Chinese President Xi Jinping spent  just three days in Greece this week but he tried to draw on a much longer sense of shared history to cement economic ties with the Mediterranean country, a gateway to the European Union.

In a letter published in Greek newspaper Kathimerini on Sunday, Xi highlighted parallels between China and Greece as “great ancient civilisations”.

Other world leaders, including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin, have also used “civilisational thinking” to frame and justify their geopolitical ambitions, according to James Dorsey, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

“This is much more about power and ensuring the survival of power than it is about the framework that you are going to use to negotiate the contracts for the Port of Piraeus,” said Dorsey, who is also a senior fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.