Brussels. He soon became a regular in the international media, denouncing Europe’s telecoms rules to the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune and the Wall Street Journal. “What has net neutrality to do with puppies? More than you would imagine,” he wrote in one opinion piece for the Journal. “You can only say that you love them.”

In the last two years, he has flown to China more than 20 times, in addition to taking part in events on the country from Guadalajara to Washington, Barcelona and London. Gambardella speaks no Chinese, but a small team that does helps him fix meetings, events and speaking opportunities for executives and regulators traveling East and West.

ChinaEU’s abstract mission and vague financial framework seem to complement Gambardella, who himself speaks and tweets in highfalutin but vague terms about “courage” and the “future.”

“The future is China and the internet,” Gambardella is fond of saying. Or: “I want to be the future.” His Twitter profile encourages people to “think BIG.” These are the bromides of his big business.

Alternative facts

To supporters, Gambardella is, in the words of one telecoms exec, “a fantastic PR man, very energetic and very hard-working.” To his critics, he is a craven self-promoter.

Gambardella “is Radio Beijing, reiterating the line of Beijing in Europe,” says Joerg Wuttke, the president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China. “He is not transparent because he is not clear about who he represents or what he does.”

And as much as he is China’s voice in the EU, Gambardella is also an EU-lite voice in China.

According to Wuttke, Gambardella puts himself forward to speak on panels in China on behalf of EU industry, where he paints a rosy picture of the business relations between the two blocs — a message at odds with the one given by EU industry representatives based in China.

Gambardella’s name is a regular presence in the Chinese press, where his message is as clear as it is consistent: European companies love China and China loves Europe, so protectionists in Brussels had better get out of the way. “We Europeans, we don’t dream anymore,” he told Chinese state television, CCTV, recently. “The Chinese, fortunately, are lucky, because they continue to dream.”

In another interview, he criticized Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, for describing China as a potential threat, saying EU officials felt insecure after Brexit. “For the EU consumers and business, China is an opportunity,” he told Xinhua.

The “Great Firewall of China” seems to be a particular blind spot for Gambardella, who has argued that China is well-placed to “lead the revolution of the current system of global internet governance.”

That’s the same China that in a 2016 survey of internet freedom in 65 countries by Freedom House was ranked dead last, and given the inauspicious title as the “year’s worst abuser of internet freedom.” Spreading “rumors” online can land you in jail for seven years, Freedom House noted.

Gambardella skirts over criticism of his position in China: “There are some difficulties but let’s look at the opportunities,” he told me after an event he organized in Brussels with WeChat, the $80 billion Chinese social media giant with almost a billion users, and with which ChinaEU is loosely affiliated. And he makes no apology for having “good relations” with the Chinese authorities. “I respect them,” he said at the same event, which took place at the Tangla Hotel, a new luxury Chinese venture on the outskirts of Brussels.

Mover and shaker

Gambardella dabbled in international controversy long before he set up shop with Beijing.

In 2012, he infuriated officials in Brussels and Washington when he led Europe’s big telecoms companies in backing a motion that would give a U.N. agency some oversight over the internet. Neelie Kroes, then Europe’s commissioner for digital affairs, denounced the move as handing control of the internet to national governments — including Russia or China.

Gambardella says the debate was about redressing the balance between telecoms operators and internet platforms. “We invented the term ‘level playing field,’” he said, referring to the concept that is now a rhetorical staple of policy debates in Europe. He also claims, somewhat immodestly, to have first floated ideas like the digital single market and net neutrality — both key tenets of the current Commission’s digital policy.

Even if true, the contributions were not appreciated by Kroes, who was responsible for reforming Europe’s telecoms companies and boosting its digital sector. Relations reached a low in November 2012 in Baku, Azerbaijan, where Gambardella tried to buttonhole Kroes, only to be physically restrained by her security detail as “Steely Neelie” marched off.

“Never,” says Gambardella when asked about the incident. “Fake news.”

Gambardella is also reluctant to discuss who pays for ChinaEU, which he says raises money from sponsors on a project-by-project basis. The association has not filed accounts with the Brussels Commerce Tribunal, as required by Belgian law, and does not disclose who its sponsors are, although China’s telecoms titan ZTE is said to be a founder. Huawei, a telecommunications giant that is also reputed to be a member, has kept its distance, according to one person with knowledge of the situation.

The Chinese mission may also play a part, says Fraser Cameron, director of the EU-Asia Centre: The Chinese are “throwing around a lot of money on soft power,” he says.

“We are happy to develop and maintain cooperative relations with ChinaEU and other friendly organizations that are dedicated to greater growth of relations between China and the EU,” said a spokesperson for the Chinese Mission to the EU in an emailed statement.

A Brussels entrepreneur

Gambardella’s embrace of China becomes quickly less surprising when viewed in the light of his career, in which he has displayed a remarkable nose for the latest hot topic.

EUBrasil, a platform founded by Gambardella in 2004, flourished (and faded) in step with Brazil’s economy. The networking platform is less active than it was in the country’s boom years, but Gambardella was in Brazil earlier this year and announced recently it was hiring an executive assistant. More recently he founded Broadband4Europe, which organizes a large annual event on regulation in London in tandem with Barclays, and he still runs Puntoit, an Italian platform for digital issues that he created in the 1990s.

“I would call him a Brussels globalist and a policy entrepreneur — he has managed to pick big policy issues for trade and business like EUBrasil and ChinaEU, champion them and build an amazing network of politicians all around the world,” says Mark Dober, a headhunter and consultant, who set up APCO Worldwide’s Brussels office in the 1990s.

Several Brussels operators point out with either surprise or admiration that Gambardella had managed to remain a vice president at Telecom Italia despite his commitment to ChinaEU. He left the company early March after it closed its Brussels office.

Those close to Gambardella say he has little interest in making big bucks but describe him as an obsessive power groupie. “He likes hobnobbing with people in power,” says one.

That power network has expanded significantly in recent years, as doors have opened in China. Gambardella was introduced to Alibaba founder Jack Ma when participating in a working group on SMEs. He sits also on the advisory board of China’s World Internet Conference, which is chaired by Ma, and has shared stages with a host of senior officials from the Chinese ministries of commerce and technology. On June 1 he is organizing a debate with Jane Jie Sun, CEO of China’s largest online travel company Ctrip, valued at close to $30 billion, at the European Parliament.

And Gambardella is not without friends in high places in Brussels. He has fond words for Viviane Reding, a former commissioner and now an MEP, who took a front-row seat to hear the Italian’s speech on ChinaEU’s first anniversary. He is also an admirer of Martin Selmayr, the powerful chief of staff to Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. “He is very smart, very quick … he is always at work,” says Gambardella. Neither Selmayr nor Reding responded to requests for comment.

Gambardella’s contacts clearly serve him well: In 2015 Gambardella brokered a meeting between three Commission vice presidents — Federica Mogherini, Jyrki Katainen and Andrus Ansip — and China’s ambassador to the EU, senior executives from four of China’s largest banks, and senior management from China Mobile and ZTE.

So it seems fair to ask him what the secret formula is for a successful lobbyist in Brussels.

“There is one rule,” he tells me at our lunch by the Parc Cinquantenaire, suddenly serious once again. “Never lie. If you lie you are … gone.”

This article is part of an occasional series: China looks West.

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