Posts tagged China

The evacuation of Chinese workers in Libya highlights Beijing’s vulnerabilities as it partners with oil-rich regimes. Upheaval in Africa and the Middle East could force China to weigh political risks more carefully.

When the chaos subsided, the group of 930 migrants made a break for the open desert, starting a seven-day journey to the port of Benghazi, where a ship arranged by the Chinese government waited to take them home. As news of the exodus spread online, Chinese bloggers bestowed the nickname “Chinese Moses” on the plucky company manager who led the ragged group to safety.

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Despite international pressure, Beijing has developed trade ties with energy-rich pariah states, including Iran and Sudan, carefully avoiding any criticism of those regimes.

In Libya, the world’s 12th-largest oil exporter, China has emerged as a major investor and financial partner of strongman Moammar Kadafi. China is now the third-largest buyer of Libyan crude behind Italy and France. […] Meanwhile, China has stuck to a hands-off policy it has dubbed “non-interventionism.”

But that approach hasn’t protected it in Libya, whose angry citizens attacked Chinese workers and infrastructure projects following the Kadafi regime’s violent crackdown on civilian protesters.

Beijing’s leaders “saw themselves as the leader of the Third World, the anti-imperialists, the anti-hegemonists. They felt that way right up until the time they had to evacuate everyone from Libya,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy analyst at Rice University’s Baker Institute. “They have suddenly realized that there are political risks in energy equity markets and that they have to make much more sophisticated risk assessments.”

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Beijing also faces pressure at home. It must now choose whether to force its national oil companies to absorb the higher costs or pass them along to consumers. It’s a decision fraught with risk. China is already battling the worst inflation in more than two years. Rising prices for food and fuel are seen as major threats to social stability.

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China is facing resentment in Africa for not hiring enough local labor; some Chinese workers there have been kidnapped and murdered. Angola, a major supplier to China, is courting other foreign investors to reduce its dependence on China.

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“China has made huge diplomatic and economic investments in these countries,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Remin University of China. “Now suddenly, you’re seeing the inherent risk in doing that. China has been focused on the economic benefits. They should learn from this and consider the social and political sides more.”

“Last year Xiao Qiang, a leading expert on the Chinese Internet, was debating a man of high position in China’s power elite about the Internet’s “threat to stability.” As if playing a trump card, the man said at one point, “If we have to, we can always pull the plug on the whole thing.” […].

But could China’s authorities really do such a thing? They spend probably tens of billions of yuan annually to control the Internet; official Chinese sources have revealed that the government spends over 500 billion yuan ($76 billion) a year on domestic “stability maintenance.”

Yet a complete shut down might still be technically difficult. And even if it were feasible, so many people in China now depend on the Internet—not just for political commentary but also for information, commerce, recreation, and communication—that “pulling the plug” would be truly cataclysmic, and hardly conducive to “stability.”

And the knights and heroes of the Western values, not to mention the protectors of the interests of the Western workers support this country heavily, by forcing companies, politically and economically, to move to China.

Probably, the Chinese modell is the daydream of the Western marxists. Ban and control everyone.

(Source: nybooks.com)

Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal now totals more than 100 deployed weapons, a doubling of its stockpile over the past several years in one of the world’s most unstable regions, according to estimates by nongovernment analysts.

The Pakistanis have significantly accelerated productionof uranium and plutonium for bombs and developed new weapons to deliver them. After years of approximate weapons parity, experts said, Pakistan has now edged ahead of India, its nuclear-armed rival.

An escalation of the arms race in South Asia poses a dilemmafor the Obama administration, which has worked to improve its economic, political and defense ties with India while seeking to deepen its relationship with Pakistan as a crucial component of its Afghanistan war strategy.

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Other nuclear powers have their own interests in the region. China, which sees India as a major regional competitor, has major investments in Pakistan and a commitment to supply it with at least two nuclear-energy reactors.

Russia has increased its cooperation with India and told Pakistan last week that it was “disturbed” about its arms buildup.

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Those figures make Pakistan the world’s fifth-largest nuclear power, ahead of “legal” powers France and Britain. The vast bulk of nuclear stockpiles are held by the United States and Russia, followed by China.

(Source: Washington Post)